Things You Might Enjoy, If You Enjoy This Sort Of Thing--Episode Two

The Last Temptation
Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli
based on a story by Neil Gaiman and Alice Cooper

I found this a couple of days ago, at the same store where I found, to my sorrow, the Essential Dazzler. And, appropriately enough to the story's content, I didn't find it in the main room of the comic shop. No, I found it in the basement, in a mildly creepy little room filled with boxes of back issues and ancient model kits and a lit glass case full of outdated collectibles. According to Amazon it's still in print, but on the "Other Books by Neil Gaiman" list in the back of my copy, it mentions American Gods as "coming Summer 2001." It cost me ten dollars plus tax, and possibly a little bit of my soul, though I can't really judge that at the moment.

Anyway, I bought it, and then later when my boyfriend and I were driving to GameStop, he said to me, "So, you bought an Alice Cooper comic?" Not really with derision--we both know that Neil Gaiman's a great author regardless, and Alice Cooper is actually pretty cool--but with curiousity. Because of course there's this lovely tradition of rocker vanity projects, like...well, for example, any comic starring the members of Kiss. So I was mildly apprehensive, but not too much.

And it's a great story.

I mean, it's not the best I've read. Certainly not the best work of Neil Gaiman's that I've read; it's a bit too straightforward for that. But it's a really cool comic to have. It's about a boy named Steven, who's scared of lots of things, and who meets a Showman who runs a theatre and looks a lot like Alice Cooper. The Showman gives him a free ticket to the theatre, and shows him some rather terrifying things, and then makes him an enticing offer, one that could change his life.

Join up. Be part of the show. Be young forever. Everyone wants that. Right?

I will not provide details.

It's beautifully written, and I imagine it's a great companion to the album, which I haven't heard, although now I'd really like to. Steven's a likable kid. And besides the writing, it's also beautifully drawn--by Michael Zulli, in fact, one of my favorite comics artists because he makes everything beautiful, even zombies. Everything's lovely, and a few panels in particular were really weirdly compelling. My copy, at least, has this odd brownish tint instead of straight black and white, which is interesting, but I don't know whether it's deliberate or a consequence of aging slowly in a dark basement. And the lettering is by Todd Klein, who did a lot of the lettering on Sandman, so even that's cool.

The Last Temptation is a comic worth finding, particularly if you can find it in some weird place like I did. I'm not saying you should hunt it down with a crazy passion, but if you come across it, pick it up and read at least a few pages. Drop the ten bucks for a copy; it's worth at least that much. It's not a complicated story. It probably won't shock you that much. But it is really good.

What Is The Point Of Dazzler?

The Dark Phoenix Saga
Chris Claremont

Possible spoilers

One thing I enjoyed about reading Dark Phoenix was the chance to see the origins of two of my favorite X-Men characters. These are Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost--Kitty I like because I feel like I can relate to her, just a bit. Emma's cool because...well, she's intelligent, sarcastic, and generally in control of herself, she's a psychic, and she's super hot.

Emma particularly has been a constant in most of the X-Men comics I've read. She's a central character in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, which is the first X-Men series I ever read. She's similarly important in Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, which I read after Astonishing even though it came first. And now I get to see her way early on.

Kitty, too--not so much in New X-Men, but she's a member of the main team in Astonishing, and she's smart and interesting and has a really cool power. Whedon even references the events of her introduction in Dark Phoenix. She's neat. There's a point to her.

However, Emma and Kitty aren't the only characters introduced in Dark Phoenix Saga. There's also Dazzler. She's a disco queen.

Why, oh gods, why is there a disco queen?

If you haven't heard of her before, or read Dark Phoenix Saga, you may not know of her. She's an aspiring singer trying to break into the disco scene. She wears a skintight silver jumpsuit and high heels made of disco. Her power is to create lots of bright lights very suddenly. She mainly uses it in her act, but she can also give people seizures or make them go blind.

Seizures. Disco. What the hell, people.

See, it's similar to part of my problem with Jean Grey. I think it would be possible to do interesting things with a power like that, but mainly as she's written she's just irritating. And the other day, when I found a copy of (le sigh) the Essential Dazzler, I was told by my boyfriend that her solo comic mainly just followed her attempts to start up a singing career. But, apparently, she has also done some superheroing, also solo.

Now, my problem with that is, how do you make a power like hers useful in a superhero context without backup? Bright lights can be useful, but they're not exactly subtle; it'd make infiltrating easy, and even with seizures and blindness and everything, it's not a terribly helpful combat power. From what I've seen in Dark Phoenix, she's not very good at hand-to-hand fighting, either.

So what is the point of her? Hearing about someone's futile grabs at a singing career is dull. She's not a good solo fighter. She has awful taste in clothing, so she's not even fun to look at.

Also, she's a disco queen. Some references to current popular culture I expect in any comic set in modern times. But the whole "disco queen" thing just dates it. I know, I know, nothing ages worse than science fiction, but that doesn't prevent my mind from imploding.

Who knows? Someone out there might be a big Dazzler fan, and I won't judge you if you are. But I just can't see the point.