This week saw the release of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Comic Book Archive, a reprinting of the ’90s Marvel Comics series from writer/artist Evan Dorkin of Milk and Cheese and The Eltingville Club fame.
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Available at full size and in a hardcover edition for the first time from BOOM! Studios, the Bill & Ted series is collected along with Dorkin’s adaptation of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, which he wrote based on an earlier draft of the script than eventually came to be filmed.
Dorkin joined ComicBook.com for a quick, five-question trip down memory lane.
You can get a copy at the Amazon link above in three weeks, or do it now, either at your local comic shop or on ComiXology.
This is a book that I remember reading off the racks at my dad’s grocery store, but it was published at a time where there was basically no chance of it getting a collected edition. Back when they first contacted you about the paperbacks, what was your impression?
By the time SLG wanted to do the trades, the groundwork was already laid for publishers collecting all sorts of older material. So, at that time, it wasn’t a real surprise, everything was getting slapped into binding and tossed onto shelves. But, back in the early 90’s when the comics were coming out there was never a thought that the series would be collected. If I thought there was a chance of that happening I would have kept better records of art and scripts and everything.
By the way, growing up with free access to a comics rack as a kid would’ve been a dream of mine.
I remember hearing at the time that you weren’t a fan of this book. Was there any truth to that? I always enjoyed the hell out of it.
I wasn’t a fan of the movies. I still haven’t seen the first one. And I wasn’t a huge fan of the job when I took it, to be honest. It was a job, something I thought I could do decently and get paid, and I was hoping that it would help me break into comics as a full-timer. I found adapting the Bogus Journey script difficult, you’re constrained by following someone else’s work, and the deadline was tough in order to get it on the racks around when the movie came out.
All that being said, once I started working on the ongoing series, it became a lot more fun and I really started to enjoy myself. I was originally only going to do four issues, but ended up doing the run, except for one fill-in when the deadlines got tight. I became a fan of the comic, which sounds weird, because it was my work, but really, I ended up liking the characters and enjoyed expanding the cast and coming up with stories for them all. I was bummed out when the series was inevitably canceled. But I had a lot of fun working on it, and I was really fond of the world I was dealing with, and hopefully all that shows in the comics.
More than the rest, your Bogus Journey adaptation has been kind of kept alive by the fan base as an artifact because of the changes made to the script before the film was completed. Do you remember watching it for the first time and being a little weirded out by the edits?
Yeah, that was definitely the case. I went to a screening with Fabian Nicieza and Evan Skolnick and we were noticing all the cuts made to the script in the finished film. Towards the end of the movie, a big chunk of material was cut, a chase sequence with a lot of action. That was surprising, there was a lot of build-up throughout the script to get to those scenes where Bill’s grandmother, the Easter Bunny and the Colonel — he fears from their past — manifested and attacked them.
We knew the scripts well enough that not seeing all of that material was a real disconnect, a lot of scenes and bits of business we were expecting to see never appeared.
Is it strange to see this back on the stands just a few weeks before we’re expected to get a new edition of World’s Funnest?
Actually, it’s weird to see this come out from Boom, and then have the collected Eltingville Club due out next month from Dark Horse, then World’s Funnest from DC and then the Fight-Man comics that I did for Marvel will be repackaged in a Deadpool Omnibus. I’m officially old enough for my past to come back and haunt me.
It is weird, I’m not someone who sees their work coming our regularly and is jaded or used to it. I still get excited when anything I’ve worked on gets released and has a chance to be read
Your sensibilities and reputation are much different now than they were when these books first hit the stands. Would you ever consider taking another swing at Bill & Ted?
Boom asked me to write a new series, and I was interested. I worked out a six-issue sequel/finish to the Marvel series, a big epic that starts off with fans of boy bands trying to kill Bill and Ted and and develops into an epic mess with the universe threatened by a cosmic entity that Death, Chronos, War, Fate, Nature and even their boss can’t put down. Hell opens up, the devil’s unseated by Morty the skeleton, alternate universes get mixed up, a lot of stuff happens. Of course, Bill and Ted save everyone and everything.
Anyway, I wanted to do it but unfortunately we couldn’t agree on the financial end of things. These things happen in comic book land.
