Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Comic Book Returns!
I am rare among my friends in that instead of 40-some DVDs, I only own about four, and I think the only one that I actually bought for myself is Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Although the first Bill and Ted movie came out when I was in kindergarten, I never saw either of the films until I was in college.
Now they may not be “great” films, and certainly aren’t high art, but Bill and Ted represent a sort of laid-back lunacy that has gained them something of a cult following. Their world doesn’t make a lick of sense, but that hardly matters to them. Bill and Ted have survived traveling across time and to hell and back not by brains or brawn, but sheer goodwill alone. And maybe a little help from Rufus. Excellent, dudes!
The first film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was a relative hit at the box office, grossing over 40 million dollars in 1989. This was when Keanu Reeves was still an unknown and comedian George Carlin was the only famous person associated with the film!
When the second movie, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey came out in 1991, Marvel Comics hired Evan Dorkin to write and pencil the comic book adaptation. Dorkin hadn’t even seen the first film, but he accepted the gig and went on to write and draw the continuing series that spun out of it.
The book was called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Comic and although it wasn’t a commercial hit, it had a unique, madcap sense of humor and established a loyal and supportive fan base. More impressive, even, it was nominated for an Eisner Award, the comic book equivalent of the Oscars, for best humor series! As far as critical acclaim goes, that’s something the Bill and Ted movies couldn’t even dream of.
It didn’t make much of a difference for our excellent heroes, though – after twelve issues the series was cancelled. Dorkin went on to become one of the most venerated creators in indie comics for original work like Dork! and Milk and Cheese, and also wrote a number of episodes for Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and the Superman animated series.
I was very intrigued when I found that Dorkin, a most triumphant cartoonist, had once written for my favorite time-traveling duo, and when I realized that the Bill and Ted series was Dorkin’s only long-form work in comics, I knew I had to read it.
The series died in 1992, and Marvel never had a reason to reprint it, so it looked as if Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Comic would be forever languishing in dusty back-issue boxes of random comics stores across the country. That is until 2004 when Slave Labor Publishing, which publishes most of Dorkin’s solo material, was able to secure the rights to the old comics.
Bill and Ted comics returned from limbo in a two-volume collection of the Bogus Journey adaptation and all of Dorkin’s stories from the on-going series. Bodacious! The reprints are formatted a little differently than the originals, however – they’re digest-sized and black-and-white. This is understandable, since color printing would probably have been to expensive, and the art has been re-colored in tones of gray, which really looks great. Dorkin characters are full of energy and he packs the art with lots of background gags and zany characters.
The stories are true to the premise of the films. Bill and Ted are a couple of dim, but happy-go-lucky guys in an utterly fantastic world. Dorkin uses nearly all of the characters from the original films and introduces original characters as well.
A couple of stand-out stories include Death trying to get a new job so that he can pay back Bill and Ted the money he lost gambling with them, and Bill and Ted trying to prevent Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated, only to later realize that doing so may seriously screw up the rest of time!
Some of the more action-oriented storylines (there aren’t many of them) can be a bit tiresome after a while, but for the most part the comics maintain the good-natured absurdity which made the films so much fun.
I would actually say that these comics are just as enjoyable as the films, if not more-so. It’s doubtful that there will ever be a Bill and Ted 3 (and with the actors now in their 40s, does anyone really think that would be a good idea?), but since the comics continue their adventures past the final frame of the second film, I would say that they’re a most-excellent substitute.
