I posted this image to Instagram this morning with the caption "Remember that time that Neil Gaiman, Alice Cooper, and Michael Zulli teamed up and made a comic together?"
I love that this is a thing that exists. It's even got a Dave McKean cover!
What we've got here is actually a cool little artifact that's one of the interesting places that music and comics crossover. The Last Temptation is both the title of this comic and of the album by Alice Cooper that was released around the same time. Gaiman and Cooper had worked on the story together. I think perhaps this gives us a nice idea of just how big Neil Gaiman was in some circles with the enormous success of The Sandman. It also, in that case, gives us a good idea of how good, and how influential, The Sandman really was.
The story, thus far, seems to be a fairly straightforward morality play told through a creepy theatre revue. Cooper appears as the host, guiding a young man on a creepy and thoroughly transparent metaphorical journey through his future. I don't want to sound like I'm being harsh, but the story is not that complex. And stories like this one, which are some of the oldest stories that we have, don't have to be. A moral tale is there specifically to teach us how to be moral people. Such stories can't really be that dense, or no one would ever read them, nor ever learn. I often think that this is one of the things traditional academics miss about the pop culture they often dismiss. Or maybe they don't. I really have to stop caring about what traditional academics would think. Fuck 'em.
Zulli's art is just brilliant, of course, though one or two panels struck me as a bit stilted and out of place. I wonder if it's harder to compose something like this when you have to be aware that one of the characters who appears on just about every page of the book has to look like someone from real life. And the likeness to Cooper is pretty amazing. Unsurprising, really.
It's a three-part story, so I'll fill you in on how things go tomorrow.
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