Zenescope - Omnibusted #64: Hunters - The Shadowlands

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

This is just a fleeting memory and a supposition on my part, but I think the creative team behind the Unleashed event were Supernatural fans because it (and this Hunters Tie-In miniseries in particular) were released in 2013, the same year Season Eight (which dealt with the ancient monster realm of Purgatory) finished airing.

Unleashed Tie-In

Hunters: The Shadowlands

The awesome Volume cover you see here is also the B Cover for Part One, by Paolo Siquiera and Sean Ellery. Interestingly enough (for the purposes of incentivizing people to buy and read every series so they give Zenescope their money and don't miss any of the story), the A Cover of Part One connects with the Part One A Covers for Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves, and Demons to make a massive banner poster (that I couldn't find online or figure out how to make with the digital versions I have access to) by Anthony Spay and Ivan Nunes, and was used as the cover for Unleashed Volume Two. The Table Of Contents background is the A Cover for Part Five, also by Siquiera and Ellery. Pat Shand co-wrote the story (as is the case with the Unleashed event as a whole, but writing credit for this miniseries goes to Raven Gregory for the first three parts here.

Following directly (or however adverbs work when time does not) from The Game, Hunters: The Shadowlands opens on Roman Asher the Werewolf Hunter as he fights to survive on his own according to the title for roughly (very, very roughly) fifteen years of eating monster meat, talking to himself (or maybe not?), not shaving, and learning magic from that not-himself, unheard voice he's been talking to. Uh-oh....

And to top it off, time is so strange in the Shadowlands (or maybe something is messing with him?) that the fifteen years he was there on his own took place before he arrived, as he eventually sees Sela, Helsing, Masumi, and Elijah crash down in the distance. Like, they look like meteors, land like meteors, and deliver the exact kind of groan-worthy, cliché dialogue and narration you'd expect from superheroes who entered a strange world as magical meteors.

Unfortunately, no sooner do the remaining quartet of Hunters arrive than their numbers are montaged in half by monster attacks and natural hazards in places that were probably named during a Dungeons & Dragons campaign at Zenescope HQ.

The two that are left alive (except the others will be totally fine later somehow) are Sela and Helsing, who witness an all-out, feral war between monsters while we are introduced to two, more important, sentient, and focused villains: Samira (self-proclaimed Queen Of Vampires with an existential crisis because she doesn't have a soul but is a religious zealot for the god of monsters, which is way more interesting conceptually than what I remember the execution being) and Ravenous (the literal first Werewolf, so I guess we can thank/blame him in the long run for what Britney has been through). They're searching the Shadowlands (which, the characters are drawn and colored just fine, but the scenery is gorgeous for a monster-infested hellscape) for the aforementioned monster-god, for the expected, vengeful exile reasons.

As I suspected (in large part because I've read this before), Elijah is fine, fist-fighting Lovecraftian fish and finding common ground with a dragon (which is a suggestion that the ancient heroes who stopped the draconian holocaust of Myst had access to the Shadowlands), and Masumi somehow found herself talking to yokai in an endless forest (which led to the awakening of her Demon-sealing swords, particularly an as-yet-unnamed Demon who may have killed Masumi's twin sister, Akiko, and likes to remind Masumi that she should feel guilt for being an assassin). So, with barely any narrative tension, the group (minus Roman, though they happen to be ambushed by a bug monster who knows where to find him, so that doesn't take long to change) are back together again.

The bug monster has friends that send the Hunters plummeting into an underground ambush, while Roman (whose other defining trait is being a racist asshole) leaves them to die and returns to his warded desert cabin because he's kind of addicted to his mysterious voice companion (whom I'm calling Vampire Horatio because although the voice's speech bubbles have no tails to indicate their source, they're most often associated with a Vampire skull). Roman also gets a quick flashback where Vampire Horatio teaches him to use magic by finding a source of innocence (a Werewolf cub) in the Shadowlands.

In the present (?—relative to the miniseries), Samira makes contact with her god (who has the same polygonal, pale green speech bubbles and jagged font as the Being...and is revealed later to be the Being) and is instructed to bring him a source of innocence (a young religious woman who was recently sired as a Vampire) as a sacrifice. Could the Being somehow be sending the same instructions to Roman and Samira simultaneously across different time frames?

