Comic Book / Hack/Slash

Cassie: A slasher. It's a type of undead, I guess... sort of like a vampire or a zombie. They're so full of anger that they don't wanna die. They hate love, youth, sex... things they miss, from life. All I know for sure is that they're mean and hard to kill.
Kyle: How do you know all this?
Cassie: Because, I'm Cassie Hack. I'm mean, I'm hard to kill, and I hunt slashers.

Cassie Hack was an ordinary outcast high school nerdgirl until her mother, Delilah, was discovered to be a serial killer (dubbed "The Lunch Lady") who had been murdering the students who had been bullying her daughter. Even worse, after she killed herself she came back from the grave as a "slasher": an undead serial murderer powered by hate and rage and existing only to carry on killing. To make things even worse, Cassie ended up having to personally re-kill her by shooting her several times in the face.

Now Cassie wanders the USA, channeling her guilt and pain into hunting down and destroying the other slashers who stalk the nation. And wearing a fine assortment of highly revealing gothwear.

Her only friend is Vlad, a hideously deformed but kindly giant whose odd upbringing by a reclusive butcher left him with No Social Skills but excellent meat cleaver moves. Together they kill zombie mass murderers, and the odd deserving living person. Aiding the two is the so-called Hack/Slash, Inc., founded by would-be slasher victims Doctor Lisa Elsten and Chris Krank, which provides info, and whatever resources they can spare.

Hack/Slash is a comic series originally published by Devil's Due, and written by Tim Seeley. A series of one-shots and miniseries illustrated by various artists, published between 2004 and 2007, were followed by an ongoing series, illustrated at first by Emily Stone. In early 2010 it was announced that due to Devil's Due's financial difficulties the series would be transferring to Image Comics. During the rest of the year both publishers issued Hack/Slash material: the Devil's Due series continuing until issue #34 while Image produced a "Year One"-style mini-series titled My First Maniac and a few one-shots. The ongoing series restarted from #1 at Image in 2011, and concluded with #25 in 2013.

The 2013 crossover book, Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash, teams Cassie up with Ash Williams and is set shortly after the end of the Hack/Slash series, with a major emotional arc inspired by the events of the finale. There have also been crossover miniseries with Eva and Vampirella, and a one-shot with Mercy Sparx, although these were less significant to the series' plot.

2014 saw the beginning of a new volume, Hack/Slash: Son of Samhain, by Michael Morecci and Steve Seeley, which follows Cassie's attempts to build a new life as a "normal" person. These are subsequently derailed by an old monster-hunter named Delroy, who enlists her to go after a new cult of monsters. The series was cancelled after the first, status-quo-establishing, arc. In 2017, a further revival series began under the title of Hack/Slash: Resurrection, written by Tini Howard, which begins with Cassie in her mid-twenties and is ambiguous as to whether Son of Samhain is still in continuity, though it does reference her Bounty Hunter job there offhand. With that series' conclusion, 2018 and 2019 saw a Crisis Crossover in the form of Hack/Slash vs. Chaos!, again penned by Seeley, and followed by The Crow: Hack/Slash.

In 2023, Image released a new miniseries set near the beginning of Cassie's career, Hack/Slash: Back to School, which was written and drawn by Zoe Thorogood, previously known as an art-comics creator but a self-confessed fan.

Not to be confused with Hack and Slash (although the stories definitely have that feel to them) or with Hack and Slash.

Has both a live-action film and a motion comic ("illustrated film") in Development Hell, with Brea Grant slated as the voice of Cassie in the latter. The unofficial official site can be found here.

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This series provides examples of:

