Get this: a prequel. Well, okay, those happen all the time I guess? But get this: I didn’t actually buy My First Maniac from Amazon. See, local comic store that buys failed local comics stores was having a massive superhero comics overstock sale, and I went in on 80% off day, where I picked up a couple of the more recent Powers, Kick-Ass in hardcover, not Red Son because I tragically failed to find it, and also a Cable collection from the ’80s that my boss apologized about later because he hadn’t been serious about me getting it. How was I supposed to know?! He’s been reading this stuff way longer than me, yo. Oh, and since all of that was still only like $15, I picked up the newest Hack/Slash volume that I had not known existed, since some online company failed to put it in my gold box or even my daily “you should buy this!” emails. Yay for supporting local businesses, right?

Anyway, Cassandra Hack is back — all the way back, in fact, to her first adventures, before she even went out on her own to hunt supernatural baddies or met up with that cool sweetheart of a deformed guy whose name I cannot currently remember but that possibly starts with a V? See, her mom was the lunch lady, and after having seen her daughter Cassie take too much abuse at the hands of the other kids, said lunch lady started slaughtering the school kids and serving them up in the next day’s lunch line. Which, okay, I’m sure that happens on a more-or-less monthly basis somewhere in the world, but after she got caught and committed a particularly gruesome suicide rather than go to jail, her revenant corpse came back and started slaughtering kids at Cassie’s new school, to protect her all over again. And now that she knows about the world that lies behind the world, it’s time to cowboy up and do something about it.

If, you know, she can just find another example of the genre, and prove that her mother wasn’t just a fluke in existence and ability-to-be-killed-by-her alike, and hold onto her angst hard enough to not get distracted by offers of friendship, and find sufficiently goth-revealing clothing to create a legend with. Spoiler alert: she somehow manages that last one, despite the odds.