The Last Temptation

I had been familiar with the idea of concept albums, but I'd never read a graphic novel based off of one. I'm a ridiculous Neil Gaiman fan, and was impressed to see that he helped Alice Cooper with the concept of the album. This graphic novel is just the icing on the cake. He pulls off the dark theatre/dark carnival story very well, keeps the preaching to a minimum, and worked with a great artist. I would definitely recommend this one.

I have always been intrigued by the character of Alice Cooper (not so much the real person) and Gaiman's interpretation of the American rock and roll icon is spot on. Cooper is at once frightening and enticing through his intimate knowledge of human weakenesses, which makes him a perfectly Gaiman-esque character.

A slightly trite morality tale for gaiman. Nonetheless it has the right tone for a fairytale, which is what it is, and it showcases Zulli's delicate artwork perfectly. NOt a deep story, and doesn't bear comparision with his masterpiece, Sandman, but a reasonable waste of half an hour. The pictures are superb.

Book signed by Gaiman at the 2005 National Book Festival, where Gaiman was promoting his new Anansi Boys novel. Visited NBF at last minute, tagging along after a friend who had invited me down several times over the course of the preceding week because she really wanted to see the person whose name I heard as: Neil Diamond. I wasn't interested in traveling two hours to meet a singer whose music I'm not interested in, and it was only the night before the festival that she finally said, "I thought you liked Neil Gaiman? Why don't you want to meet him?" and I said, "Neil Gaiman?"

I hadn't read Gaiman's new novel yet, which had been just released and was available only in hardcopy, and as I was at the time a poor graduate student I didn't show more want to shell out for a book I wasn't yet sure I loved. Still, I had to find something to get signed, and all my Gaiman hardbacks were in storage out-of-state. So about 10 minutes after the conversation above, I dragged my friend out to a bookstore (about 15 minutes before closing) and The Last Temptation was the only other hardback of Gaiman's in the store. My friend was equally amused and irritated.

Gaiman read an excerpt from Anansi Boys that made me go: Oh, I'm going to like this book, and also made me suddenly remember Gaiman was British. :sigh: School was really hard that year. Later, at the book signing, I babbled something inane to him, and he was very polite. "Thank you for coming by" or maybe "Thank you for visiting". I can't really remember now. Oh, the awesomness of meeting authors. Maybe one day I'll sound intelligent to one.

The story: Good. Slightly creepy. This is something I could see Ray Bradbury and James O'Barr creating if they could have merged into one person. This is the first time I'd encountered work by the illustrator, Michael Zulli, and it encouraged me to track down some more of his to see. show less

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Written by Neil Gaiman in consultation with Alice Cooper, tying in with Cooper's album of the same name. I know almost nothing about Cooper except that he wears make-up. Even so, I really enjoyed this brief tale of Steven, an adolescent who is tempted by the sinister manager of the Theatre of the Real (a Cooper lookalike) with the offer of eternal life at an unspeakable price. It would have been better to read it at Halloween; it would certainly have meant more if I was a Cooper fan; but I felt it was also in some ways a trial piece for Gaiman's American Gods, and all the more interesting for that.

I had avoided this for some time, but it was better than I expected.

This is a collected three-issue miniseries in where a middle-school boy is 'tempted' by a spirit who looks like Alice Cooper ca. 1990. (The standard temptations: get the girls, never grow old, etc.)

Lots of themes from other of Gaiman's work ('missing children' from American Gods, 'adolescent boy confronting magic' from Books of Magic). It mostly hangs together, though pt. 2 is a bit padded, and there's a very odd moment in pt 3 where I wondered if a few panels had gone astray. (I still don't get it.)

Geek note: in one panel, a librarian is reading a book by 'Richard Maddock', i.e., Sandman's Richard Madoc. [Had to be respelled because this is Marvel, not DC.]

Gaiman meets rock star Alice Cooper in this Halloween tale that originally appeared in the early 1990s. It adapts a story from Cooper's album "Lost in America", to which Gaiman contributed story and lyrics.

Gaiman manages to elevate the most frequent scene in literature -- that of evil tempting innocence and offering fantasies come true, all in exchange for the poor sap's soul -- into something quite unique.

However, this work fell short of my expectation. I really didn't care what happens to Steven; I never got a sense of his personality, any feeling that he was real or realistic. As a lead character, he's a bit dull.

Fortunately, Michael Zulli is magnificently spot-on with his depiction of Alice Cooper. And who else but Alice is show more perfect in a role as the ultimate showman (a cross of his stage self and Dahl's Willy Wonka)? I think Zulli's black and white illustrations fit perfectly with Gaiman's story. The art is evocative and well done, bringing out the eeriness of the theme. I've heard there's a colored version of this graphic novel but I'm pretty much satisfied with this copy.

The effort to work in Cooper's lyrics holds back the plot and dialogue in more than a few places. It's a growing-up story of a boy, but with a final insight that whispers rather than shouting. The ending results in being a tad cryptic and vague.

Book Details:

Title The Last Temptation
Author Neil Gaiman & Michael Zulli
Reviewed By Purplycookie show less