• 10-Minute Retirement: Cassie tries to quit Slasher hunting twice (once in Closer, and once in Monster Baiting), only for circumstances to force her to realize that stopping isn't really an option for her.
• Abusive Parents: If a flashback to Cassie's childhood in The Final Revenge of Evil Ernie is any indication, Delilah wasn't above physical discipline... with a burning hot iron.
• Academy of Adventure: Hunters For Hire & Darla Ritz's Academy For Girls, introduced in Back To School, is a sort of boarding school/mercenary service filled with teenage slasher-hunters like Cassie and presided over by Badass Teacher Darla Ritz.
• Acid Reflux Nightmare: Eating badly causes Cassie to have Recurring Dreams about Milk and Cheese, but she almost prefers those over her nightly recollection of shooting her mother. At one point, Vlad, drunk, also hallucinates the duo, but it's actually due to other forces.
• Activist-Fundamentalist Antics: Laura Lochs, especially in the Vs. Chucky story where she claims to want to "save" Cassie by murdering her friends in ways that reflect sins according to Laura's belief system, even though they don't actually apply to the people she intends to kill (i.e., the woman being punished for abortion has never had one, the man being flogged for homosexuality isn't gay, etc.).
• All Myths Are True: Every prominent Slasher Movie franchise is canon. See Intercontinuity Crossover for details.
• All There in the Manual: Rudolph, who gets offhandedly mentioned in Entry Wound, first appeared in Slashing Through the Snow, a short story included in the first trade paperback and omnibus.
  • Some slashers who put in fairly minor appearances (at first), like Dr. Gross and Acid Angel, only had their backstories revealed in the ombibus collections as well, via Hack/Slash Inc.'s Slasher Profiles.
• Alliterative Family: The Lochs family (Louis, Lacey, Liberty and Laura).
• Almost Dead Guy: Jason in Land of Lost Toys.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Slashers are always homicidal and malevolent, even if a few of them retain altruistic attachments to people close to them in life.
• Ambiguously Bi: It's questionable whether Emily Christy was actually bisexual/gay or just preying on gay students.
• And I Must Scream:
  • The ultimate fate of Martha "Muffy" Jaworski: trapped in a birdcage in her own mind as Ashley Guthrie controls her body. By the end of Mind Killer, Six Sixx says she's essentially dead.
  • Hack/Slash/Repeat had Cassie fighting a slasher who wasn't especially strong but had such a massive Healing Factor that she spent sixteen hours trying and failing to kill him. She ended up chaining him up and dropping him to the bottom of a lake, which even Cassie saw as Dirty Business to the point that she wouldn't let Vlad take part.
• And This Is for...:
  • Done by Vlad while bludgeoning Jimmy to death in Comic Book Carnage.
  • Cassie does one to the Mosaic Man but it's for a taxicab.
  Cassie: I do this in name of Yianni's cab, motherfucker.
• Anger Born of Worry: Cassie verbally chews out Margaret in rage over going in to get information on the Tin Woodsman in Over the Rainbow instead of waiting outside like she said she would, but it's obvious that this trope is in play. After a few minutes to calm down, she makes clear she's just worried about her friend maybe getting killed when she isn't there.
  Cassie: You're sorry?! You told me you'd meet me outside. You never said anything about going in, much less about getting chased by a fucking armored dwarf! [...] No excuse! Just because we're friends doesn't mean you get to do my job! I can't know people who risk their lives! I'm so pissed I can barely look at you.
• Angst: Cassie has issues.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Vlad makes this to Cassie in Sons of Man when they believe they are making their Last Stand against the Artemis hunters, while apologizing for having been happy when she broke up with Margaret in Mind Killer, but she doesn't really grasp the full implications of it until Final.
  Vlad: I know I am not your boyfriend. I am not the person you will marry or make the sex with. But I do not like to share you, Cassandra. I do not like to share you with anyone.
  Cassie: (sheds a Single Tear) I know.
• Anti-Hero: Cassie and Samhain.
• Apocalyptic Log: Dr. Phillips's journal in Little Children, which tells of the rise and fall of the aforementioned children and ends with his death.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Black Ambrosia, Akakios' "panacea". Found in the form of black flowers, their nectar burns a black flame. Injecting the nectar into a corpse can return a semblance of life in moderation, but will inevitably cause a Flesh-Eating Zombie. With the use of Alchemy Is Magic, Akakios was able to create Slashers, and the substance can carry through the bloodlines of the living to activate upon death.
• Art Shift:
  • Each arc has its own art style, especially in the Tim Seeley stories.
  • Issues #6 and #28 are set in Haverhill, a town inspired by Archie Comics. The art shifts into an Archie-like style to represent this. However, at the end of #28, the art shifts back into a more realistic style to represent Haverhill coming down with Cerebus Syndrome. (Oddly enough, this wound up anticipating the more realistic art style in the 2015 reboot of Archie.)
• Asian and Nerdy: Chris.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Played for Laughs in a Black Comedy way regarding Mariantha's Fingore, Ear Ache, and Eye Scream in The Good Son.
  Cassie: Does it hurt?
  Mari: ...
  Cassie: Right, sorry.
• Asleep for Days: After her ordeal in Closer, Cassie apparently stayed asleep for two days by the time she wakes up in Mind Killer.
• Asshole Victim: Bobby Brunswick's victims in Euthanized. Cassie even says they probably deserve it.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: Notably, a pet-eating snow blower.
• Attempted Rape: A drugged Cassie is saved by Chucky the Killer Doll, of all people.
• Author Appeal: According to the extras in the first trade paperback collection, Cassie was based on a Suicide Girl model Tim Seeley met at the con. He was too shy to ask her out.
• Ax-Crazy: Too many to list.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: A popular pose for Cassie and Vlad on covers.
• Badass Adorable: Cassie, sometimes more than others. Example.◊
• Badass in Distress: Cassie ends up captured on several occasions, even when not sure intentionally, most notably in Shout at the Devil, Closer, Monster Baiting, and The Good Son.
• Badass Longcoat: Vlad wears a trench coat.
• Badass Normal: Cassie.
  • Empowered Badass Normal: Thanks to Samhain's blood. Until Cat cures her to avoid the side effects.
• Bad Future: Shown in Murder Messiah; Cassie, Lisa and Kris are dead, and Vlad is held captive by the returned Akakios, who unleashed a virus that turned innumerable people into slashers, which conquered a significant chunk of America.
• Bad Girl Comic: Shows many of the standard features of the genre but subverts some of them. Cassie is a scantily-clad, cynical '90s Anti-Hero who is usually drawn in a very sexualised way, but contrary to the usual features she's a Badass Normal fighting supernatural bad guys, and her angst and self-doubt are significantly played up compared to the usual cheerful sociopathy of the Bad Girl protagonist.
• Badass Boast: Cassie makes a few. She tends to be able to back them up.
  Cassie: (in Euthanized) Because, I'm Cassie Hack. I'm mean, I'm hard to kill, and I hunt Slashers.
  Cassie: (in Murder Messiah) Slashers aren't the top of the food chain... I am!
• Badass in Distress: Cassie and Vlad sometimes end up captured, necessitating help getting them out.
• The Bait: A common tactic for hunting Slashers. Cassie readily admits that she isn't a heroine, she's a Slasher hunter, so she often tricks other innocents into luring out the Slasher of the issue to fight. And that's when she isn't deciding to be the bait herself as a Deliberately Distressed Damsel.
• Bait-and-Switch: In My First Maniac, Cassie goes to hunt for Farmer Fig, assuming him to be a Knight Templar Parent Slasher much like her mother... but it turns out that the story about his promiscuous daughter was all a lie, said daughter was actually invalid after having been kicked in the head by a horse, and the real Slasher was Grinface, someone who was killed as an indirect result of his protectiveness. According to the back matter on the trade, Farmer Fig originally really was the Monster of the Week, but artwork of Grinface changed Tim Seeley's mind.
• Batman Cold Open: Euthanized.
• Battle Strip: Cassie does this in Come Together when she gives Vlad Marshmallow Hell to snap him out of Acid Angel's brainwashing, tearing open her shirt to shove her bra-covered breasts in his face.
• Batter Up!: Cassie's main weapon is a bat with "KISS IT" carved into it.
• Beach Episode: Girls Gone Dead
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted to various degrees. Most notably, in My First Maniac, after her No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from a trio of her classmates, Cassie sports a large black eye. Cassie repays the leader of the trio with an even nastier one the next day.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Elvis was actually an agent of an Eldritch Abomination in Shout at the Devil, which was the source of his talent.
  • Jack the Ripper is implicated as being a slasher in Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: A Discussed Trope in Resurrection issue 4 when Laurie and Cassie have sex despite mutual dislike after an argument they had.
  Vlad: I thought you two didn't get along anymore.
  Cassie: Yeah, well, sometimes that just makes it hotter.
• Big Bad: Akakios serves as the main villain of the entire main series, and fully comes into his own as Big Bad after emerging in the present day.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Dale Wildman.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Cassie and Vlad fulfill this often for potential Slasher victims, including Vlad doing so for Cassie many times in her Deliberately Distressed Damsel routines.
  • Samhain rescues Cassie from the Black Lamp Society like this in Closer.
  • Venus Twelve uses an electric shock device in a pack of Artemis hunters to kill them in Sons of Man when Cassie and Vlad were about to die in a Bolivian Army Ending.
• Big Damn Kiss: Cassie plants one on the Brainwashed and Crazy Samhain in Sons of Man to break him out of his brainwashing, which causes her to develop Unresolved Sexual Tension with him. This instance is followed up by him returning it in Interdimensional Women's Prison Breakout.
• The Big Guy: Vlad.
• Big "NO!": Let loose by Mary Shelley Lovecraft, after realizing she's been reborn into "a comedic superhero universe" (the Lovebunny one, to be specific) in Entry Wound.
• Bilingual Bonus: The message transmitted by D1ab0liq via Nixon in Murder/Suicide spells out "kill" in binary.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: What Cassie believes her conflict with the Slashers is.
  • Hilariously, a good argument may be made Cassie is less of an antihero than she thinks and more a full-blown White Hat.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Rudolph in Entry Wound. When he first appears in Euthanized, X-O also has them.
• Blood Bath: Emily Christy resorts to something akin to this in order to retain a human appearance in Tub Club, manipulating students into weird bloodletting pool orgies as a part of being in the titular secret society. Cassie is also depicted as partaking in one on a cover from the same Story Arc.
• Blood from the Mouth: A rare beneficial example. After she kills Akakios, Cassie has his panacea cures from her system by Cat. Due to it being in her blood, she ends up puking it up on the ground.
• Body Horror: Usually goes more for violence than outright horror, but there are a few examples.
• Bond One-Liner: Happens on occasion, often coupled with a Pre-Mortem One-Liner.
  • In Girls Gone Dead:
    Vlad: (to Father Wrath) ... What's that? Was that a sneeze? God bless you.
  • In Hack/Slash vs. Chucky:
    Cassie: Jesus, what'd you do to Sugar?
    Chucky: I nailed him.
  • In Tub Club, to a Face Stealer:
    Vlad: But, at least I am comfortable... in my own skin.
  • In Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter, to a Supervillain:
    Cassie: Who needs Kryptonite, asshole?
• Booze Flamethrower: A variation in Girls Gone Dead. Cassie kicks Laura Lochs into a bar which soaks her in high-proof alcohol. Cassie distracts Laura by pointing out she looks like she has just won a wet t-shirt contest (which is a Berserk Button for Laura). While she is distracted, Cassie ignites her by throwing a flaming shot on her.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In Slice Hard, Ashley cuts the fingers off a guard and uses them to bypass the fingerprint scan on the biometric lock on the lab.
• Boss Rush: A rare non-video game example in Entry Wound. Mary Shelley Lovecraft's battle with a Crisis Crossover of superheroes causes all of the specific day Slashers to wake up at the same time, causing Cassie and Vlad to spend more than forty-eight hours straight driving around America and putting them down, with emphasis on how tired they are by the time they get to their sixth one in a row.
• Bound and Gagged: Cassie in Closer.
• Break the Cutie: In flashbacks we learn that Cassie was bullied in school because she was poor and "ugly". Aww.
  • Not to mention the part where her mother is an undead serial killer who has had to be put down by her on two separate occasions so far. That tends to be a bit traumatic.
• Breast Attack:
  • Cassie threatens Laura Lochs with one of these in their first meeting in Girls Gone Dead, calling it an "emergency breast reduction".
  • Pooch bites Kuma's breast during their fight in Closer.
• Brick Joke: In the debut, Euthanized, Cassie laments never getting a "midget Slasher". Fast forward four years to "Over the Rainbow" (Issue 14 of her first ongoing) and she gets one... but is less than amused.