Whatever the case may be, Roman comes back to save Sela, Masumi, Helsing, and Elijah (a.k.a. "Professor," "Sweet & Sour," "Poppet," and "Boy," because Roman Asher has the same initials as "Racist Asshole") from the bug monsters. Roman's nicknames and Southern hospitality aside, the writing has gotten better since the "that just happened" cringe the first issue gave us.

And between the Hunters getting back together and the Being, Samira, and Ravenous seeking...help...from Prometheus (yes, the liver-eaten fire-bringer of Greek mythology himself is in the Shadowlands instead of Tartarus here, though Pandora's Box, which was previously suggested to be a gateway to the Shadowlands, would still be in Tartarus at this time) to unite the warring monster tribes for an invasion of the Nexus, we get...another Roman flashback; yay.

Interlude

Roman Asher & the Night Wolves

Aside from being a sick name for a Halloween-themed country-metal band, this is a flashback to Roman's childhood, when he was lazy and didn't believe in fairy tales until the day he ditched fence duty to look for food in the woods with his sister, and had to listen and hold his tongue while his entire village was slaughtered by Werewolves and his sister was abducted and turned. This set him on his current path, until later complacency led him to fall in love and start a family (who were slaughtered one night by his turned sister). We and his four present companions are supposed to eat this bullshit as the reason he never gets close to anyone and was willing to let them die, but to me the story read as his inaction being the cause of his problems. Thank you, Liesel Van Helsing, for threatening to crush his testicles into an allergen-free nut butter alternative. I'm scared and a little turned on, and you're my new favorite character.

For such a long, dialogue-heavy chapter, not much gets said or done here. The monsters are ready for war when one of the bugs warns the Being about the Hunters (which, he's had free, interdimensional Netflix in his head for an eternity of solitude and can dismember a god with his bare hands, so he's not worried about five humans), which spooks Samira and she has the Being's oracle (her own mentor) do...something to protect him before disposing of the only witness and evidence (except the Being already totally knows, probably, and will sit on the information until the plot requires her death). Otherwise, Roman plans to take Vampire Horatio with him when they escape, Liesel reveals to the audience that she's kind of a Sela fangirl because of the inspirational speeches, Masumi and Elijah might be a thing, and Elijah frees that chained-up dragon he had a moment with earlier (possible Chekov's dragon for the finale?). Great little Shandian moments here (this is the first part written by Pat Shand beyond story contribution credit), but very few and we don't know what they mean just yet.

After using one of the bug monsters to dig to the middle of the battlefield (those guys are super handy and they talk like Gollum, so I don't mind that they basically drove the entire plot), the Hunters all but dominate the fight with the lesser monsters while Sela (on Helsing's insistence and amidst some fleeting doubt from Masumi) futilely engages with the Being to claim Prometheus' essence (a Gold orb like what Shang had) and return to the Nexus. But he's too OP and decides that because he knows her future, it'd be more fun to take her back to Earth with him so she can suffer while he Ascends. Yes, we're teasing the sequel miniseries already. And never mind that part from The Game where he thought Sela was still trapped in the Shadowlands (and even if we grant some grace to the Chad-abbed monster-god by saying he meant Myst or the Shoe, he's still wrong, not to mention he walked the Dark One before he kidnapped Cindy, at which point he knew there were two Guardians Of the Nexus; maybe it's one of those "god who sees everything gets the order wrong because he can't remember everything" scenarios, but not even an army of man-faced bug monsters can dig a plot hole that big). The other big reveal is that Samira was the voice of Vampire Horatio the entire time, and Roman is going to turn heel later so she and the Being can "evolve him past his pain."

No dragon to save the day like I thought, the skull reveal happened sooner than I remember (probably because twists like that hit better in publication order than canon order), there was little narrative tension as to whether the Hunters would survive, and a great deal of the banter was cringe (particularly with Roman, but we're not supposed to like him, anyway). But the action was cool enough, the characters I liked, I really liked (and I know they'll only get better with time), and what mystery there was sent me on a journey both times I read it because the hints and herrings were so compelling despite their simplicity.

Stay Tuned for a classic Kurosawa sequel on Friday and Zenescope's first official Avengers-style crossover next Wednesday, and as always, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (you haven't yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read because it costs a lot of money to look this cheap, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

15

Omnibuster,

Out.