Last year, I caught "Bill and Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure" during the Horror Nights at Universal Studios, an annual "comedy and dance" show that's been running since 1992, in which the blond and brunette (portrayed by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves in the films, respectively) duo riff on the year's various pop-culture events.
It was a highly produced show with stunts and special effects, but the humor was so broad that lines didn't even seem to be delivered in complete sentences, just a few bullet points broken up by furious bouts of … whatever jazz dance has evolved into. (
Sex in the City Movie! Charlotte shatted! *booty shake*). Bill and Ted were hardly in it. They'd pop out of a telephone booth[1], do a sound bite, run around the stage for a moment, something would explode, and other colorful characters would come crowding out.
I couldn't help but notice that, while Marvel's
Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey and
Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic Book, written and penciled by Evan Dorkin, is[2] much more sophisticated in terms of craft (it's so easy to associate Dorkin with his iconic
Milk and Cheese characters,that Death's fine lines and loose-limbed, expressive body language, sans Dorkin's trademark heavy eyebrows, comes as a sharp reminder of his range) and certainly in humor, it suffers from the same problem: Dorkin himself said in an interview at billandted.org (in which he professed no great love the characters Bill and Ted), "It's not so much the characters so much as how they react to everything going around, so if you provide a lot of really stupid things that they deadpan …" (In the same interview, he also mourns the loss of all of the other characters in the comic he was able to create.)
In other words: the stage show and the comic-book versions of Bill and Ted are fairly passive. I remember them as being more proactive in the first film:[3] the second I remember mostly for its set pieces. In Dorkin's comics, Bill and Ted are merely vehicles to provide the audience (of children and teens, it would appear from the letters page) with wish fulfillment: accordingly, Bill and Ted are a child's idea of an adult (or, a person who doesn't have to do what his parents tell him to, and has an awesome destiny). They acquire wives and children with little to no mushy stuff: as soon as they have a house, they have a theme park and a time-traveling roller coaster built in the backyard.
(In a brief second of self-awareness, Ted notes, "Since Bill and I are grossly childlike and way immature, we can enjoy it most fully!") Death, the underdog, clearly emerges as the hero,
suffering the indignity of being covered in melted cheese during a part-time job gone awry, having snacks with his landlady, stealing the telephone booth, playing hooky and taking snapshots of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and fighting for his job when a younger, less qualified smart aleck tries to replace him.[4]
Unfortunately for adult readers, Dorkin's savage satire is heavily blunted, and while I can appreciate how subversive it must have been at the time to devote an issue of a comic to making fun of superheroes, published by Marvel itself, it just doesn't play. Bill and Ted are simply too bland: they're nice boys who get everything they want, and are always rescued by Rufus (George Carlin, in the films)
or a thumb on a wheel, or ...
Since Dorkin can't help but be humorous, there are moments: Bill and Ted passing the time during a two-page freefall sequence is made funny simply by their dialogue and postures; background gags (a drunk Death unknowingly shearing a Mohawk with his scythe); Bill's deadly serious expression as he puts forth his Clue solution. (You can't help but yearn for a time in which you could find a full Dorkin comic, even licensed work for hire, in your comic shop every month). The inking by Stephen Destafano is fine and Marie Severin's is masterful, the comics are hand-lettered[5] and Robbie Busch, the colorist, knows how to pop his reds. (There are some tones I find distracting, especially on faces, but I do love Bill's jacket.)
The longer you stay in Dorkin's San Dimas, however, the more it seems a bit creepy and off (if the films exceeded 90 minutes, they probably would, too). There are a lot of Jersey jokes, which don't do a lot to establish the sun-blanched, mall-ridden suburban Southern Californian milieu, which also functioned as shorthand for understanding Bill and Ted's diction and behavior.
All mothers are about 20-year-old hotties (Misty, who is first Bill's, and then Ted's, stepmother, and the Babes, Joanna and Elizabeth, often act as Bill and Ted's mothers as well. "They always tell us before they time travel.") In the final issue, we learn that Bill and Ted's sons, who look exactly like them when grown, travel through time correcting their fathers' mistakes. Freud pops up now and again, but strangely, he doesn't have much to say about any of this.