• Bridal Carry: Judging from her perspective on awakening briefly, this is the position Samhain carried Cassie away from the site of her attempted Human Sacrifice between Closer and Mind Killer.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Louis, a Defector from Decadence of the Black Lamp Society, very clearly sets himself after being subjected to interrogation by Samhain in the opening of Sons of Man.
• The Butcher: Subverted. In a couple early issues, Vlad mentions he was raised in a basement by "The Butcher," leading readers to believe he shared a similar history to Hack. Turns out "The Butcher" was just a kind, elderly Slavic immigrant who found him as a dumpster baby. Rather than report the abandoned, deformed child and let him be raised in an institution or hospital, he kept Vlad secret and raised him as best he could.
  • Vlad could be considered an example himself; his old nickname "the Meat Man" is certainly in a similar spirit to "the Butcher".
• Calling the Old Man Out: Cassie does this to Jack in Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator. It's rather calm and subdued for her, considering she usually shouts at people she is angry with, making the impact all the more potent. She only starts screaming when she is wanting to know if Jack created the Slashers.
  Cassie: You'll be fine. Vlad knows how to stitch a cut. He had to learn all kinds of things like that... after his parents abandoned him. Beat After you left us, I tried everything a little kid could think of to make you come back. I figured if I did the same thing I was doing the last time I saw you, everything would go back to the way it was... I spent a whole spring sitting in the recliner with my stuffed rabbit repeating "daddy come back, daddy come back" over and over in my head.
• Came Back Wrong: This is the basic explanation of the existence of slashers - if you're evil and insane enough and die violently, you automatically come back as an even crazier super-powered undead. This is actually an over-simplification.
• Cannibal Clan: Vlad and his biological family are apparently descended from Sawney Beane.
• Captain Ersatz: A few slashers are loose parodies of film characters, such as Pinhead, Sammi Curr from Trick or Treat and the brothers from Basket Case.
  • Samhain and Angel
  • X-O is Victor Zsasz with a Tic-Tac-Toe fetish.
• Car Fu: While effective against zombie animals in Euthanized, the resurrected Mosaic Man proves immune in Foes and Fortunes. In My first Maniac Cassie is on the receiving end, but obviously walks away from it.
• Cat Fight: Gertrude versus Margaret and Cassie in the opening of Mind Killer. It's pretty nasty, with hair-pulling, Cassie getting punched hard enough to make her nose bleed, and Margaret getting poked in the left eye.
• Catapult Nightmare: A nightly occurrence for Cassie, who always has nightmares about her mother coming back. Even when it isn't that and is instead an Acid Reflux Nightmare, she still wakes up screaming.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: In the first part of Foes and Fortunes (issue 26 of the first ongoing), Vlad, looking for Cassie, ends up walking in on her in a very compromising position.
• Celibate Hero: Cassie admits in Euthanized that one of the reasons she became a monster hunter is because she's afraid of romance. According to her when discussing it with Georgia in Nef, she feels she is "RAID to cock" and hasn't really ever had any interest in getting with guys that way... resulting in both of them figuring she might be gay.
  • As you know, slashers tend to only die at the hands of a virgin. Becomes a disadvantage in Shout at the Devil, due to Six Sixx and Acid Washed having a song that can brainwash virgins.
  • Loses this altogether after losing her virginity in Monster Baiting to Samhain. Thereafter, she has absolutely no problems with casual sex.
• Celebrity Star: Comic Book Carnage features Steve Niles, Robert Kirkman, Messy Stench and Skottie Young (who reappears in vs. Chucky and Trailers) as characters and victims, plus various real-life Suicide Girls appear in the first annual (and are also killed).
• Cerebus Syndrome: Kicks in roughly when the ongoing series begins. While previous arcs were nasty, there was little actual direct harm to the protagonists. The first issue of the first ongoing has her being tortured, which carries on to other issues, examining her many psychological issues in depth. This just goes to better show how nasty her life really is.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The Nef guitar, which first shows up in Shout at the Devil, but is important in subsequent arcs, particularly Mind Killer, Murder Messiah, and Final.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Doctor White across the entire Emily Christy arc.
  • Mary Shelley Lovecraft, who appears in Entry Wound before meeting Cassie and Vlad in Something's Fishy.
  • Alan Knight, the "Late Knight", becomes much more important in the Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter.
  • Cat Curio starts as a One-Shot Character as a little girl in Double Feature, but graduates to the main cast by the time she awakens from her coma.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: Cassie has a bad habit of doing this regularly, but also calls out others for doing the same.
• *Click* Hello: Cassie's introduction to the men harassing "Gordon Stewart", a.k.a Jack Hack in Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: The demonic form Six Sixx briefly assumes in Shout at the Devil.
• Closet Key: Whilst Cassie initially seems to be straight, she eventually discovers she's also into women after meeting Margaret Crump, aka the stripper "Georgia Peaches", in the story "Shout at the Devil". Ironically, Cassie's first kiss with Margaret in "Closer" is what makes Margaret realize she's a lesbian as well, so the two acted as Closet Keys for each other.
• Clothing Damage: It's very common for Cassie's shirts to get absolutely shredded in combat. Of particular note is Sons of Man, where battling the Artemis hunters leaves Cassie's fishnet outfit as nothing more than strips of cloth, with her essentially fighting in just her Black Bra and Panties.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Particularly epic example in Shout at the Devil, when Cassie trips while shopping. Justified on her part, given that this was the foot that had recently had two toes cut off by a slasher in Gross Anatomy.
  Cassie: Goddamn cocksucking motherfucking Christ in a tree!
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Doctor Gross's specialty.
• Combat Pragmatist: Cassie is not above using anything she can get her hands on in a fight, nor any underhanded moves.
• Comfort Food: Cassie's is referenced by Vlad in the opening of Closer, but due to the events of Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator, she won't even respond to being asked if she wants it.
  Vlad: When we see terrible things, I hold her. She cries. We eat microwave burritos. Orange cream sodas.
• The Comically Serious: Vlad. Spending twenty years living in a basement can do that to a guy.
• Comic Within A Comic:
  • Chippy the Slasher Slayer, who is essentially a furry version of Cassie (she's a squirrel, by the way).
  • Wunderkind, who is totally not Captain Marvel.
• Continuity Nod: Various adventures have offhand references to prior Slashers or other events, usually accompanied by a Clue from Ed. pointing to the name of the arc, but not always. The Brick Joke noted above is a particularly notable example of a nod. Some are more subtle, like a mention in Tub Club of a scar Cassie received from fighting Chucky.
• Conveniently an Orphan
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: One Slasher will give Cassie and Vlad fits, but should they come back as part of an ensemble, they tend to go down easier than the first time.
• Cool Big Sis: Lisa could be example of this, like in Double Feature.
• Cool Car: The duo originally used a van, but after it was destroyed during the battle with the resurrected Julian the Mosaic Man, they replaced it with a hearse that Julian's grateful near-miss victim happened to have lying around.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Ceutech has some, as do Society of the Black Lamp front organizations.
• Country Matters: Uttered by a particularly nasty bully in one of Cassie's childhood flashbacks in Gross Anatomy.
• Creepy Child: Ashley Guthrie was creepy looking even before he became a slasher.
• Creepy Stalker Van: Parodied in Crossing the Line Twice style in the short "Rape Van". (It's a demonic literal van that rapes cars and crushes the occupants to death.)
• Crucified Hero Shot: A non-fatal one near the end of My First Maniac, when Cassie is strung up to a wooden cross with rope to put her in a position for a Motive Rant. Her narration even lampshades it.
  Cassie: If I told people what I'd done, or worse, what I intend to do... they'd crucify me. So it's ironic that this girl, Sarah Bunn, is the one who gave me the Jesus treatment.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • The Acid Angel died when her lover replaced her insulin with hydrochloric acid.
  • The myriad ways Fantomah kills the supervillain wannabes in Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter. The last three were actually teleported into space.
• Cult: The Society of the Black Lamp.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Jack left Cassie and her mother Delilah in order to keep the Slasher projects he was working on from coming to take away Delilah and Cassie to become guinea pigs for research. He tried to keep an eye on them, but his various debts caught up with him time and again. By the time Delilah died, he was in prison for his unsavory lifestyle, preventing him from coming to see Cassie.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Samhain II.
• Danger Takes A Back Seat: The Acid Angel hides in the Hearse towards the Creationist Museum in Come Together.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Cassie herself. When your childhood involves vicious bullies and a psychopathic mom who murders people, you're going to have some problems.
• Darker and Edgier: Both provides an example of the trope, and satirizes it within the story.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Over the Rainbow for Margaret.
  • Six Sixx hogs the spotlight for most of Mind Killer, Part II.
• Deader than Dead: A requirement for slashers, which sometimes is even more difficult than expected.
• Deadly Doctor: Doctor Gross.
• Deadly Prank: Bobby Brunswick's origin.
• Deal with the Devil: Six Sixx actually freaks out when "the Devil" doesn't turn out to be what he expected.
• Delinquent Hair: Sarah in My First Maniac has hair that is dyed white for the most part, but with pink tips, befitting her "party girl" attitude.
• Determinator: Vlad.
• Death by Origin Story: Cassie's origin story involves the death of her mother, twice over.
• Deconstruction: Arguably one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both start with the premise "Final Girl of a horror film goes hunting the villains from other horror films," but unlike Buffy, who balances this with a normal life, Cassie is shown to be a deeply scarred person.
• Defictionalization: An Invoked Trope. The photo shoot Cassie uses to lure in D1ab0liq in Murder/Suicide really exists, and is on SuicideGirls.com. Some of the photos are visible in the back of the issue. The "invoked" part comes with how issue itself was used as a promotion in the form of a webcomic for the shoot.
• Deliberately Monochrome: In "Psyche: No Vacancy," as part of the Whole-Plot Reference to Psycho.
• Deus ex Machina: Before Chucky can strike the killing blow against Cassie, he's eaten by an alligator.
• Deus Sex Machina: Acid Angel, who could secrete a powerful acid when she was sexually aroused.
• Devoured by the Horde:
  • Victims of Bobby in Euthanized tend to be devoured by the zombie animals.
  • In Vs. Chucky, Laura is Eaten Alive by her Voodoo Zombies.
  • Seems to have happened to Dr. Phillips in Little Children given there is No Body Left Behind.
  • Louis is devoured by Artemis hunters in Sons of Man, begging to be killed first but not granted that wish.
• Diagonal Cut: Vlad cuts the Slasher Bobby Brown down this way.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Cassie's and Vlad's very freaked out reaction to their first encounter with Fantomah.
• "Die Hard" on an X: Die Hard was an admitted inspiration for Slice Hard.
• Dirty Business: Cassie's execution of the feral children in Little Children. She's disturbed enough that she has to call Georgia/Margaret, who she had previously told never to call her again unless she had information about a Slasher, just to have some comfort.
• Disappeared Dad: And he becomes a focus of the Reanimation Games trade, volume 5.
• Disposable Sex Worker: While stuck in the Hack/Slash universe, Evil Ernie spends his time murdering random strippers and prostitutes.
• Disproportionate Retribution: A common trait of Slashers. We have Delilah Hack (killing and turning Cassie's bullies into "mystery meat"), Laura Lochs (her boyfriend was stolen by a Spring Break slut, so she planned on committing a massacre), the Sundermann brothers (killing the people responsible for making their favorite childhood hero Darker and Edgier), and many more.
• Distressed Damsel: Several of the victims of the Slashers are held captive, often women due to Monster Misogyny. Occasionally turns into Damsel out of Distress given the right opportunities.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Doesn't happen often, but poor Chris and Lisa.
• Ear Ache: Mari gets her ear cut off by Shandy Beane in The Good Son to be eaten. The damage is never directly seen, but its existence on the plate being served tells enough.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Euthanized, the first story, includes Cassie commenting on common tropes of her story and using her guns effortlessly, sometimes even not bothering to look where she's shooting. This comes as a significant contrast to her more careful, grounded fighting style and more serious take on Slashers in subsequent stories.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Guess who.
