Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book // Licensed to Cash-In

With the recent release of a mostly-unexpected Bill and Ted movie to become one of the few bright spots in 2020, there’s been a lot of hype for the two airheaded stoners who saved the world through music in the dawning of the 90s. For those who want more adventures of Bill and Ted after their miraculous adventures, however, there is another option: comic books.

Bill and Ted are no stranger to the printed page. Their first movie landed a comic adaptation from DC back in 1989, released as the usual in eventual tie-in comic of the era. Bob Rozakis worked on the script, while Angelo Torres provided the art. Barry Goldberg colored the pages, and Jon D’Agostino lettered the book. While it works as a great way to relive the movie, the book abbreviates a lot of the most excellent sequences with historical figures experiencing modern times. However, that would change when Marvel would grab the license in 1991.

The book has a lot of creative talent working on it. Evan Dorkin worked on adapting the early script, as well as pencilling. The inking team consisted of Stephen DeStefano, Marlin Severin, and Ron Boyd. Robbie Busch colored the book, while Kurt Hathaway and Tom Orzechowski lettered it. At 72 pages, the book is a heftier adaptation than what DC had provided a few years prior, but also takes more liberties with the art and story due to the older script. The end result is a frantic and energetic adaptation of an already off-the-wall story and one well worth checking out.

Among the more notable changes include the tormentors from hell coming to Earth to make for a climactic van chase through the city, the death of the villain, and even a complete alteration to Death himself. The latter is more of a stylistic choice, but one that stands out.

With the second movie, a marketing push was also at hand. Action figures popped up out of nowhere from you company Kenner, and were promptly cancelled without the entire line being released. Some assume it’s because the figures only played musical instruments. Yes, even Abraham Lincoln.

Yes. He has a fez that screams WYLD STALLIONS when you remove his stovepipe hat.

Aside from that, a cartoon series showed up on CBS for a season, and even landed the actual stars of the original movie to voice themselves. Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, and George Carlin all traveled through time on the animated small screen for a season… until the animation company changed, the channel changed to Fox, and the voice cast got replaced by a group of sound-alikes. The reconfigured cartoon lasted just a season as well. However, the cast of sound-alikes actually became the life-action small-screen Bill and Ted for a few weeks on Fox until it was also cancelled like so many shows made for the Fox Network.

Video games also came out on both the Nintendo Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System, as well as the ill-fated Atari Lynx and the PC. And there was a cereal, proclaiming itself to be Most Excellent. 

Yeah, at the very least someone was trying to make Bill and Ted into a mass-marketing phenomenon. As such, comics were just one piece of a larger puzzle being pushed in 1991 and 1992. Since the tie-in comic sold remarkably well, and 90s Marvel was continuing their path of desperately grabbing every single marketing license they could in the hopes of reproducing the success of Star Wars comics from the 1970s, there was a year where Bill and Ted also survived on the printed comic page.

And Evan Dorkin was allowed off his leash of a movie script.

For those not in the know, myself included during the research for this article, the name Evan Dorkin kept bugging me when I was reading these comics. It always sounded familiar, but I could never place where or when I’d heard it before. Finally, I went online and looked him up.

Oh, lord. 

Marvel, what have you wrought.

With the Battle of the Bands won, and the world briefly united by Bill and Ted’s epic movie-ending song, the comic kicks off with having Bill and Ted marry their loves, the medieval princesses. The comic even shrugs and comments that they already married the princesses before in the second movie, but that the two airheads wanted a party all their friends and family could attend. The party is crashed by the original betrothed princes who had been casually tossed aside in the first movie, who duel Bill and Ted for the hands of the princesses… and promptly die.

While the comic seems to be filled with a ton of irreverent humor and dumb moments, there’s a lot of dark humor stuffed inside the comic for those who knew their history or look at the comic deeper than the surface level.

With the second issue, Dorkin actually begins evolving what could be a harmless tie-in comic into a 6 part storyline. Death, fed up with being ignored by Bill and Ted, walks off and takes his first vacation. His ideal vacation is literally just visiting people and laughing about their pending deaths, as well as visiting the locations of infamous disasters throughout history. Bill and Ted chase after him, and go to some of their friends for help.

You are now reading a comic where the real reason Socrates died is because he hated Bill and Ted. Evan Dorkin is a madman.

The third issue brings a minor character to the forefront. Time Thumb had shown up in the first two issues, looking for Bill and Ted. Like his namesake, he’s a rolling thumb with a clock for a head, looking 100% like he sprang from the brain that made Milk and Cheese. Meanwhile, the Wyld Stallions try to sign with a record label so they can become the most excellent saviours of the future, add diversity to the cast with Phillip the bassist, and turn the concept of a legal drama upside-down with a completely bizarre court case against their agent.

