So, on this night of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go gump in the gight, let's take a moment to examine, from a safe distance, the spookiest, weirdest,
scariest comic book
that Marvel Comics has ever published!
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Okay, now that we've seen
that, let's look at a comic book about rock 'n' roller
Alice Cooper.
Advertised heavily when it was published in '79,
Marvel Premiere #50 starred, like most Marvel Comics, a real-life personality from whom Marvel licensed the likeness and personality to create all-new tales. (Not unlike the Fantastic Four's real-life tales dictated directly to Marv Wolfman during the period.) It was even featured in that month's Marvel
Bullpen Bulletins, ensuring that readers of everything from
Daredevil to
Conan and
Fun and Games to
Machine Man was clued in that America's Clown Prince of Rock now starred in his own comic book! So distressing was this news to Elvis Presley, founder of American rock music, that he died two years previously.
Thus was born
Marvel Premiere (aka "Find someplace to plug those inventory stories!") #50...Alice Cooper's
"From the Inside," based on his groundbreaking 1978 album of the same name,
that based on his voluntary stay inside a New York City mental institution for treatment of alcohol abuse. (Just say "no," Alice!)
The songs are about the persons Alice actually met in the asylum, and so is the comic book, although...not unlike the Thing's poker night...certain details have been...
exaggerated for dramatic effect. Alice's frequent attempts to escape the ayslum are thwarted by the cruelly seductive Nurse Rozetta and the crazed Doctor Fingeroth.
Panels from Marvel Premiere #50 (October 1979), script by Alice Cooper, Jim Salicrup, Roger Stern, and Ed Hannigan; pencils by Tom Sutton, inks by Terry Austin, colors by Marie Severin, letters by Tom Orzechowski
Alice's adventures in wonderland are punctuated by the philosophical questions anybody in such an institution faces. Who am I? Where am I? And where's my snake? Accompanied by a cast of characters that could have jumped right out of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Alice is right up against the standard Yossarian problem (and they really oughta number that one): if you're crazy enough to want to get out, you must be
sane!
At the time, there was nothing like this in the big two mainstream comics: well, maybe
Howard the Duck approached "From the Inside"'s manic social satire and Marvel's misdirected underground
Comix Book attempted to reach a more adult audience, but with no superheroes and no comics battles,
Marvel Premiere was clearly the oddball comic out on the drugstore rack that month. It resembles the early issues of
MAD more than it does its contemporary '79 books like
Amazing Spider-Man or
Iron Man.
But just how
did the greatest threat to America's youth wind up in a mental institution? Flashback to a happier time of concerts, touring on the road, and giant on-stage snakes:
Suffering from exhaustion, Alice decides to check himself into a spa for relaxation and recovery, but is mistaken for a similar-named mental patient on his way to the mental institution. I woulda said 'nuthouse" but thats no longer politically correct, so I won't mention tha...oh, whoops.
And yep: that's
Car 54, Where Are You?'s Officers Toody and Mulroon, picking up the patient. With Tom Sutton pencilling and Terry Austin inking, you know you're in for a ton of pop culture references and background hijinks.
I'm blogging most of these panels as large as I can, but it's really worth hunting out a back issue of the book to see the insane level of detail in the comic. Here, newly admitted Alice (shaven and shorn) is introduced to the characters that will populate his comic, his album, and his nightmares.
And if you have Terry Austin on inks, you
know you're gonna get Popeye and Company in the background:
As a
different Alice was once confronted with:
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
Alice's patented escape plans go oft awry:
Like other great Coopers of our time (James Fenimore, Agent Dale, Winnie, and Mini), Alice cannot be daunted in his plot to go over the wall. Or, actually,
over the page...dropping an escape cord from the bottom of one page to the top of the next:
Alice recovers his beloved snake Veronica (she even gets her own song on the album!), and hits the road to find America. Hey, wait, that's a
Paul Simon song! I call no way!
...only to come smack up against Alex Cooper, the lunatic who switched places with him in the first place, in the middle of a gubernatorial run. While Alice is trying to figger out why it's called "gubanatorial" and not "governatorial," he's recaptured and dragged back to the asylum, but not without a little political satire that's as apt today as it was in the late seventies.
"We can't have any loonies mucking up the political system!"
Just like all comic books, there's an illusion of change but at the end things are pretty much at the status quo all over again. Our intrepid comic book hero is back in the bin, but at least reunited with his beloved Veronica.
"We both been put in cages / We got our shots and tags / I got my sweatin' fist to shake / She's got her tail to wag."
But the final question is...
...who's more crazy...the man in an insane asylum...
...or
the readers in there with him?!?
A few months later, the tear-stained letters poured into Marvel Central. Did the readers approve? Did the readers hate it? Did the readers
go insane?!?
So, what's the verdict, Marvel? Should
Alice Cooper become a regular Marvel monthly comic book? Preferably teaming-up regularly with the Hulk? "We're liable to have some purely astonishing news before you'd even begin to suspect."
And sure enough, a mere
fifteen years later, Marvel published another Alice Cooper comic book.
Marvel did their absolute best to make
Alice Cooper: The Last Temptation (based on his then-newest album) look as much like the Dream King of the Distinguished Competition that they hired its writer, cover artist, and an interior cover artist from that series. And things were
never the same at Marvel Comics!
Panels from Alice Cooper: The Last Temptation #1 (May 1994), script by Neil Gaiman, pencils and inks by Michael Zulli, colors by John Kalisz, letters by Todd Klein
At least until the miniseries ended two months later. Alice hasn't been seen in a Marvel comic book since then. But let me point out that in an age after
Fear Itself and a time of
Shattered Heroes, who could lead Earth-616 out of its doom and gloom better than Mister
Vincent Furnier Alice Cooper, huh?
Hey, it worked for those dire, dreary, and dismal
Muppets, didn't it?
Happy Halloween from the inside, from me and
a guy named Alice!
I love "behind the scenes" documents and back-up info of how the Marvel Universe works, which may explain why I have every copy of all forty-seven editions of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. But I'm still not buying that theory that Scott Summers' head is a gateway to a red energy dimension. So I'm loving the back-up documents showing the breakdown of the new X-Teams (altho, guys? Putting the word "Extinction" in your team classification is just asking for dramatic irony). I especially loved the brochure of Wolverine's newly rebranded Jean Grey School for Higher Living and Occasional Resurrection that appeared in this week's Wolverine and the X-Men #1. ComicsAlliance has the online exclusive on this so I've reproduced it to the right so small you can't actually read it. Frustrated? Why, just click on the picture and you can zip over to ComicsAlliance and see it in all its embiggened glory there. See: everybody wins!