• '80s Hair: Acid Washed and Gertrude Hall, or as Ashley called her - "the girl with the giant hair".
• Eldritch Abomination: The Lords of Nef, Mary Shelley Lovecraft, the Dread Drinkers.
• Electric Torture: Andrew Rodin performs this on Samhain when having him in captivity in Sons of Man. Once the latter breaks out of his brainwashing, he returns the favor, fatally.
• Electrified Bathtub: In Girls Gone Dead, Father Wrath tries to kill a group of 'sinners' by tossing a television into their hot tub. Vlad manages to slow him down long enough for most of them to get out.
• Elvis Lives: And was empowered by Eldritch Abominations for his talent before being whisked away to their dimension. He's dead by the end of Shout at the Devil via Ass Shove.
• The End... Or Is It?: One of the final panels of the main series has a mysterious hand taking Vlad's old mask off the wall, where it's hanging in Cassie's and Margaret's house.
• Enemy Mine: Cassie and Chucky formed a shaky partnership in the Child's Play crossover, in order to take Laura Lochs down.
• Enfant Terrible: Ashley Guthrie, and the feral, slasher children from Little Children.
• Erotic Dream: Foes and Fortunes opens with Cassie having one about Samhain. When Vlad comes by, she's caught "drilling for maiden water".
• Evil Chef: Delilah Hack and Hibachi Devil (presumably).
• Evil Cripple: Courtney in Hatchet/Slash. Cassie even claims she's not so different from Victor Crowley himself.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Pooch in Murder Messiah. He knows that Samhain is Akakios, or at least very, very evil.
• Evil Gloating: Common for the Slashers and other more mundane villains both.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Do not try to control Slashers or other supernatural killers. It never ends well.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Played for Laughs with the Mugger, one of the villains in Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter. His Evil Plan is...pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
• Exit, Pursued by a Bear: At the end of Vs. Chucky, Chucky gets swallowed whole by an alligator while battling Cassie in a swamp.
• Extreme Mêlée Revenge: When really angry, Cassie has a habit of either brutally stabbing someone repeatedly or, in the case of Dale Wildman, beating them half to death with her bare hands.
  Cassie: You were right about one thing. I care about some people. But that just means I'm going to beat you to death with extra rage.
• Eye Awaken: Akakios, after he awakens from his fall from Monster Baiting in The Case of the Killer and the Questing King.
• Eye Patch Of Power: Six Sixx gets one after a Dread Drinker rips his eye out in Mind Killer.
• Eye Scream:
  • Hibachi Devil getting stabbed in the eye with a test tube in Slice Hard.
  • The Dread Drinkers taking over peoples' bodies by crawling into their eyes in Mind Killer (along with what happened to Six above).
  • The Candlemas Murderer in Entry Wound has a candle in his right eye socket.
  • Mari gets her right eye cut out in the Cannibal Larder by Shandy Beane to be eaten in The Good Son.
• Face–Heel Turn: Vampirella has a brief one in her Resurrection appearance, due to mental influence from Trixie.
• False Friend: Sarah Bunn in My First Maniac, who became fast friends with Cassie due to realizing she had a similar connection to undead killers, but was really a Zombie Advocate trying to come up with a way to bring back the mind of the Monster of the Week. She seems to really want to be a friend, but the two are Not So Similar.
• Fan Boy: Portrayed in canon for a variety of things, ranging from musicians to comic books to films.
• Fan Disservice:
  • The Betty and Veronica Expy examples go topless in Something's Fishy... only to show that they've mutated into Fish People with gills down their fronts.
  • Cassie spends a few panels completely topless in the first arc of Resurrection, but the most noticeable thing to the reader is the huge wound on her chest due to Dr. Chase starting to do an autopsy on her when she was only feigning unconsciousness.
  • More generally, Celor's artwork in Resurrection tends to depict Cassie as somewhat haggard and scrawny-looking, even at her least stressed.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Due to the way the comic deals with a shared universe with other Slasher Movies, it contains aliens, demons, Hollywood Voodoo, Alchemy Is Magic, Dream Walkers, superheroes, and ghosts, alongside alternate dimensions. Cassie says it best herself in the lead up to Final.
  Cassie: Our friend Ava has been having visions. Weird glimpses of something. She thinks it might be the future. A future that doesn't look too goddamn good. I know that sounds like some X-Men type shit, but just between the people in this room, we've seen aliens, ghosts, and a fucking killer doll, so at this point we can't really throw out anything.
• Fanservice: Lots, with special mention going to Cassie's Suicide Girls photo shoot, which actually is shown in part in the back of the first annual, Murder/Suicide, and includes shots of her naked.
• Fetus Terrible: Sort of. Part of a pair of twins.
• Final Girl: The basic idea for the series came when Tim Seeley, stuck at home one Halloween due to sickness, watched a few horror film marathons and thought, "What if a final girl, after killing the slasher that was after her, went on to hunt down and kill other ones?"
  • Notably, despite the clothing, sailor mouth, and near Blood Knight-ness, Cassie still fits a lot of the Final Girl stereotypes (virgin with no vices, for example).
  • Thanks to Cassie's intervention, several (almost all female) would-be slasher victims survive. She teams up with almost all of them for the final story arc.
• Fingore:
  • Dr. Phillips has his left ring finger bitten off by Phoebe in his April 8 Apocalyptic Log entry.
  • Mari has all of the fingers on her left hand cut off to be eaten in The Good Son.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: Cassie notes that fire usually keeps Slashers down, at least for a while.
• First Girl Wins: Cassie and Georgia end up as the Official Couple, at least until Son of Samhain.
• First-Name Basis: After Georgia comes to comfort Cassie during her Heroic BSoD in Closer, the latter starts calling her by her real name, Margaret, instead. It starts as You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious (as it was the first word she said in fourteen hours), but eventually transitions into being a result of their relationship.
• Fish People: Something's Fishy, also Body Horror.
• Flashback Nightmare: Every night that she doesn't have an Acid Reflux Nightmare about "Milk and Cheese," Cassie's dreams end with her mother.
• Flashback to Catchphrase: My First Maniac has Cassie give an explanation for the phrasing "Kiss It!" that she usually carves into her bats as she pops off Grinface's head with razor wire.
  Cassie: You like to chase me, Grinface? You like to see me from behind? I'm going to pop your fucking head off. Then I'll let you see my behind. I'm gonna let you kiss it.
• Foe Romance Subtext:
  • Six Sixx had a brief moment of this in Mind Killer for Cassie, albeit for purely release purposes.
    Six Sixx: Mmm... been a while. Whatdya say, Cas? A little hate-fuck before I torture you, the sluts and that big retard?
    Cassie: (smirks) Please. The only thing your little orange dick is good for is being mistaken for a Chee-Toe.
  • Bomb Queen is into Cassie, openly propositioning sex and even giving her a Forceful Kiss when they first met, being annoyed when she's turned down.
• Freudian Excuse: A rare heroic example. She eventually admits by Closer that it was just an excuse, though.
• Freudian Threat:
  • When trying to get information out of Dr. Herbert West about the location of her parents, Cassie threatens him with an impromptu "gender reassignment procedure" via scalpel.
  • Samhain threatens Louis with his knife this way in the opening of Sons of Man.
• From Bad to Worse: Monster Baiting, which turns from comedic adventuring and Cassie's loss of virginity to the rise of the Big Bad. And it seemed like a comedy filler to start with...
• Full-Frontal Assault:
  • In Murder/Suicide, D1ab0liq, possessing Fractal, strips off Fractal's top entirely before his final assault against Cassie and Vlad. In this case, it's mostly just to prove how much control he has.
  • Played for Laughs with a demonic man in Hack/Slash/Eva: Monster's Ball.
    Cassie: All this crazy shit going on, and I still can't stop looking at his dick.
    Shepherd: I know. God help me, I know.
  • An Enforced Trope in Monster Baiting, when a group of psychosaurs attack Cassie and Samhain soon after they first had sex. This one is a deconstruction, as the naked individuals are woefully underprepared for the attack and are sorely outmatched.
• Funny Answering Machine: Cassie has one for her cell phone, as shown in Girls Gone Dead.
  Cassie's Answering Machine: This is Cassie. Suck it.
• Gas Leak Cover-Up: Used on occasion to cover for Slasher activity.
  • Dr. White uses it to cover for the destruction of a group that found out about Slashers in Tub Club.
  • In a heroic example, the police use it to cover up for the events of Mind Killer.
• Gender Bender: Newer Venus models in Sons of Man have been engineered to be this, to cater to a variety of tastes. It mostly serves to creep out Cassie, though.
• Gender Flip: Minor villain April Fool is a black female Expy of The Joker from another dimension. Without the Immunity though: she gets killed off very fast because Cassie, unlike certain people, doesn't have any moral qualms about killing human villains, and promptly hangs her.
• Generation Xerox: Resurrection #8-11 features a maternal ancestor of Cassie's called Caraway Cordero, a mysteriously ageless Really 700 Years Old retired demon-hunter who looks exactly like Cassie, but with only one eye, and had a now deceased giant sidekick who wore a Plague Doctor costume.
• Gentle Giant: Vlad.
• Get Out!:
  • Played for Laughs in Foes and Fortunes when Cassie is Caught with Your Pants Down.
  • A far sadder example is Margaret demanding Cassie leave when she shows up to protect her in Murder Messiah.
  • Laurie Peacetree demands this of Cassie after the events of the first arc of Resurrection, after she killed her mom.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • In The Good Son, when looking for a woman who was hiding from the Beanes.
    Cassie: I'm just going to go talk to her. What's the worst that could happen?
    Cut to the front of a giant mansion
    Cassie: Subtle.
    A scream in the distance
    Cassie: Terrific.
  • In the first arc of Resurrection, Cassie is arguing with Laurie about an idea she got from Forensic Files. When urged to show the episode in question immediately, the scene instantly switches to them half-naked and having sex with the television on in the background.
• Girl of the Week: Laurie Peacetree for Cassie in the first arc of Resurrection.
• The Glasses Come Off: Cassie needed glasses as a kid... she apparently doesn't any more.
• A God Am I: Ourobouros.
• Go for the Eye: Lynn, the fake Samhain empowered by the Godbox, has one weakness — apparently the Godbox doesn't think invulnerability should extend to the eyes. Cassie obviously exploits this weakness.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Despite the obvious risks, slasher healing and resurrection ability constantly fascinates scientists who hope to tame it for medical purposes. It always, always, ends in a bloodbath.
• Gonk: In general, expect people to look really ugly in this series. Whilst Slashers especially are prone to this, even neutral or outright heroic characters can be pretty ugly. Vlad is a stellar example.
• Good is Not Nice: Cassie is out to help people, but she's extremely rude in the process. In The Crow: Hack/Slash, the evil Crow even accuses Cassie of deliberately using civilians as bait to find her Slasher victims, and Cassie admits that she didn't stop the drug addict witness from slipping out of her and Vlad's trailer to shoot up in the church because she didn't care — she just wrote her off as "just another junkie".
• Gorn: In one of the Love Bunny backups, the titular character even disparagingly calls it "gore pornography".
• Gory Discretion Shot: Uncommon, But present.
  • Slice Hard had a particularly cool one involving an X-ray machine when Ashley decapitates a security guard.
  • When Cassie executes the three remaining feral children in Little Children, the focus jumps out to the entire forest, with only the crack of the gunshots shown.
  • The focus is on Cassie's facial expression when Nathan obliterates the head of his wife's murderer with an electrified weed-whacker in The Coldest Dish.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Ashley Guthrie, being an Undead Child Slasher from a nice, respectable family, makes only "G-Rated" swears when he curses.
• Goth: Cassie and the SuicideGirls.
• Gotta Kill Them All: Why Cassie is Walking the Earth; to kill every single Slasher she can find. She eventually stops explicitly going after them when she settles down with Margaret and Sanny, letting others in her friend group do so. Even when she goes back into action, she's not as focused on that anymore.
• Grand Theft Me: Both Laura Lochs and D1ab0liq were capable of possessing people. Laura via Hollywood Voodoo and Black Magic, D1ab0liq via his Psycho Electro powers.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: Cassie utilizes alcohol bottles as improvised weapons on occasion, including in Girls Gone Dead and Closer.
• Groin Attack:
  • Vlad gets a knee to the balls in Slice Hard.
  • While held captive and tortured by Doctor Gross in Gross Anatomy, Cassie managed to kick him in the crotch. After overcoming the pain, he proceeds to yammer on about how targeting his balls represented her deep-seated hatred of her absent father.
  • Margaret falls victim to one of these courtesy of Gertrude in the Cat Fight in Mind Killer.
  • Cassie also falls victim to a crotch-kick in Murder Messiah.
