Article Database

A Tempting Trade Paperback

Comic book stories can have some surprising inspirations. Bored guys draw costumed turtles on pizza boxes and history is made. High-school friends transform a fanzine villain into one the the world's best-known heroic icons. A concept album becomes a surreal comic book fantasy album with Bradburyesque overtones.

Missed out on the last one? Don't fret: Dark Horse is about to remedy that with a trade paperback of one of the most unusual Neil Gaiman projects in his comic book career: The Last Temptation. And it all began with a phone call...

"I got a phone call one day," Gaiman told Dark Horse's Shawna Ervin-Gore. "It was one of those incredibly simple things that appear from time to time. The phone rang and a voice said 'Hello, I'm from Epic Records in New York, and I have an artist who is a fan of yours who wants to make a concept album.' And I said, 'And...?' And he said, 'and he wondered if you could come up with a concept.' So I said, 'Well, who is it?' because the only people I could think of on Epic Records were Barbara Streisand and Michael Jackson, neither whom I actually wanted to work with... And he said Alice Cooper, which really pleased me. I mean, that was the thing that immediately made me think, 'Ooh, this might really be fun!'

"I flew out and spent the day with Alice just talking about stories, you know, the classic 'Welcome To My Nightmare' stuff. We talked about things that we thought would go well with a project like this, and I mentioned that if I was going to do anything with an Alice character, I wanted to put him back in the top hat and tails — Alice as a showman of the dark carnival theatre." And thus was born the concept for The Last Temptation: The Theatre of the Real, run by a mysterious Showman whose displays are guaranteed to disturb each and every member of the audience... including a young boy, Steven, who attends the show on a dare, not knowing what to expect.

According to Gaiman, the Theatre of the Real "came out of discussions of the nature of theater: What is scary? And we both came to the conclusion that what's really scary now is the world out there. Actually, there is nothing you can do on film that is scarier than the news. There is nothing you can do in your imagination that is weirder or more terrifying than the basest, real fears of growing up. That was the start of it... What wound up happening was that I wrote the story for Alice to write the songs from, and then Alice wrote the songs from it and discovered at the end of the day that we actually have more story than we could fit onto one album." And thus The Last Temptation comic was born, with all its Ray Bradbury overtones. "I thought it might be fun to do something that felt like classic period October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes Bradbury," Gaiman told CSN. "Mostly, I think I just learned how hard it is to do that kind of thing."

"We hadn't planned it to be a comic," Gaiman explained, "and then we had just one of those weird little thing that just occasionally happens when everybody is suddenly interested in one thing or another. In 1993 or 94, everybody was starting line or talking about it, and when it became known that I worked with Alice on a project, we had — quite literally — a trail of people beating on our doors."

In a short time, the project ended up at Marvel Comics, where it was the most successful of Marvel's short-lived Marvel Music projects. And unlike most of Gaiman's other comic works, the book wasn't collected in trade paperback for several years, until Dark Horse secured the rights to make the project available once again.

This isn't just another version of Marvel's book, however. Instead, Dark Horse is reproducing Michael Zulli's detailed, moody, evocative art for the series in sepia-tone ink on cream paper to make every detail of Zulli's duotone work crisp and clear.

"Michael had been doing a lot of work at that time in zipatone, which game his art a real unique, dark look, and I loved it. Nobody had ever really seen it... We never found a method of coloring that actually worked with zipatone, that really enhanced it. I mean, my second colorist for the series was Bernie Mireault, who is one of the best in the business. But even he never really worked with the art needed. There was a sort of delicacy to the art that sort of got lost." Gaiman added that the sepia-on-cream version "is what Michael Zulli wanted, and it's closest to the original artwork, which is amazing."

The Last Temptation, a 104-page trade paperback priced at $9.95, is scheduled for November 15th release. And Gaiman is already working on his next Dark Horse project as well, a dark romance with painted art by John Bolton that's tentatively slated for 2001 release.

Originally appeared in Comic Shop News issue 698, October 2000