Notes:
[1] For those unfamiliar with the films: in 1988's
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the two will flunk out of school if they don't pass their history report. This will effectively break up their band, Wyld Stallyns, which must not come to pass because they are influential figures in the future. Rufus, from the future, travels back in time to them, leaving them with the time machine, which they use to collect historical figures, including
Babes from medieval England. All ends well, but in the 1991 sequel, a villain from the future sends evil robot clones to kill them. They die, but beat Death in several games. They eventually prevail, marrying the Babes and having children.
[2] Although Dorkin's
Bill and Ted comics are available in black-and-white trades from SLG, I spoiled myself and read them in the color, single-issue form: just because I can't remember a time I sat down and read such a nice big stack of serialized comics. Plus: I prefer the production value of early ‘90s Marvel comics: they were printed on light gray paper stock, like newspaper but with a smooth, slightly silky finish, which held the ink and the color better, I think, that the glossy paper of today
Not to mention the bonus of Bullpen Bulletins: Issue #1, cover-dated Dec. 1991, quotes Todd McFarlane as saying that, for Halloween, "I would like to be the president/owner of my own hockey trading card company, so I can tell people what to do instead of having to listen to my editor!" (December of 1991 is when the meeting took place in which a group of the hottest Marvel artists at the time — including McFarlane — wanted ownership of their work. Of course, they were denied, and went on to form Image.) Other oddities include predictions for the future (the only one that came true: Willie Lumpkin on the big screen) and "Non-sexual harassment" making the top of the Coolmeter. WTF, early '90s Marvel editors? How do you go from things like Pee Wee Herman and Dr. Seuss month after month to … whatever that's supposed to mean.
[3] In the interview, he implies he hadn't seen the first film, even after the comic was cancelled.
[4] In that same interview,
Dorkin said that #9 was probably his favorite, and it's all about Death.
[5] Issue #8 is a fill-in issue from another team, and Richard Starkings' lettering was like the Terminator advancing.
Image credits:
Babes: From issue #4, written and penciled by Evan Dorkin: inked by Marie Severin. [©1992 Nelson Films, Inc., & Marvel Comics Group]
Thumb: From issue #6, written and penciled by Evan Dorkin: inked by Marie Severin. [©1992 Nelson Films, Inc., & Marvel Comics Group]
Deathcheese: From issue #9, written and penciled by Evan Dorkin: inked by Marie Severin. [©1992 Nelson Films, Inc., & Marvel Comics Group]
Superhero: From issue #10 written and penciled by Evan Dorkin: inked by Marie Severin. [©1992 Nelson Films, Inc., & Marvel Comics Group]
BillandTed: From issue #12, written and penciled by Evan Dorkin: inked by Marie Severin. [©1992 Nelson Films, Inc., & Marvel Comics Group]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
In other words: the stage show and the comic-book versions of Bill and Ted are fairly passive. I remember them as being more proactive in the first film:[3] the second I remember mostly for its set pieces. In Dorkin's comics, Bill and Ted are merely vehicles to provide the audience (of children and teens, it would appear from the letters page) with wish fulfillment: accordingly, Bill and Ted are a child's idea of an adult (or, a person who doesn't have to do what his parents tell him to, and has an awesome destiny). They acquire wives and children with little to no mushy stuff: as soon as they have a house, they have a theme park and a time-traveling roller coaster built in the backyard. 
Since Dorkin can't help but be humorous, there are moments: Bill and Ted passing the time during a two-page freefall sequence is made funny simply by their dialogue and postures; background gags (a drunk Death unknowingly shearing a Mohawk with his scythe); Bill's deadly serious expression as he puts forth his Clue solution. (You can't help but yearn for a time in which you could find a full Dorkin comic, even licensed work for hire, in your comic shop every month). The inking by Stephen Destafano is fine and Marie Severin's is masterful, the comics are hand-lettered[5] and Robbie Busch, the colorist, knows how to pop his reds. (There are some tones I find distracting, especially on faces, but I do love Bill's jacket.)