  • Colin Beane is hit between the legs by Cassie's nail bat in The Good Son.
• Groupie Brigade: That turns into a lynch mob.
• Guilt by Coincidence: Cassie first met Vlad during a spate of slasher murders in Chicago, and since Vlad was living in the shadows at the time, is big, burly and... not a looker, she mistook him for the killer and attacked him.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: While Vlad slices and pulverizes, Cassie usually blows brains out.
• Happy Ending Override: At the beginning of Son of Samhain, Cassie has broken up with Georgia and gone back to a wandering and violent life, because she simply couldn't handle normality.
• Harmless Villain: Pooch (who pulled a Heel–Face Turn) and the Jersey Devil. Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter featured a so-called "secret society" of them.
• He Who Fights Monsters: At one of her lower moral points on account of My Greatest Failure, in Army of Darkness Vs. Hack/Slash, Cassie declares that Nietzche was too optimistic and that anybody who makes a career fighting monster was one in the first place.
• Heal It with Booze:
  • In Hack/Slash vs. Chucky, the eponymous killer doll suggests a "voodoo healing remedy" Laura used to deal with the pain of her heavily burned body: booze and painkillers. Vlad uses it due to the "Freaky Friday" Flip, and Cassie does later while being stitched up.
  • Laurie gets Cassie some alcohol to deal with the pain of having a fake vein inserted into her body in the first arc of Resurrection, but due to them being in an argument also wanted to give her a bad hangover with it in the process.
• Healing Factor: Almost all slashers have one, explaining their near-immortality.
  • Cassie herself gets a healing factor, courtesy of Samhain's blood. It only lasts from the end of Monster Baiting through Final before Cat and Pooch have to cure her to prevent her from becoming a homicidal maniac.
• Heel–Face Turn: Pooch, though he was pretty much an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain anyway.
• Hellhole Prison: Englund Correctional Facility in Resurrection, whose governors didn't even check the qualifications of the guy who they hired as a doctor and didn't respond in any way to him killing and turning large numbers of inmates.
• Heroic BSoD: Cassie, after watching her father die, and her mother re-re-die. According to Vlad, she just lays in the back of the van, not moving or cleaning up the blood on her clothes or even speaking or reacting to him at all, for fourteen hours straight. She does get in a hot tub at the hotel they stop at, but just sits there as the blood pools out around her, eyes creepily downcast.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Usually also counts as Redemption Equals Death.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Cassie has always feared becoming a slasher, just like her mother.
• Historical Domain Character: Sawney Beane, the Scottish Cannibal, becomes a creature like The Shadow over Innsmouth.
• Homeless Hero: Both Cassie and Vlad live in their car more often than not due to their Walking the Earth Perpetual Poverty. This only changes when Vlad dies and Cassie decides to retire to become a waitress and live with Margaret... until she leaves her, too and, once Vlad is resurrected, goes back to being homeless.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Being a take on the Slasher Movie type, there are many of these, and Cassie isn't exempt either.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: Sergeant Ryan Kramer from Land of Lost Toys was a slasher who became active every Memorial Day. Entry Wound involved every holiday-themed slasher waking up early, including a Sergeant Ryan Kramer, Jr.
• Hypocritical Humor: In Son of Samhain, Cassie tells Ocky, a little boy, to watch his mouth when he starts swearing, despite peppering curse words into her dialogue before and after.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Downplayed Trope. In My First Maniac, Kelsey calls Cassie cool after they escape from the cops coming to a night party at the Fig farm. Given Cassie grew up bullied for being poor and ugly and presumably had a Friendless Background, this leaves her overjoyed, and as she writes about it in her diary, she has her feet up swinging like a Smitten Teenage Girl.
  "Today, for the first time ever... someone said I was cool."
• I Can't Believe I'm Saying This: In Come Together, Cassie notes she didn't think she would ever say this, but that she attacked Vlad because she was "tripping balls".
• I Want My Mommy!: Ashley Guthrie cries for his mommy after he dies for the third time, as shown in Mind Killer. Considering he hated his actual mother, it's probably just a reflex.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: A variation in Sons of Man. Cassie justifies trusting Samhain somewhat as that if he wanted her dead, he could have let her die in Closer.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • The first asylum inmate Evil Ernie kills to "impress" Cassie says he was institutionalized because he ate people, claiming doing so let him "see God".
  • The Beane family say they need to eat human flesh to keep up their strength. It's unknown whether or not regular meat can do the trick ( seeing as Vlad seems to do just fine) or if this is just something that stuck with them due to Sawney Beane.
    • The Beanes seem to have been right. By the time Vlad meets them, he's deathly ill due to the lack of a "proper diet", and it is only the intervention of Dr. Vincent Morrow that allows him to Take a Third Option.
• I'm Going to Hell for This: Literally In the case of Six Sixx in Mind Killer. After bearing witness to the horror that is Cassie's life via the Dread Drinkers, he decides to free her of captivity and not take her to a Fate Worse than Death on Nef, realizing she is a good person and doesn't deserve that kind of suffering. Instead, he goes back with only part of his newest Deal with the Devil fulfilled.
  Six Sixx: You've got your personal hell... I've got mine.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Oroborous.
• Implacable Man: Most slashers.
• Immune to Bullets: Averted, surprisingly. Shoot a slasher enough times, and it stays down.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: As far as occasionally-jealous, basement-raised, monstrous part-demon serial-killer killers go, Vlad has some very strong shades of this. He always chooses the high road when he can.
• Intercontinuity Crossover:
  • According to Word of God, Seeley considers all well-known slasher franchises to be set in the same universe. Jason is shown in a flashback, and the Dread drinkers are just Dream demons given a different name by Jeffrey. In My First Maniac, Cassie's initial research into Slashers included reading about "a man who kills in dreams in Ohio", "a masked maniac who terrorizes a small town on Halloween", and "a camp plagued for thirty years by a psycho who won't die".
  • Re-Animator and Child's Play each get a crossover, with the latter even having Chucky directly mention Freddy, Jason, and Michael while declaring himself as better than any of them.
  • And the one-page dream project, Dexter vs. Jason vs. Hack/Slash.
  • The BUMPed arc is a crossover with BUMP, even facing that villain, Edgar Dill.
  • The most recent one had Cassie, after her second run of comics, team up with Ashley Williams.
  • There's also the three-part mini, with Hatchet.
  • Vampirella appeared in both a crossover miniseries, and, shortly afterwards, issues #8-11 of the main Resurrection series.
• Interrupted Suicide: After realizing she has taken on Samhain/Akakios's Healing Factor, Cassie tries to kill herself with a belt of dynamite to keep from becoming a Slasher. Vlad just stops her.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Evil Ernie, once he gets inside Cassie's head. Cassie, having very low self-confidence and no love life, is very disturbed by the fact that if anyone could both understand and love her, it's him.
• In the Blood: Early issues suggest that becoming a slasher can happen to anyone who is Axe-Crazy enough while alive, but it later turns out that slasherness is hereditary in anybody descended from the original members of the Black Lamps, thanks to the weird effects of the Black Ambrosia drug they abused. (Although since that was 2500 years in the past, the genetic taint has spread quite widely.)
• Innate Night Vision: According to Venus Twelve, the Hades variant of the Sons of Man had this feature as part of the Super Breeding Program. However, they never actually show up in the comic.
• Intoxication Ensues: In Double Date, the slasher arranges for the punch at a school dance to be dosed with ecstasy to make the teenagers (especially) horny, so he will have some 'sinners' to murder. Given the story was a parody of Archie Comics, the reactions are hilarious.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Delilah tells Jack Hack what he said about Slashers back to his face: when he looks at them, it makes him want to feel something good. Unfortunately, the speaker, being insane, doesn't understand that "seeing Slashers" and "feeling good" weren't meant to be part of the same thing.
  • First said when about to have sex for the first time with Samhain, then again before stabbing him repeatedly to death twelve issues later when he is Akakios.
    Cassie: You feel alive. Share it with me.
• Ironic Hell: Subverted in the Chucky crossover with Laura Loch's Hell House, where the assigned punishments were completely random. Played straight in the Shout at the Devil arc, when Six Sixx is sentenced to perform in a demonic dive for the rest of eternity.
• It's All My Fault: Gertrude's reaction to the deaths in Mind Killer, and not exactly without reason.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Cassie has a very hard time having people get close to her because of her status as the Serial-Killer Killer. It leads to her shutting down the first incarnation of Hack/Slash Inc. and breaking up with Margaret, though the latter she has trouble admitting to her face.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Cassie, most of the time.
• Jerkass: Kyle, also something of a Politically Incorrect Jerkass considering some of the stuff he says to and about Chris, mostly involving calling him gay or talking disparagingly about him being Asian.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Both Cassie and Vlad chew each other out over how their friendship actually works, Cassie gives Vlad an earful over his clear Clingy Jealous Guy attitude whenever she shows interest in someone, while Vlad does make a good point that when she becomes interested in someone, she basically all but ignores Vlad, prime example being Vlad getting brained with a birdbath because Cassie was almost constantly phoning Georgia and even dismissing that she was busy to Georgia, usually when she phones she is about to play a game or talk to Vlad, hurting his feelings, as unlike Cassie, Vlad has a very hard time making friends, due to his unfortunate appearance.
• Joker Immunity: A few slashers (notably Ashley Guthrie and Acid Angel) have reappeared after their apparent demise. Granted, it's kind of their thing that they can't stay dead easily.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Using slashers as Super Soldiers, and studying them in an attempt to attain immortality.
• Kid Detective: Double Feature had Cat Curio, who, for her troubles, got knifed and put in a coma for at least ten years.
• Killer Rabbit: Ashley Guthrie, when he was stuck possessing a teddy bear◊.
• Knight Templar Parent: Don't let Delilah Hack catch you mistreating Cassie. Seriously, don't.
• Last-Minute Hookup: Cassie and Margaret.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
  • A nameless Slasher is shown in a flashback about "Slashers started appearing more often in the 80's" in Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator, who wears a hockey mask.
  • In the Elvis Lives example, Word of God confirmed that, while he is never named on screen beyond being called a "king" and his outfit and mannerisms, the man who hired Six Sixx is "Elvis, except not in a way that could get us sued".
• Leet Lingo: One-shot villain D1ab0liq is a Psycho Electro misogynistic geek bad-guy with a 733t pseudonym.
• Legacy Character: Father Wrath II.
• Legion of Doom: Akakios manages to get a load of the more memorable slashers to team up for the final arc.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again:
  • Cassie's request for Vlad after being caught without a one-liner when being hit on by two teenage boys in Girls Gone Dead.
  • Played for Laughs when Pooch tells the story of birth on Nef after Chris finds out that Lisa is pregnant.
    Chris: Pooch?
    Pooch: Yes, Master?
    Chris: Don't ever tell me that story again.
  • In the last issue of Come Together, Cassie rips off her tattered shirt and gives Marshmallow Hell to Vlad while driving to snap him out of Acid Angel's mind control. When he comes to, she requests he pretend that never happened. He does bring it up at the end of Fame Monster, but she's more bemused than embarrassed.
• Let's Wait a While: After her First Kiss with Margaret in Closer, Cassie decides this when asked, as unlike during their time on Nef, they aren't in a hurry to lose their virginity to avoid a Virgin Sacrifice. Sadly, they break up shortly thereafter in Mind Killer, and lose their virginity in separate situations.
• Living Toys: Ashley Guthrie's entire shtick. Initially, he crossed this with Nightmare Weaver; he would invade the dreams of kids and then warp their favorite toys into nightmarish living versions of themselves that would then murder the kid, causing them to suffer a fatal aneurysm in the real world. After being killed by Cassie the first time, he becomes a physical Slasher again by possessing various toys.
• Lodged-Blade Recycling: In Sons of Man, Venus Twelve (later known as Ava) grievously injures Andrew Rodin by stabbing him in the throat with an arrow that is lodged in her arm, leaving it stuck in the throat.
