I like Hack/Slash for how it takes the typical victimization of women in these films and turns it inside out. I also sympathize with the main character for having been dealt some pretty raw hands when young: bullies, weird parenting, an environment defined by a stifling and outdated morality, a sense that she has to make her own destiny. There are a lot of aspects to her origins story that I think may resonate with the biography of anyone who's gone through the process of coming out, especially if it was a painful experience, and chosen to build a life of tolerance, activism or any other path consciously opposed to what they experienced prior to that revelation. She is sassy, she's messed up and she's mostly OK with that because she has more than enough external priorities to stay busy. I like that Hack/Slash repeatedly shines a light on the worst human cruelties and tragedies imaginable and affirms the power of affection and acceptance to oppose them. In a very Buffy the Vampire Slayer manner, Cassie and Vlad expose the wrongs, intentional or otherwise, that others have done and then cooperate with one another to put an end to those crimes in a very physical, violent, satisfying way.

Also, she's a bisexual character whose romantic and sexual life isn't entirely about stimulating male readers. Cassie is actively seeking to determine what her own sexual maturation means for herself, what it means to be "normal" and what it means to be in love. Finally, I'm an easy sale for any setting that intersects with Lovecraft's Mythos.

Despite all that, there are things that bother me: Cassie definitely walks the line between object and subject in the comics. I haven't read all of them and don't regularly subscribe to it so there are undoubtedly counterpoints I have missed but some of the out-of-band portrayals of her - such as a SuicideGirls profile the creator made for her, no really - definitely smack of something less than empowerment to my increasingly-conservative-with-age sensibilities. It bothers me just a little that Cassie seems to be expected to do her share of the heavy lifting in a mini-skirt, flashing underwear the whole time, but it's OK for Vlad to be a physically repulsive mutant. Maybe I'm being a huge prude, though. Cassie already uses her body as an instrument of violence. Who am I to deny that character the right to have fun with it, too?

With the same breath used to criticize the portrayal of Cassie as both tough vigilante and vulnerable emotional being, I must admit that part of why I loved Buffy so much was that the Slayer gets both to kick ass and to be a high school girl with as many concerns superficial as supernatural. Maybe I'm falling victim to my own possibly outdated binary view of portrayals of women as either frivolous or empowering. Maybe there's a well-roundedness I'm missing here. Frankly, I would love to hear the opinions of people who disagree with my dithering.

All of that is to say that, actually, I am very interested in the film adaptation happening. This is a comic about intense longing and the bonds between outsiders, things the queer communities know very well, and it is about those bonds and longings in ways very few other comics ever are. Plenty of comics are, essentially, workplace melodramas with capes: who is sleeping with/has wronged/competes with whom on the team, and how will all that change next month? Hack/Slash has those same issues circulating, to some degree or another, but doesn't try to tackle them in the same way a soap opera would. I would be very interested in seeing a film adaptation that tried to capture the alienating, unsettling aspects of the tragedy and horror the characters experience in the books and the very human questions that are raised by their relationships instead of just being a great big gore-fest with a mini-skirt on an otherwise replaceable wise-cracking lead. That would be a pretty cool change in how horror movies usually seem to go.

HITMAN 2, KANE & LYNCH, HACK/SLASH Update from Producers Adrian Askarieh and Daniel Alter [Collider.com]