Vaudevillian rock icon Alice Cooper, best know for his gothic stage aesthetics and falsely declaring school out forever, is returning to comics books.
As the legions of Cooper fans reading this already know, Alice Cooper is not new to comics. He appeared in 1972's Marvel Premiere, released the Neil Gaiman penned The Last Temptation comic, and contributed to the 1995 Halloween-themed Simpsons comic Treehouse of Horror.
He's a man of many hats. Gaudy, gaudy hats.
Dynamite has recently announced new Cooper books, starting with a remastered 20th anniversary edition of 1994's The Last Temptation. Originally published by Marvel as a companion to Cooper's concept album of the same name, the comic -- written by Neil Gaiman with art by Michael Zulli -- follows a boy named Stephen as he's tempted by The Showman (inspired by Alice Cooper, but not because he tempts children, AC don't roll that way) to join his twisted carnival.
"I'm really happy that The Last Temptation is coming out for a new generation of readers, who have not seen Michael Zulli's glorious drawings, or know of the Showman and his wicked ways," says Neil Gaiman. "I wrote this a long time ago, driven by love of Ray Bradbury's dark carnivals and of Alice Cooper's own pandemonium shadow show. It's time for it to shuffle out onto a leaf-covered street and meet the people who don't know about Stephen and Mercy and show what's coming to town."
Specifics on Cooper's other comics are sketchy, but the rocker promises big things in the future.
"Artistically, for me there is hardly a better medium." Said Cooper, possibly while sitting on a throne of snakes and human skulls, "There is so much you can do in the form of a comic that we'd never been able to do on stage. It's just a different way of storytelling, and it really has almost limitless possibilities. We're looking forward to stretching the existing boundaries of the comic medium again. We have new stories to tell, but we'll do it with the same theatrical, sinister sensibility that comes with the name ‘Alice Cooper'. This is just the beginning! Welcome to my NEW Nightmares!"