• Loony Fan: The Sundermann brothers from Comic Book Carnage, and the Tin Woodsman from Over the Rainbow.
• Lost in the Maize: My First Maniac. Grinface turned Farmer Fig's cornfield into a deadly maze, full of traps and surrounded by barbed wire, for the purposes of his "game".
• Lovable Jock: Kelsey in My First Maniac. He's the most popular guy in school and a football star, but is very nice, even becoming one of Cassie's first friends.
• Luminescent Blush: Cassie has this at the end of Sons of Man while thinking on her Big Damn Kiss with Samhain, demonstrating her growing feelings for him.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Each type of power has particular uses for it that don't tend to overlap much or work in other ways. This is a major component in Foes and Fortunes, as Libby Lochs is Wrong Genre Savvy about it.
  Laura: Stupid Libby. She ruins everything she touches. She wanted to do "good" with a necromancy book. She tried to make lucky items for the dregs, the luckless losers like her. But necromancy isn't meant to bless items. To do so drags a spirit out of the afterlife and binds it to the object. A slave spirit that doesn't want to be there. When we raised Julian, we bonded him to the powers of death and black magic so that he would be at our beck and call. Julian serves death. He'll free any spirits imprisoned on this plane.
• Mama Bear:
  • Delilah Hack was a very dark one. When her daughter Cassie was bullied, she responded by murdering the bullies and serving them as food in the school cafeteria. Even the vestige of Delilah retains a murderous protectiveness for Cassie, to the point that Cassie's ultimate plan to defeat Ashley Guthrie is to lure him into her dreams, knowing that when her Flashback Nightmare happens, the dream remnant of Delilah will kill the dream-haunting Slasher to protect her.
  • Along with Delilah, there was Mother Leeds from The Living Corpse crossover.
  • By Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash, Cassie has become this about Sanny, but not to outright homocidal levels.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: In Over the Rainbow, Cassie deliberately mentions this trope in regards to the identity of her Disappeared Dad, and why she's relatively apathetic about looking for him, also partially in a Shout-Out to The Wizard of Oz, toward which she was traveling to a remake of.
• Man Bites Man:
  • In The Good Son, Mariantha, tied up and mutilated, rips out a distracted Shandy Beane's throat with her teeth.
  • Ocky bites Cassie's arm when she tries to get him out of trouble on their first meeting in Son of Samhain.
• Man on Fire:
  • Cassie sets Laura Lochs on fire with a flaming shot and candle in 'Girls Gone Dead.
  • Cassie kicks one of the feral girls into a fire in Little Children.
  • Cassie kicks Alice on to a campfire in Closer, distracting the other members of the Society of the Black Lamp with this. They put her out, but Samhain finishes the job with her Lamp, apparently a known ritual for the Society for those who fail.
• Mars Needs Women: The Lords of Nef can't create life... so they impregnate virgins taken from Earth.
• Marshmallow Hell:
  • Gertrude smothers Six Sixx in her breasts before vanishing him at the end of Shout at the Devil.
  • Cassie strips off her own shirt and shoved her bra-covered breasts in Vlad's face to snap him out of Hallucinations in Come Together... then requests Let Us Never Speak of This Again.
• Mauve Shirt: A number of characters, notably Jason from Land of Lost Toys, whose death even depressed the normally stoic Cassie.
• McNinja: Cassie faces one with Ash that's an "Arctic ninja commando".
• The Medic: Lisa, as much as a veterinarian can be.
• Meta Guy: Mary Shelley Lovecraft.
• Mind Rape: Done to Cassie by Doctor Gross, and done en masse by the Dread Drinkers in Mind Killer.
• Mission Control: The first incarnation of Hack/Slash Inc., also known as Chris and Lisa. They have contact with the Internet and the various people whom Cassie and Vlad have saved, and so draw attention to any rising Slasher cases.
• Mix-and-Match Man: Julian the Mosaic Man.
• Molotov Cocktail: In Hatchet/Slash, Cassie uses a Molotov cocktail to set fire to slasher Vincent Crowley in an attempt to Kill It with Fire.
• Moment Killer: Vlad, by accident, in the first issue of Final. See Not What It Looks Like.
• Monster and the Maiden: Cassie Hack is a Badass Normal Action Girl who fights and kills serial killers. Her partner, Vlad, is a superhumanly strong man who comes from a lineage of demon-human hybrids.
• Monster Clown: Mortimer Strick - "I'm going to make a balloon animal outta your esophagus!"
• Monster Misogyny: Most male slashers prefer female victims.
• Mook Maker: The Jersey Devil's Witch mother.
• Morality Pet: Vlad is this to Cassie.
• Motive Rant: Lots of the villains.
• Mrs. Robinson: Mrs. Miller, a near-victim of the Candlemas Murderer in Entry Wound, is in the middle of receiving oral sex from a teenaged boy while cheating on her husband when Cassie saves her.
• Muggles Do It Better: Turns out that modern scientific chemistry can beat Akakios's mystical alchemy, resulting in a depower of both Acid Angel and Akakios.
• Mundanger: The first ever villain we see Cassie and Vlad take down was the coach of a cheerleading camp who had been murdering campers. He appeared completely normal... aside from him wearing a catcher's mask while killing, for some reason. The second Father Wrath also turned out to be a completely human copycat when first encountered.
• Murder by Remote Control Vehicle: In the Blood Blower half of Double Feature, a dog-hater uses a remote-controlled snow blower to kill puppies, and later uses it in an attempt to murder Cassie and Lisa.
• Murder Into Malevolence: A basic part of Slashers. While they are rarely kind, and are often at least somewhat unstable, it takes being murdered for many to come back as Revenant Zombies with a bent toward a Serial Killer. This is an oversimplification. Instead, it's the Black Ambrosia residue in their bloodline that brings them back, and turns them toward being more malicious than most people in the first place.
• Musical Episode: Deadbeats! from Trailers Part 2.
• My Beloved Smother: Delilah Hack.
• My God, You Are Serious!: Cassie breaks down laughing as she hears about Mary Shelley Lovecraft's Meta Fiction Evil Plan. After enough ranting, Cassie realizes she's completely serious about all of it, and takes her seriously from then on.
• My Greatest Failure / I Let Gwen Stacy Die: As of Army of Darkness vs Hack/Slash, Vlad's death is this for Cassie.
• Nail 'Em: In Vs. Chucky, Chucky uses a nail gun to kill houngan Papa Sugar; deciding that it was easier to stick the needles straight into the victim rather than into a Voodoo Doll.
• Nasty Party: Laura Loch's plan in Girls Gone Dead.
• Neck Snap:
  • How Vlad kills the second Father Wrath in Double Date.
  • How Mary Shelley Lovecraft is defeated in the Crisis Crossover Another Side, Another Story in Entry Wound, ending the Boss Rush.
  • The Mosaic Man does Libby Loch's friend in this way in Foes and Fortunes.
  • How Vlad grants a Mercy Kill to Acid Angel's ex-lover.
• Never Sleep Again: Villain Ashley Guthrie initially had the ability to kill people in their dreams by twisting their dreams into deadly nightmares. He lost this power after physically incarnating.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In Tub Club, Cassie's decision to call Georgia/Margaret all of the time instead of spending time with Vlad leads to him wandering off on his own and being hurt when Emily Christy breaks a bird bath over his head. Cassie, feeling extremely guilty about this, demands (briefly) that Georgia never call her again unless it's a Slasher emergency.
  • In Monster Baiting, Cassie and Cat's quest with Samhain to find a cure for his bloodlust ends up turning him back into Akakios when the psychosaurs' Mind Rape removes the mental blocks placed by the witch so long ago. The overall effect is so disastrous that by the end, Cassie requests that Cat not thank her for saving her, since they didn't win.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • In Closer, the Society of the Black Lamp introduce themselves to Cassie by kidnapping her out of police custody on her way to jail before her trial, instead of letting her rot there. Some of them even mention that they should have done that instead. The result is that Samhain rescues her.
  • In a more literal example, the psychosaurs in Monster Baiting accidentally undo Akakios' brainwashing, leading to him returning to power.
• No Bisexuals: Averted. Hack/Slash actually has a small gay fan following due to Cassie briefly pursuing a relationship with a stripper named Margaret Crump. It caused them both a bit of soul-searching, but what's broken it off for the time being is Cassie's inability to deal with the notion that the slashers she hunts might show up and kill Margaret. Cassie would later have a deeply bizarre relationship with Samhain.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Fame Monster arc includes caricatures of Lady Gaga, the Kardashian sisters, and characters from Jersey Shore as victims. And a caricature of Bruno Mars as the slasher. In the final arc, Roderick Fetch is a caricature of Rupert Murdoch and the rock band Ig'nant Mime Squad are Insane Clown Posse.
  • Subverted with Comic Book Carnage, which sees a Slasher stalk Skottie Young, Robert Kirkman, Steve Niles and Messy Stench, and all but one are brutally murdered by him.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: In My First Maniac, Cassie gets brutally beaten by a Girl Posse who think she's a murderer, ending up with a nasty shiner and a bloody nose. The next day, Cassie baits the trio into following her and dishes out a beating of her own to the trio's leader. It's noteworthy that Cassie alone beat up the other girl even worse than the three were able to do to her.
• No Social Skills: Vlad was raised in isolation by a butcher, and it shows.
• Non-Protagonist Resolver: Occasionally, people who are not members of the Slasher slayer crew are the ones to solve Cassie's problems.
  • Samhain is the one to save Cassie's life in Closer, several arcs before he officially joined the group.
  • Six Sixx ends up being the one to save Cassie, Margaret, Vlad, and Gertrude in Mind Killer.
• Nostalgia Filter: Portrayed in canon.
• Not Enough to Bury: A common trait of Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday examples due to Cassie booby trapping their graves with dynamite. She even jokes that the remains of the Candlemas Murderer could be fit in a topper ware container in Entry Wound.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: In the first arc of Resurrection, Doctor Ezekiel Chase is a doctor... of philosophy. How that means he feels qualified to perform an autopsy on Cassie, who he administered a lethal injection to but didn't check is actually dead is best left for other minds.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • After interrogating Louis in a bathroom stall, Samhain walks out on his own. It's very clear that the other man assumes they were doing... something, and Samhain doesn't bother to dissuade that notion.
  • Inverted Trope. In the first issue of Final, Cassie is seen about to have a one-night stand with a boy. In any other situation in the comic, this would be a Honey Trap for Vlad to come in and kill the Slasher of the issue. This time, however, she really did just meet a hot guy on the Internet and want to have sex, and is annoyed at his intervention.
• The Nothing After Death: Vlad claims to have experienced this after he's resurrected, and uses it to persuade Cassie not to kill Dr. Chase.
• Not Quite Dead: They're Slasher villains.
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: Cassie's dream battle with Ashley Guthrie starts out with one of these.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In The Case of the the Killer and the Questing King, being attacked by the Catalogue Killer and subsequently losing track of Brendon Joyce leads Cat to stop her Motor Mouth, call Vlad and Cassie, and shout the latter down when told they have more important things to do than one of her "little mysteries." The response silences them instantly for how surprising it is:
  Cassie: Screw your little mysteries, Cat. We're on the trail of a real sicko up here. He's been slaughtering and gutting nurses.
  Cat: A slasher grabbed my friend, too, Miss Self-Important! This friend of mine — he's the king of spies, and he trusted me like I was his kid. You two know what it's like to help your father, right?!
  Cassie and Vlad: Stunned Silence
• Offscreen Teleportation: They're Slasher villains.
• Off with His Head!: Often.
• Oh, Crap!: Various instances.
  • Cassie completely panics when she realizes that not only is Ashley Guthrie around to let the Slashers loose in Slice Hard, but that he knows exactly where she is due to a Psychic Link. Her immediate response is not an attempt to kill him, but Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
  • The best probably being when Cassie goes to tell the authorities all about slashers, realizing too late she's wanted as a suspect in homicide cases all over the country in Closer.
    Cassie: ... Fuck me running...
  • In My First Maniac, Cassie's reaction to seeing that her False Friend is about to hit her with a car when she's about to take out the Monster of the Week.
    Cassie: ... Shitballs.
  • Then there is Cassie realizing that Bomb Queen has come to her universe in Interdimensional Women's Prison Breakout.
    Cassie: Aw no. No no no.
• Old Superhero: Alan Knight, the Late Knight himself, is actually the second Sleepy, having long since retired. He takes up his mentor's outfit for a bit in Super Sidekick Sleepover Slaughter.
• One-Winged Angel: Ms. America near the end of Tub Club, when she became Ourobouros.
• Open Heart Dentistry: Cassie and Vlad usually go to their friend Lisa - who is a veterinary - to get patched up. In her defense, Lisa usually comments that she is not qualified to work on humans, but Cassie and Vlad prefer not to have their injuries treated in hospital.
• Opening Narration:

