The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2091: Puma Blues #3, December 1986

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The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1607 - 1608: Alice Cooper - The Last Temptation #2 - 3, August, December 1994

Our morality play ends as all morality plays do, with the protagonist having learned something that may not have made him happier, but that certainly made him wiser. The Showman is revealed to be a tempter, not necessarily The Devil, but a serpent, so make your own conclusions.

I am curious now about the Alice Cooper album that accompanied the series. I'll have to have a look next time I'm at the used CD place. Yep. I'm that kind of a dinosaur. I've liked, but not loved, Alice Cooper for a long while now. One of my treasured possessions is an original vinyl of his album From the Inside, on which each song is about an inmate in an asylum. The album features little cardboard doors to open behind which we have glimpses into the inmates' world. In retrospect, the album is definitely not doing any favours for the treatment or perception of people with mental health issues. It's more of a concept album version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (the book, not the film), but with much less depth. Which is not meant as a disparagement, merely an acknowledgement of Alice Cooper's place in the canon of popular culture. He's more entertainer than philosopher, I think.

The end of the story has piqued in me a curiosity. In proper horror-villain fashion, the Showman fades away into the mist in the last few panels, promising to return one day and claim our hero's soul. My curiosity is when did our villains start returning like this? Does it go as far back as our early myths? Does Loki slink away, promising to return in the original Norse epics? Or is this a more recent phenomena, spurred by the increasing paranoia of society, or, more likely, by a view of history that shows us that our problems always come back and rear their ugly heads. We must simply have the courage to not let our worse selves win.

That got deep. Neil Gaiman fans will like this comic. Alice Cooper fans will like this comic.

"Did I tell that you'll be going crazy tomorrow?"

Other things you might like reading:

More thoughts on music and comics: A Different Kind of Album

Another really obscure Neil Gaiman comic: The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 251: Elric #0 - One Life, 1996

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1606: Alice Cooper - The Last Temptation #1, May 1994

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.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 729: The Puma Blues #22, 1989

This is a very cool comic. There's a definite impetus of resistance going on in it, very much focussed on the environment, and given that it's a 27 year old comic, some of the ideas and subjects brought up in it are really very contemporary. The back matter includes political cartoons about the denial of climate change, zine ads about resistant action, and a call from Amnesty International to abolish a death penalty that is used primarily against the most vulnerable members of society. It is an unabashedly, vocally resistant comic.

And as if that wasn't awesome enough, it features stunning (and I mean absolutely stunning) artwork by Michael Zulli. His nature scenes are on par with Masashi Tanaka's amazing work on Gon, though skewing more to the ruggedness of the American landscape, rather than Tanaka's often lush jungle and forest settings. Let's be honest: anything Michael Zulli does is going to be pretty breathtaking, but I think this might be one of my favourite things I've seen by him.

And still there's more: The Puma Blues, this issue at least, falls into a very small category of comics I've read, one that includes such strange works as Martin Vaugh-James' The Cage and Rick Veitch's Can't Get No, comics that move fairly explicitly into the realm of the poetic rather than the prosaic. There's a link between words and images, but it often veers off into the metaphoric rather than the literal, forcing a much closer and slower reading experience. Such works can be frustrating (I have, indeed, heard much hatred for The Cage), but ultimately, if one gives them the time to work both independently and concurrently on the verbal and visual, one is gifted with a rather fantastic experience of metaphoric language through the lens of comics.

I was going to add The Puma Blues to my list of comics to track down until I found out that the series was never completed as periodicals. However, Dover Publishing, that champion of cheap editions of great works of literature, has a graphic novel of the series that includes a new 40-page chapter that finishes the series. I think that'll have to go on my list of stuff to get.

Tomorrow is the end of Year 2. Time flies when you're....well, this year hasn't actually been very fun, but at least I've gotten to read a comic every single day.

To be continued.