Alice in Wonderland

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MARVEL CLASSICS COMICS — Issue no. 35, August 1978

Book: Marvel Classics Comics

Issue No.: 35

Published: August 8, 1978

Title: “Alice in Wonderland”

Cover Price: 60¢

Format: Digital scan

Welcome to another post about another issue of Tales From the Public Domain! Actually, this is a post about issue no. 35 of Marvel Classics Comics. But any time I see a new movie or book about Robin Hood or King Arthur or whatever, I imagine somebody with a booming announcer voice saying “Tales From the Public Domain!”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Disney basically built a whole film catalog making animated movies about famous public domain characters. And I suspect this Marvel adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland owes a little to Disney’s 1951 Alice film. But just a little — nothing that Disney could sue Marvel over, of course. (Disney wouldn’t have any reason to sue Marvel now since they’re part of the same mega-corporation. That wasn’t the case in 1978, though.)

So many themes and characters from Alice in Wonderland are iconic at this point, but I don’t think I’ve ever read the original book or seen the Disney movie. I did work on a quirky indie film adaption of Alice many years ago, but that’s a story for another day. (The short version: despite playing a few film festivals, it never got commercially released. That’s the way quirky indie film work goes sometimes.)

A panel from this issue showing a rabbit in a tweed jacket running toward a house. A large hand and arm is sticking out a window of the house. It’s Alice’s hand — Alice is relatively very large at this point in the story. From inside the house, Alice says “I used to read fairy tales, and now here I am in the middle of one. There ought to be a book written about me!” That’s a little meta joke in case you didn’t catch it. The rabbit says, “Mary Ann! Where are my gloves?”

Despite all the iconic stuff, I wasn’t thrilled with the story. There’s not much of a plot — it’s basically just Alice stumbling from one silly situation to another. And the dialog (I am assuming a lot of the comic adaptation’s dialog was lifted from Carroll’s book) involves a lot of wordplay that I found more tedious than clever. And the ending (spoiler!) is one of those it-was-all-a-dream endings, and I’m generally not fond of those.

All that said, this adaptation is fine. The art is solid, and it was a good deal back in the day. As a blurb on the cover proudly proclaims, this 60-cent (cover price) book is “52 full pages, no ads.” Of all the 1978 Marvel books I’ve read, the only ones that don’t have ads are Classics Comics and Spidey Super Stories. Both books have an educational angle — I wonder if the Marvel creative team thought teachers might be more likely to purchase these books for students if there were no ads? Or if Marvel got a tax break for publishing a couple of ad-free educational books? I guess I should do some research into that.

(I also need to get some “fill-in” posts of my own ready. I was away from home for the past few days and didn’t have a Marvel Time Warp article ready for the usual Tuesday morning posting.)

Next time — Spider-Man! Or maybe Captain America!

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