  "Cassie Hack is the lone survivor of an attack by a slasher called the Lunch Lady... a slasher that happened to be her mother! Now, she travels the world with her monstrous partner and friend Vlad, hunting down and destroying slashers wherever they find them!"

• Orifice Invasion: The Dread Drinkers (heavily implied to be Dream Demons) possess their host by taking root in their eyes, and induce nightmares on victims by grabbing onto theirs.
• Origins Issue: My First Maniac for Cassie, and Me Without You for Vlad.
• Our Slashers Are Different: Slashers are a specific kind of monster that are driven to kill in life and rise as immortal zombies after death. Later, a convoluted cosmology involving cults and black magic emerges about their origin that is later mocked in-universe.
• Papa Wolf: A dark and twisted variant can be seen in Hack/Slash Meets Zombies vs. Cheerleaders in the form of Coach Campbell. Before the start of the issue, his eldest son turns into a zombie after taking Ceutotech's HGX in an effort to become a better footballer, then infects his brothers and mother. Campbell responds by locking them up in his office at the school, then starts murdering students and feeding them to his undead family in hopes that this will sustain them until he can find a cure.
• Parental Abandonment: Jack Hack left his wife and daughter.
• Pass the Popcorn: Played for Drama. Courtney of Hatchet/Slash uses the VIP booth in the Hyperdome to watch her former friends be slaughtered by Victor Crowley. On realizing it, Cassie is horrified.
  Cassie: Holy shit. What the fuck is wrong with you?
• Perpetual Poverty: Due to their nomadic lifestyle, Cassie and Vlad are pretty much constantly strapped for cash, and Cassie tends to talk about how they're using their money a lot.
• Pet the Dog: In the ending of Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator, Dr. West makes a serious attempt to save Jack from dying, and even provides Cassie with a reanimation serum to resurrect the deceased purely so that the recipient does not have to live without the victim.
• Pineapple Surprise: In Interdimensional Women's Prison Breakout, Samhain does this to Bomb Queen: as she slaps a paralysis disk on his back, he pulls out the pins of all the grenades on her vest.
• Pixellation: The effect of the censorship curse on the town of Wertham when Cassie flashes her breasts.
• Planet Heck: Nef, which is not so much literally a Physical Hell as it is Another Dimension with demons who live in it. The characters who know about it still call it Hell, but there isn't really any evidence that people who die go there, though.
• Pocket Protector: In Fame Monster, Vlad is saved from a magical blast fired by an assassin when it strikes the machete he is carying in the pocket of his Badass Longcoat.
• Police Are Useless and usually fodder.
• Practically Joker: April Fool from Interdimensional Women's Prison Breakout serves as a Gender Flip Race Lift of Joker. Unfortunately for her, Cassie doesn't have a no-kill code, so she's hanged as soon as she's caught, which is within the course of the arc.
• Preemptive "Shut Up": An occasional source of comedy, such as anticipating a Shout-Out.
• Professor Guinea Pig: To stop herself from dying, Emily Christy used her experimental slasher serum on herself in Slice Hard.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Very narrowly averted. After Vlad dies, Cassie's Roaring Rampage of Revenge takes her beyond the point of reason. She very nearly becomes a living Slasher and kills Cat after killing Akakios, but Pooch injects the panacea antidote into her behind just in time, as Cat was aware it was only a matter of time before Cassie's aggression peaked and she decided to kill everyone in sight.
• Psycho Electro: D1ab0liq.
• Psycho Serum:
  • Hate Juice, the fluid made from Slashers that can drive users insane.
  • Furthermore, its original form, Black Ambrosia, which can made Slashers upon the user's death of that of their descendants. Taking just a bit of it through a Superhuman Transfusion made Bomb Queen into an Omnicidal Maniac that she herself was afraid of.
  • A Subverted Trope with Senex-Rev 5, the serum made by Dr. Herbert West combining his own reagent with some kind of substance in Slashers. It doesn't seem to have any negative side effects on its own, and actually seems capable of restoring stability in Slashers... but requires enough doses to make the effects stick, otherwise they degrade back to their psychopathy.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Bobby Brunswick from Euthanized, the Sundermann brothers from Comic Book Carnage, Edgar from BUMPed.
• Public Domain Character: Nightmare and Sleepy, a pair of Golden Age superheroes, appear in flashback, and a few other Golden Age heroes are obliquely mentioned in the same story. Ultimately, a Legacy Character to Sleepy becomes a recurring character, and Fantomah, another example, becomes one as well.
• Pumpkin Person: Samhain, a potentially-redeemable slasher with a Halloween theme who wears a pumpkin-like mask.
• The Purge: Akakios's slaughter of the Black Lamp leadership, and then his all-out attack on Cassie's friends and their friends and relatives.
• Put on a Bus: quite a few people, notably Georgia, though The Bus Came Back. Her girlfriend Jessie, though? Put on a permanent one at the end, since she can't handle the stress of what the experience with the Society of the Black Lamp did to her.
• Raising the Steaks: Early villain Bobby Brunswick had the ability to reanimate animals from the pet cemetery where he was buried. A slasher shark also shows up in Trailers.
• Race Lift: Minor villain April Fool is a black female Expy of The Joker from another dimension. Without the Immunity though: she gets killed off very fast because Cassie, unlike certain people, doesn't have any moral qualms about killing human villains. She gets hanged as soon as she is caught.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: In-universe; Cassie derides a bunch of schlock monster movies as having really crappy monster effects in Monster Baiting. Turns out the monsters were all real.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Officer Hazelwood in Mind Killer. While initially a Hero Antagonist, he merely is taking what he sees as proper precautions against an infamous fugitive and serial killer (Cassie). Once he realizes what actually is going on, he helps with a coverup of the Slasher threat and gets Cassie's criminal record cleared. Cassie doesn't even seem to hold any of it against him.
• Recycled In Space: One of the "possible" stories in Trailers had the government sending Cassie and Vlad into space to kill slashers who had taken over a space station. The narration even notes that this is the kind of thing horror franchises do when they've run out of ideas.
• Redemption Failure: Samhain is hit with this pretty hard when trying to save Cassie in South America. The attempt results in him being Mind Raped back into Akakios permanently.
• Refuge in Audacity: Summoned when Six Sixx, when asked about the source of his success, gleefully yells "I MADE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL!". He did, but the other man just says "yeah, whatever", given that's apparently the kind of thing his type say.
• Resurrected Murderer: The comic is based around Slasher Movie style undead serial killers, or "slashers", with the initial implication that you can come back as a slasher just through being deranged and evil enough. It is eventually revealed that the potential to become a slasher is hereditary in any descendant of the members of the original Classical Greek-era Black Lamp cult, due to the effects on the gene line of the "black ambrosia" drug that they abused.
• Revenant Zombie: All the fully-empowered slashers are examples of this. A Government Conspiracy investigating them even refers to them as "revenants" or "revs".
• Revenge by Proxy: Common for certain Slashers, most famously in Vs. Chucky, Murder Messiah, and Final. The prevalence of this trope is a large reason why Cassie pushes almost everyone in her life away.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman: In Hackoween (a Crossover with Halloween Man), Cassie grabs an entertainment magazine off a newsstand and discovers that on Halloween Man's world, Rob Zombie is a big band leader.
• Right Behind Me: Played for Laughs in issue 2 of Resurrection when Cassie and Laurie go to investigate a prison from which The Undead are coming. The former is in the middle of coming up with a battle plan when she sees the latter's worried expression and hears a growl behind her.
  Cassie: That thing is right fucking behind me, isn't it?
• Room Full of Crazy: Ashley Guthrie's mother, after being institutionalized.
• Rogues Gallery: Cassie usually tends to put people down, but a couple of Slashers have come back to haunt her more than once (that's their thing to begin with), notably Jeffrey Sixx Six, the Mosaic Man, the Acid Angel, Ashley Guthrie, and Mary Shelley Lovecraft.
• Rule of Cool
• Rule of Scary: The entire concept of the series.
• Sacrificial Lion: Vlad dies in the finale of the main series, which takes Cassie over the edge and nearly turns her into a Slasher for real.
• Samus Is a Girl: The second Samhain.
• Scars Are Forever: Cassie loses the two smallest toes on her right foot to her first encounter with Doctor Gross, and they never come back, resulting in her bandaging up that foot and covering it in a boot whenever possible.
• School for Scheming: Camp Indigo River in the first Resurrection arc, which pretended to be training children how to survive supernatural attack, but was actually part of a plot to determine whether child slashers would be less insane and more controllable.
• Sealed Good in a Can: Fantomah. However, Good Is Not Soft.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: Cassie's mother Delilah Hack - a.k.a. the Lunch Lady - served up the flesh of the students she murdered as Mystery Meat in the school cafeteria.
• Self-Made Orphan: Courtney in Hatchet/Slash. After ten years of plotting, she murdered her parents so she could inherit their fortune and use it to implement her plan for revenge on the the 'friends' who fled and left her in the hands of a slasher.
• Serial Killer: The mortal villains would probably be this, if they didn't have some kind of edge (magic, demonic empowerment, etc.). On rare occasions, this is all that the villains really are, such as in the Batman Cold Open to Euthanized, or in Double Date.
• Serial-Killer Killer: Cassie is a former Final Girl who hunts slashers. A radio show Cassie and Vlad occasionally listen to even nicknamed her "The S.K.K."
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: In Army of Darkness Vs. Hack/Slash, Cassie tries to use the Necronomicon's time-travel abilities to prevent Vlad's death.
• Sex Signals Death: Slashers are generally attracted to teenagers engaging in "deviant behavior" — there's easily a dozen ready examples of teens getting offed as they're about to have sex. Naturally, this is because of the trope's ubiquity in 80's slasher movies. This turns out to be a plot point, as Akakios originally created the Slashers, or "Paladins" as he called them, to destroy what he called the "Children of Dionysus", those dedicated to sin and debauchery, in the belief that they would cause an apocalypse.
• Shapeshifting Seducer: Mary Shelley Lovecraft tries to coerce Cassie into joining her with this, shapeshifting into Margaret and Samhain.
• Shoot the Builder: Courtney did this by proxy to the construction workers who helped get Victor Crowley into the Hyperdome, by way of letting Crowley kill them.
• Shoot the Dog:
  • Cassie killing the remaining feral children at the end of Little Children. Also qualifies for Dirty Business (see above).
  • Cassie killing Fractal in Murder/Suicide to allow her to perform Taking You with Me to D1ab0liq.
• Shoot the Rope: A variation in Closer, where Samhain throws his knife to cut the rope holding back Cassie's legs to help her free herself and avoid becoming a Human Sacrifice, or at least long enough for him to come save her personally.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Libby Loch's subplot in Murder Messiah, which ends with her being literally shot in the face. Subverted Trope: It turns out that she put a message in the form of a spell she put on the sheriff, which is transposed on to Ava... clueing in the heroes to the main Evil Plan. Ultimately, Libby's intervention saved the entire world.
• Shout-Out:
  • A number to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, amongst other sources.
  • Mary Shelley Lovecraft, not only being a shout out unto herself, mentions that Cassie is a compelling character, though not as loved as the Summers girl
    • An earlier reference to Buffy can be found in the Shout-Out-filled Comic Book Carnage. When Cassie explains who she is, someone tells her that if she "wants to play Buffy" the roleplaying room is upstairs.
  • When joking about one of Linda Marsh's cases at the end of Tub Club, Cassie says "He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that pesky nurse".
  • Obligatory crossover art.
  • Cassie's father uses the alias Gordon Stewart in the crossover with Re-Animator, which was directed by Stuart Gordon.
  • A quote from the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred is used at the start of the Re-Animator crossover, in reference to how Herbert West actually originated in the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • The town of Haverhill, a parody of Riverdale from Archie Comics, takes its name from Haverhill, Massachusetts, the childhood home of Bob Montana, one of the creators of Archie.
  • Cassie sums up her situation in Closer and Mind Killer with a paraphrased reference to The Godfather Part III: "I tried to quit, but they just keep pulling me back in."
  • Cassie sarcastically notes in Sons of Man that the Black Lamp Society were trying to sacrifice her to Zuul.
  • In the opening of Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash, Margaret is first seen laughing at Cassie's Mr. Creosote impression.
  • The place names in Resurrection are almost all Shout Outs, including "Englund Prison" (to Robert Englund, who played slasher Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series), Mount Myers (after Michael Myers, the slasher in the Halloween films), and Mount Gordon (after Stuart Gordon, director and writer on the Re-Animator films).
  • In Resurrection Volume 1, Cassie tries to put down Laurie Peacetree gently, given she's 25 and Laurie is 19.
    Cassie: No offense, but I need to get involved with a nineteen-year-old this summer like I need to chug a coffee cup full of oven cleaner.
    Laurie: Heh, cool. Heathers. I love that movie.
    Cassie: Oh Goddamnit.
• Shovel Strike: In Entry Wound, Vlad attempts to take down the Candlemas Killer with a shovel. He fails.
• Shower Scene: A lot of them, especially for Cassie. Of particular note is "Psyche: No Vacancy" from Trailers Part 2, which is a Whole-Plot Reference to the Signature Scene of Psycho if Cassie had been there instead of Marion Crane.
• Show Some Leg: Land of Lost Toys has this as a Subverted Trope:
  Nurse: You! This is a high security area of the hospital! How'd you get in here?!
  Cassie: I showed the guy at the door a li'l leg... oh, and I paid him 150 bucks.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Subverted in the Chucky crossover, when Laura expected Cassie to pull something during her rant and kicks her in the face.
• Single Tear:
  • Drake's reaction to finding Fractal's corpse in Murder/Suicide.
  • Cassie's reaction to Vlad's Anguished Declaration of Love in Sons of Man.
  • Cassie sheds one when she shoots Akakios to get him off of Cat in the finale of Monster Baiting, due to realizing that her lover was truly a monster.
  • When Cassie inadvertently ends up back in time and watches Vlad die a second time she's gobsmacked and sheds one. It quickly turns into outright sobbing, though.
• Sinister Scythe: Used by The Waking Man. Julian the Mosaic Man also used a spiky scythe... thing.
• Sinister Minister: Father Wrath, who even appeared to be a Fred Phelps-Captain Ersatz when he was mortal.
• Slashed Throat: Samhain deals with the pilgrim-like Society of the Black Lamp member this way in Closer.
• Slasher Smile: A lot of slashers are pretty smiley. Most notably Grinface, who wears a mask with a perpetual ear-to-ear smile on it.
• Sociopathic Soldier: Wadzinsky from Tub Club had shades of this, including shooting an innocent young woman and Pistol-Whipping Vlad with no concern whatsoever.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Mary Shelley Lovecraft:
  [sigh] Though your tale is more complex than some, you still exist in a simple world of revenge, titillation and death. Allow me to try again, in language more befitting your author. Hi, I'm Mary. I'm Frankenstein, Cthulhu and Godzilla all rolled into one. I'm going to fuck up your world, bitch, and then fictional characters are gonna hop out of books and take over.
• Squee: Pretty much Cassie's initial reaction to seeing Captain Ersatz of He-Man and Lion-O fighting in Land of Lost Toys.
• Stab the Salad: When Cassie comes to see Samhain in Interdimensional Women's Prison Breakout after he ran away from Eminence following Ava's horror at him due to realizing (but not saying) he is Akakios, he raises his knife, ready to attack... and stabs into a wall next to her head before giving her a Big Damn Kiss.
• Stab the Scorpion: Cassie to Cat in Monster Baiting, when she, realizing that Samhain has had a permanent Face–Heel Turn, shoots him right past Cat to get him off of her and pull her up from a possible fall to her death.
  Cassie: Cat... duck.
• Staking the Loved One: Cassie is forced to kill her mother... twice.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: According to the Psychofiles, the Tin Woodsman's real name is Kent Wood.
• Storming the Castle: In the Final Battle of the main series, Cassie and a cadre of Final Girls against the Society of the Black Lamp.
• Strawman Political: Laura Lochs and both Father Wraths.
• Stress Vomit: In the second issue of Resurrection, Cassie vomits instantly on the ground when she sees Ezekiel Chase has Vlad's corpse.
• Stripperiffic: As an indy comic themed around Slashers, a genre known for including plenty of titilating beauties as well as abundant gory deaths, Cassie is very prone to running around in clothing that is sexy, but doesn't really cover much. Specific clothing tropes she tends to evoke include Black Bra and Panties, Collared by Fashion, Hell-Bent for Leather, Loincloth, Mini Dress Of Power, and Stocking Filler.
• Super Breeding Program: The eponymous project in the Sons of Man arc in a nutshell, which evidently did not require consent of the ones breeding.
  Venus Twelve: The Society has long sponsored human breeding experiments. Their earliest attempts were in pursuit of more intelligent and "morally" prone individuals to "purify" their ranks for the coming apocalypse. To them, the experiments were no more inhumane than breeding for a better lap dog or a meatier cow. Over a thousand years of controlled mating, they created several specialized human breeds. They called these creatures the "Sons of Man." The Poseidon was able to hold its breath and swim unnaturally well. The Hades could see in the dark. But their most successful creations were the Artemis, bred as hunters and killers, and the Venus, bred as companions and sex slaves. [...] There are breeding and nurturing sites throughout the world, but Rodin founded this location to develop his own special projects. Here he guided the eugenics program to new heights, forging a stronger, more lethal breed of Artemis, and "special order" Venus models, customized to the buyer's desires.
• Super Window Jump: Cassie jumps out of a high window in a hotel and lands in the pool below to escape from Father Wrath in their first encounter in Girls Gone Dead.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Cassie might be an Action Girl, but she doesn't have any superhuman abilities usually. As a result, she routinely runs into trouble when she is facing a threat she can't handle physically, and can be caught off guard by as mundane a threat as the police or a group of thuggish cultists, and she can get knocked unconscious with one good solid hit.
  • Although Cassie seems to have achieved an Earn Your Happy Ending at the end of the initial run, she never went into therapy for her many mental problems, including being a Shell-Shocked Veteran with a side of being a literal Sociopathic Hero. As such, she breaks up with Margaret due to being unable to escape the nightmares of her life as a horror hunter.
  • At the end of Resurrection Vol. 1, Cassie is surprised that Laurie wants nothing more to do with her - killing someone's mother, even if she was a villain plotting multiple murder, will do that.
• Sword over Head: Cassie takes this position with her bat after her Big Damn Kiss to Samhain in Sons of Man, unsure if he's broken out of being Brainwashed and Crazy. It takes him showing he is back to his Warrior Poet self to get her to stop.
  Cassie: Are you back to Zen-Man, or is Slasher-Sam still in the house? Talk to me, motherfucker! Do I have to smash the pumpkin?!
• Symbol Swearing: Parodied in Resurrection #12, when the magic spell on the town of Wertham causes all the characters' swearing to come out as Symbol Swears. Cassie even notes that she can somehow tell that it's the sound of a string of random punctuation.
• Take That!:
  • In Tub Club, when undercover, Cassie notes of Elizabeth Bathory that before reading about her, she "thought Anne Coulter was a sick bitch".
  • In the Slasher Psychofiles, Cassie notes this of Six Sixx:
    Cassie: As bad as this guy sucked, I'd still rather hear Acid Washed then anything by Avril Lavigne...
  • In Sons of Man, Louis calls the Black Lamp Society "crazier than Scientologists".
  • In The Living Corpse crossover, Cassie, finding the shack supposedly inhabited by The Jersey Devil, says "I swear to God, if there's only some guy in there standing in the corner, I want my money back."
  • Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash has one to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9's coining of "Zompire".
    Cassie: And I fought some kind of a zombie demon hybrid which according to Ash isn't called a Zemon or a Dombie.
  • In Resurrection #12, the town under a "censorship" spell that bans all sorts of "bad taste" activities is named "Wertham", after Fredric Wertham, notorious post-WWII anti-comic campaigner.
• Tamer and Chaster: Despite the on-panel sex scenes, Resurrection has a noticeable reduction in fanservice compared to the original series. It's not so much that Cassie dresses less revealingly as that the angles and framing of panels have much less overt Male Gaze and she, having grown up somewhat, doesn't deal as much with horny teenagers.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Akakios' plan in Final involves spiking "Stab" soda with Black Ambrosia to create a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Team Pet: Pooch.
• Tempting Fate: In The Good Son:
  Cassie: I'm just going to go talk to her. What's the worst that could happen?
  Cut to the front of a giant mansion
  Cassie: Subtle.
  A scream in the distance
  Cassie: Terrific. "What's the worst that could happen?" She said.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • A Running Gag as a Subverted Trope is Vlad saying something that would cause this effect... but having no idea he did due to his limited grasp on language.
  • Played for Laughs in Entry Wound when an exhausted Cassie complains to the Candlemas Murderer while saving a boy in the midst of oral sex to an older woman.
    Cassie: Come on! I've had two hours of sleep in three days. Just go down. But, I mean, not like that guy...
• There Are No Therapists: Well, there was one... who was evil and had no skin. And mixed his sessions with torture and murder.
• This Is a Drill: Cassie uses a power drill to kill the slasher Tin Woodsman in Over the Rainbow.
• This Is the Part Where...:
  • Used in the Batman Cold Open of Euthanized. Curiously, the situation mentioned is never one that actually comes up in the comic again, at least not where Cassie or Vlad take precautions against it.
    Cassie: This is the part where they suddenly jump up and attack one final time.
    Beat
    Cassie: Or not. Killer, yes. Slasher, no.
  • Again in Land of Lost Toys.
    Cassie: This is the part where I usually wake up screaming.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works:
  • Cassie throws her bat to distract a soldier in Tub Club long enough to grab his gun to hold up his superior.
  • Samhain often opts to throw his knife in combat or other situations.
  • Subverted Trope in Entry Wound when an over-caffeinated and over-tired Vlad throws a shovel at the Candlemas Murderer and misses.
  • Cassie shuts up the Big Bad in Final with a hatchet thrown into his shoulder.
  • In the first arc of Resurrection, Laurie is adept enough with her fire axe that she can throw it straight into a zombie's head and avoid Cassie in front of it.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Cassie and Margaret's relationship.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The mysterious book that Laura found in the basement of a Tennessee that allowed her raise and control Father Wrath, and contained a host of other spells as well.
• Torture Porn: Doctor Gross' M.O. He even lampshades it, saying that the days of slash and stab are over with and it's all about really messed up torture now.
• Torture Technician: Doctor Gross.
• Trade Snark: Cassie uses this to lampshade all the Slasher Movie cliches in the Campfire Stories part of Trailers, Part 2:

