All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
This week marks a momentous occasion -- the 25th anniversary of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. It's a milestone that deserves observing. But after the customary re-watch of Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey you might find yourself loitering outside of the neighborhood Circle K, sobbing into a pretzel and wondering how you'll ever fill the bleeding Bill & Ted-shaped hole in your life.
Never fear, true believer. Like any successful film series of the late 1980s and early '90s, the Bill & Ted movies spawned a slew of spinoffs: videogames, an animated series, and even a terrible live-action pilot. Unfortunately, most of those have aged with considerably less grace than the movies themselves. However, there's once exception: Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book — a short-lived Marvel series that, like the films, was way better than anyone would've expected.
Written and drawn by alt-comics icon Evan Dorkin, Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book launched shortly after Bogus Journey in 1991. A decade later, Dorkin would win multiple Eisner awards for his anthology series Dork, but back then, he was a young cartoonist looking to break into the industry at large. "[Editor Fabian Nicieza] was editing a batch of all-ages licensed books that nobody was really looking to work on except for young creators like myself looking for an entry point or older creators hard up for work," Dorkin says. His first Bill & Ted gig was a straight-up adaptation of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, which then spun out into the ongoing series.
Dorkin wasn't a huge Bill & Ted fan--he still hasn't seen the first film--but he enjoyed the relative creative freedom the comic's fringe status afforded him. "It wasn't part of the superhero line and it was doomed from the start, so it didn't matter what I did as long as it wasn't inappropriate for all-ages readers," he says. "Fabian let me run with it, which I really appreciated. I had a great time and I think that shows in the finished comics."
The result is a comic that captures the fun, frenetic weirdness of Bogus Journey and spins it through Dorkin's madcap sensibilities. Bill & Ted are at their best facing a mix of the mundane and insane, and Dorkin delivers, as our heroes rock their way through marriage, record contracts, trans-dimensional roller coasters, returning villains, and -- in one atypically dark issue -- sending their buddy Abe Lincoln back in time to get assassinated.
Like most good things, Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book came to an untimely end, cancelled in 1992 after a mere 12 issues (plus a single Fight-Man spinoff). But fans can still pick it up in two volumes, reprinted in 2005 -- along with Dorkin's Bogus Journey adaptation -- by Slave Labor Graphics.