After another issue of insanity with issue four, issue five brings the plot of Time Thumb to the front. Bill and Ted are accused of breaking the time-space continuum. Which they completely did do during their movies, admittedly. 

But before that, Evan Dorkin takes the time to actually plug his other Marvel project, the parody comic Fight Man.

No, seriously. This makes Bill and Ted canon to the greater Marvel Universe, as Fight Man would later show up in Gail Simone’s Agent X series.

However, Bill and Ted are abducted by the law force of time, and brought to trial for their crimes against the timestream. Their judges are the one and only Chronological Order.

Yes. This is what in charge of all reality. And is, again, Marvel canon.

Meanwhile, recently deceased villain Chuck deNomolos has escaped from Hell by challenging Death to a game and winning. And continuing to win, buying the rights to life for several minions old and new. And Benedict Arnold.

Luckily, the Princesses have shown to be incredibly intelligent and recruited Bill and Ted’s friends from across time and space to save them from the Chronological Order and deNomolos’ forces of evil. Via time traveling roller coaster.

Issue 8 is the one issue not written or drawn by Evan Dorkin. Instead, Tom Brevort and Mike Kanterovich take the role as writers, with Steve Buccellato working on art. This one-off issue actually flips the original movie’s concept around, with Bill and Ted snagged out of their time and brought into the future to be part of someone else’s history project. Not only does the comic play this straight, but the book also goes out of its way to skewer political figures like George Washington.

A jaunt through the future, however, is interrupted by yet another history project stopping by to grab the student who originally took Bill and Ted.

I’m not exactly sure what drugs Brevort and Kanterovich were on, but I would like to partake of some.

Death, having spent most of his time hanging out with Bill and Ted rather than reaping souls, is replaced. His replacement is Morty, a remarkably accurate skewering of a 90s interpretation of a “reboot.”

Complete with backwards hat, 8-ball jacket, massive clock around his neck, and ill-humored Bart Simpson attitude, it’s hard to tell if Dorkin was actually aiming for parody or accuracy to 1992 popular culture. Because he is spot-on. Death spends the rest of the issue trying to find a new job, and it comes down to an inquiry with the other embodiment of existence for Death to try and get his old job back.

Issue 10 is nothing short of a parody of the entire Dark Age of Comics, with Bill and Ted accidentally falling into a world where everyone is hyper-muscled steroid-enhanced superheroes and/or supervillains (sometimes both at once). With their time machine stolen, it’s up to Bill and Ted to become…

Licensed comics should not be this much fun, frankly.

Issue 11 takes the place of a “very special issue,” with Bill and Ted finding out that their friend Abe Lincoln is fated to be assassinated. Evan Dorkin actually takes the time to have Bill and Ted deal with the fact that so many of their friends have died long before they were born, and there’s actually a lot of touching scenes with the pair actually trying to save Lincoln before accidentally turning the United States into the world of Fallout.

The final issue had Evan Dorkin throw all reason out the window and go for Crisis with Infinite Bills and Teds. With several people accidentally sent sideways in time during an autograph stampede, Bill and Teds from multiple universes unite to save the multiverse.

Luckily, the future children of Bill and Ted are able to help save the day by coming back in time to make sure that time is no longer messed up. Which is apparently their job.

And with that, the most off the wall licensed comic Marvel has ever put out was closed. Evan Dorkin would go on to win tons of Eisner Awards in the following decades, and still works in the industry as a writer and artist. And the man deserves it, because this comic is a work of mad genius.

Here is where we would normally say that this comic can only be found in the deep back issue bins of your local comic shop, pirated online, or off eBay. However, this comic series has been reprinted twice in the last few decades. Slave Labor Graphics would include all the issues by Evan Dorkin under two volumes, though it would lose issue 8 in favor of adding in the second movie adaptation. Boom! Comics would pick up the license for Bill and Ted in 2015, and would put out an omnibus in 2016 that also included the 8th issue… before they would go on to launch into their own Bill and Ted Comics.

2015 would be a direct sequel to the second movie, Bill and Ted’s Triumphant Return. Bill and Ted would try to redeem the villain deNomolos by teaching him how to play and enjoy music… with disastrous results.

2017 would have Bill and Ted returning to Hell in order to save Heaven from an invasion of demons, damned souls, and tormentors. As it turns out, an old friend has decided he’s no longer satisfied with sitting around in hell…

Finally, 2019 would bring Bill and Ted intergalactic with the properly-titled Bill and Ted Save the Universe. This would not only expand the scope of the story, but also expand the role of Bill and Ted’s families, giving even minor characters like Dillon (Ted’s younger brother) a major role in the plot.

While all three of these comics are most excellent, it’s just remarkably hard to live up to the incredibly bonkers standards set by Evan Dorkin. And that is perhaps the best compliment someone can give to a Bill and Ted comic.