In the US: Saturdays, 9pm EST, Starz In the UK: Not yet acquired
To many people, Bruce Campbell is a man-god. He is a man. He is a god. He is a god of men. He is a man-god.
What’s He (man-)god of? He is the living incarnation of straight white American male irony. Anyone claiming that (straight) (white) American (men) don’t get irony need only point at Bruce Campbell and say “May He have mercy on your soul”.
When you discover that Bruce is such an avatar is more about when you are born than the nature of Bruce Himself. For some, it’s relatively recently with his Old Spice adverts.
Going back slightly further, it’s as grizzled lothario and former Navy SEAL Sam Ax in Burn Notice.
Many will remember him as Autolycus, King of Thieves, helping another god on the New Zealand-filmed Hercules: The Legendary Journeys before joining Xena: Warrior Princess on the occasional quest.
(Park that thought for a moment – it’s important).
My introduction to the Church of Bruce was in the early 90s with The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, where he got to play a cowboy very plausibly in love with Kelly Rutherford, while chasing all manner of sci-fi devices in the Old West.
But even that was a relatively late arrival to the party. Because the Coming of the great god Bruce Campbell first began with The Evil Dead, a 1980s horror movie a few people might have heard of, and which spawned more than a few sequels, including Army of Darkness.
It made a star of Bruce, who shot it with his childhood buddies Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert. Tapert went on to run a couple of shows, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, where he ended up marrying the star, Lucy Lawless. Meanwhile, Raimi went to make plenty more movies, including Spider-Man, and with Tapert, created a New Zealand-filmed TV show on Starz called Spartacus, which also occasionally starred Lucy Lawless.
And now everything’s converging again, with Raimi, Tapert, Campbell and Lawless all together on another New Zealand-filmed show, this one a sequel to that very first epiphany, Evil Dead. It sees Campbell reprising his role of Ash, the ironic, semi-idiot hero of the original movies, who’s now 30 years older, 30 years wider, but not 30 years wiser. Trying to impress a girl while high on weed, he accidentally reads out passages from his big book of evil, causing the once-dismissed ‘Deadites’ to once again return to the world. Now Ash must quit his job in the local hardware store, quit his trailer and head out into the world to either face the evil or run away from it. Thank heavens he’s still got that chainsaw he can mount where his wooden hand should go, so he can carve them up with maximum gore.
Yes, the god of irony walks the Earth once again, and he’s NSFW.
The observant among you will have noticed that there was no Weekly Wonder Woman last week. That wasn’t because our Wondy wasn’t in any comics – quite the contrary, in fact – but simply because of the time I had available, I had to choose between WWW and WHYBW, and tele won. Sorry, Di.
I didn’t get any complaint letters, though. I don’t know why. I’m assuming it’s because you were too busy crying to be able to put fingers to keyboard.
Don’t worry, though. Brush those tears away. WWW is back. And given that there was only one new issue with Diana in last week, it’s not exactly a Herculean task to do two weeks in one go.
So after the jump, we’ll be looking at the latest issues of the Big Four: Wonder Woman, Superman-Wonder Woman, Justice League and Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman. Only one of them has a bad joke from an old episode of Doctor Who in it.
Still no Diana in DC Bombshells again, though. This is tantamount to false advertising, now.