  Cassie: A Hatchet Man^TM and a Haunted Cabin^TM? This camp has everything!

• Trigger Phrase: The Society of the Black Lamp has one they use for their "Paladins", possibly caused by the Alchemy Is Magic nature of Slashers. However, it's quite long, so they sometimes can't get it all out before they are attacked instead.
  "In the name of the dark flame that led you away from death's embrace, I command you..."
• True Companions: Hack/Slash Inc in both of its incarnations, which grows into a surrogate family for Cassie and Vlad. The group fluctuates, but the general membership seems to be Cassie Hack, Vlad, Chris Krank, Lisa Elsten, Margaret Crump, Gertrude Hall, Pooch, Ava, Daisy Black, Anjelica Castellini, and Cat Curio. Even after the main series, Cassie keeps in contact with some members to either help them or ask for help.
• Two-Timer Date: In Double Date, Father Wrath II takes advantage of some Archie Comics style hijinks involving a two-timer date to can access to a school date in search of victims.
• Typo on the Cover: The collected edition of Army Of Darkness Vs. Hack/Slash has "Hack/Skash" on the spine.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: A running gag in the Vampirella crossovers, in which Vampirella finds Vlad mysteriously attractive.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension:
  • Vlad has feelings for Cassie. This increases after he has had "the sex" (With someone else).
  • Cassie has a fair bit of this with Samhain, to the point of having an erotic dream about him that leaves her Caught with Their Pants Down. Resolved in issue 13 of the second ongoing with her losing her virginity to him.
• Unsuspectingly Soused: In Girls Gone Dead, one of the party-goers feeds Cassie a Long Island Iced Tea, telling her that is nonalcoholic. As a result, she gets plastered and winds up flirting and dancing with boys, making out with a girl, and is less than great shape for the final showdown when the slasher shows up.
• Vader Breath: Vlad's distinctive "Hurr". While he tends to have it even without his mask on, Cassie takes it up briefly while wearing the mask in her Roaring Rampage of Revenge to kill Akakios at the end of Final.
• Vapor Wear: The "camp counselor" outfit Cassie is put in by the Society of the Black Lamp in Closer that she wears through Mind Killer very clearly has no bra. A Justified Trope, since the Society explicitly made it to be as slutty as possible as part of their Slasher bait ritual.
• Victim of the Week
• Vigilante Man: Cassie and Vlad are this, Nathan from The Coldest Dish. Evil Ernie tried becoming one, but didn't make a real effort to not kill random bystanders.
• Villain Team-Up:
  • Slice Hard. The slashers cooperate surprisingly well... except for X-O.
  • Ashley and Six Sixx in Mind Killer.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Six Sixx and Acid Washed are sacrificing virgins to the Lords of Nef as part of Sixx's Deal with the Devil.
• Virgin-Shaming: Played with in the Shout at the Devil story arc. Hulking and deformed slasher-slayer Vlad has unsurprisingly never "made the sex" with a women before. Unfortunately for him the villain of the story arc has kidnapped his partner/best friend Cassie, and has a special mind control spell that only works on virgins. So a good deal of the arc is Vlad trying to find a woman who will sleep with him so he can go and rescue his friend.
• Waif-Fu: Usually averted, surprisingly.
• Walking the Earth: Or America, anyway.
• We Are Not Going Through That Again: In Murder/Suicide, Cassie tells Vlad not to touch the possessed Salome, since she doesn't want a "Chucky situation" (where she had to fight his body while someone else was in possession of it) again.
• We Can Rule Together: Mary Shelley Lovecraft tried pulling this in Something's Fishy, using a Shapeshifting Seducer gambit on Cassie. She's interrupted before we can figure out if it was going to work or not.
• Weak, but Skilled: Cassie has all of the strength of a seventeen-to-twenties teenager/young woman, and nothing else beyond her guns or other armaments. She makes up for it with skill in facing down slashers, along with appropriate backup.
• Weak to Magic: Nef Black Magic can cause permanent harm to slashers. Also counts as Wrong Context Magic given the Nef demons are from Another Dimension of Planet Heck.
• Weapon Specialization: As Slashers are often heavily associated with iconic "signature weapons", many Slashers in the Hack/Slash continuity naturally have particularly favorite weapons. But, to further their similarities, comic protagonists Vlad and Cassie both have their signature weapons too. Vlad favors meat cleavers, which he learned to use under his adoptive father, a Czechoslovakian butcher, whilst Cassie favors a nail-studded baseball bat. They can use other weapons, but these are always their go-to choices if they have the option.
• Well, This Is Not That Trope:
  • While watching Jack Hack pass away in Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator, Vlad notes that this is where the dying would say some last words, but that this is not one of the shows he watches where that happens.
  • Entry Wound opens up with a huge battle between superheroes and Mary Shelley Lovecraft, telling about the epic battle in play... then shifts to Cassie and Vlad hunting holiday slashers while saying this isn't that story.
• Wham Episode:
  • Cassie and Vlad meet the Re-Animator: The return of Jack Hack and Delilah Hack, and definitive turn from Nominal Hero to Unscrupulous Hero.
  • Sons of Man: The description of the true origin of the Slashers.
  • Murder Messiah: Cassie decides to dissolve Hack Slash Inc. and the Evil Plan and true identity of Akakios are revealed.
  • Monster Baiting: Cassie loses her virginity and develops a Healing Factor, and Akakios is reborn in the modern day, showing that Slashers are effectively incurable.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Cassie calls out Gertrude for not destroying the Nef guitar in Mind Killer.
  • Margaret's extensive problems with Cassie basically involve her anger over Cassie not only rejecting her, but refusing to admit she loves her at all. This distinction and their extended Unresolved Sexual Tension continues from Sons of Man through Murder Messiah.
  • Cassie calls out Cat (and by extension Chris) for re-starting Hack Slash Inc. in Interdimensional Women's Prison Breakout.
  • Vlad calls out Cassie on her hypocrisy regarding Samhain multiple times, especially considering she Would Hurt a Child if they were a Slasher, but likes to keep Samhain close.
  • Cassie's conscience does this to herself in Son of Samhain over leaving her happy life with Georgia.
  • Laurie's relationship with Cassie ends in Resurrection Vol. 1 with her calling out Cassie on killing her mother.
• When Trees Attack: BUMPed features Golems made of the souls of murdered people who are implanted into wooden bodies, giving this impression.
• Who You Gonna Call?: Cassie and Vlad, usually.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Psyche" from Trailers Part 2 is essentially what would have happened if the infamous Shower Scene in Psycho had Marion Crane replaced with Cassie, with Vlad as support.
• Wicked Witch: Alice, one of the member's of the Society of the Black Lamp, wears a costume to this effect in the first encounter Cassie has with them. Cassie disparagingly calls her "Sabrina".
• Wild Child: Feral children were used for "Rev-D" experiments in Little Children; it causes them to regress to an extremely feral state, eventually killing their surrogate father and forming an effective wolfpack.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Pretty much all slashers, due to their brains being screwed up. Samhain appears to be an exception, though only due to conditioning, and Ms. America had moments of lucidity, as she wasn't a "pure" slasher.
• With My Hands Tied: Cassie ends up being pretty effective in her first fight with the Society of the Black Lamp in Closer despite being Bound and Gagged... until the adrenaline wears off and she passes out from the drugs still in her system.
• Women's Mysteries: Cassie covers up an After Action Patch Up with Venus Twelve in a clothing store fitting room as "women's issues" in the closing scenes of Sons of Man.
• Wunza Plot:
  • Odd couple Cassie and Vlad fight supernatural murder.
  • Cat and Dog Investigations. Cat Curio is an autistic young woman, and Pooch is a hellhound, and they investigate mysteries together.
• Xanatos Gambit: The Dread Drinkers' plan; they let Six Sixx go when Ashley ended up in their prison dimension, sensing Ashley was a dreamwalker whose abilities, combined with Six Sixx's, could allow them to escape the dimension "the One" exiled them to aeons ago. Once out, they intended to use Ashley's abilities to spread across the world, and then the universe. If Ashley didn't work with Six Sixx as planed, then she's stuck in a prison dimension with things that take pleasure in Mind Rape.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Cassie tracks down her long-lost father, then he gets killed by her mother.
  • Cassie gets friends in My First Maniac... then one is revealed to be the crazy girlfriend of the slasher, who kills the other.
• You Have Failed Me: The Society of the Black Lamp has this practice, which apparently involves setting ablaze the one who failed with their own lamp, as shown in Closer.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In Sons of Man, Andrew Rodin uses Louis as a test for the Artemis units after he led Samhain to Rodin's island.
• You No Take Candle: Vlad, since the butcher who raised him had a fairly loose grasp of English. He gradually learns how to speak somewhat normally.
• Your Head Asplode: The Trailers story Dead Celebrities.
• Youthful Freckles: Both Libby Lochs and Monica share this trait.
• Zombie Advocate: Sarah wants to bring back Grinface's mind in My First Maniac, and tries to enlist Cassie's help. Unfortunately, the advocate misunderstands how exactly Slashers work, so that kind of thing is completely unrealistic.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Akakios's planned mass slasher conversion in the Final arc.

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