Welcome to Perry Como's Nightmare

The Last Temptation, written by Neil Gaiman and Alice Cooper, illustrated by Michael Zulli (1994; this edition 2001): Neil Gaiman in a very minor key, collaborating with Alice Cooper on a comic-book tie-in to Cooper's 1994 concept album of the same name. It would probably help to own and listen to that album prior to, or contemporaneously with, this comic book. A 12-year-old boy gets tempted by a malign supernatural being called only the Showman (who looks like Alice Cooper in full make-up). Is the Showman a serial killer of children, the ghost of a serial killer of children, or the Devil himself? And what will happen on Hallowe'en?

Song lyrics are somewhat awkwardly wedged into various sequences in the comic. Both the Showman and David, the12-year-old protagonist, previously appeared in the 1970`s Cooper concept album Welcome to my Nightmare, which itself indirectly spawned a Marvel comic book starring Alice Cooper. Historically speaking, comic books and musical stars have never been a great fit, though the Superman comic book in which Lois Lane falls in love with Perry Como is hilarious.

The whole thing seems underwritten -- David, the protagonist, isn't so much unsympathetic as he is so sketchy a character as to be unidentifiable with on any but the most nebulous terms. Zulli's B&W art is lovely, but would look better reproduced at at least normal comic-book size, rather than the trade paperback size of the available Dark Horse reprint volume. Very lightly recommended for Cooper fans, Zulli fans, and Gaiman completists.

Tarantula!

Tarantula!, written by Robert Fresco, Martin Berkeley, and Jack Arnold, directed by Jack Arnold, starring John Agar (Dr. Hastings), Mara Corday ('Steve' Clayton, and Leo G. Carroll (Professor Deemer) (1955): Giant ant movie Them! was such a hit, it kicked off a slew of giant insect movies. The law of diminishing returns soon held sway, though Tarantula! is one of the best of these movies, primarily because of the skill of longtime science-fiction and comedy director Jack Arnold. Arnold knew how to sell a threatening landscape, and indeed it's the desert -- and not the giant tarantula -- that looms most menacingly in this film over the puny humans.

Professor Deemer and his scientific cohorts are working on some crazy-ass, radioactive food supply to make things grow really big without them having to eat anything other than the radioactive food supply. As the film opens, giant rats, guinea pigs and a tarantula the size of a Great Dane attest to the success of the experiments. Then all hell breaks loose, and it's up to the always affable John Agar as a small-town doctor to figure out what's killing cattle, horses and people. Oh, right. It's a tarantula the size of a ten-story apartment building. Or maybe large -- there are some scale issues with the tarantula.

The tarantula looks surprisingly good. There are only a couple of model shots of the spider, with most of its appearances combining real spider action with shots of the desert, houses, what-have-you. The spider really is a jerk -- it seems to go out of its way to knock down telephone lines, power lines, and the occasional transformer tower, for reasons only a giant tarantula could know. The ending is abrupt, and features a young Clint Eastwood as a jet pilot. Good times! Recommended.