HeroPress: Top of The Pile: Bill & Ted Roll The Dice #1

Tuesday, 28 June 2022

Top of The Pile: Bill & Ted Roll The Dice #1

Cover by Lukas Ketner

In the wake of 1991's Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, those good-hearted idiots William "Bill" S. Preston Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan find themselves on the outs with their princess girlfriends as they're failing to achieve the true potential they were shown by their future selves.

Trying to scrape together a free meal from Ted's dad's house, they discover that Mr Logan and his new wife, Missy, are binning Ted's metal albums and books after Missy learned that these were gateways to the occult (from accidentally attending a meeting of P.O.S.E.R.S. - Parents Opposing Satanism in Entertainment and Regional Sports).

Rescuing some of this stuff from the fire, the aspiring musicians find a copy of the roleplaying tome: The Devil's Nether'ealm Dungeons, which neither of them recognise as they're not actually gamers.

It turns out the book was planted by the Dark Lord himself, Satan, who then uses it to suck Bill & Ted back into Hell, where he challenges them to complete a Dungeons and Dragons-inspired quest to escape back to their loved ones.

From the get-go, one of the main things that helps Bill & Ted Roll The Dice stand out is the fact that the script by James Asmus is actually really funny.

While still hitting all the notes we would expect, much of the humour transcends Bill & Ted's trademark catch-phrases and silliness, and builds off of the characters.

Satan assigns Samigina, a demonic marquis of Hell, to run the "game" for our heroes and you can genuinely feel his exasperation when he's trying to take the game seriously and Bill & Ted are just goofing around.

If you've ever tried to run a roleplaying game yourself the chances are you can relate to this pain.

Bill ends up as a first level bard, while Ted finds himself as a level "minus five" squire!

As Samigina says: "There are no 'do-overs'."

Even once the adventure begins in earnest, Bill & Ted still manage to weave in some meta commentary on Samigina's rather railroady gamesmastering style, right up to the point where they suddenly find themselves facing their first monster encounter.

Of course, the success of this first issue doesn't rest solely on the most excellent script, kudos must also go to the impressive art of Wayne Nichols, doing a great job of capturing the likenesses of actors Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in his portrayal of the comic's protagonists and also giving us a mythically grand depiction of Hell and what little we have seen so far of the setting for Bill & Ted's quest.

The double-page spread of their arrival before Satan is breath-taking in its emphasis on the sheer size of the devil, a metaphor for the scale of the problem the two lads from San Dimas face.

Published by Opus, the comic also includes a back-up feature, The Lives & Times of Chuck De Nomolos, The Greatest Man in History, by John Barber with art by Andrew Currie.

This very 2000AD-like tale sets out to fill in the backstory of Bill & Ted's archenemy from the 27th Century and the role their friend Rufus played in this character arc.