Marvel Graphic Novel #12: “Dazzler The Movie” (October 1984)
Creative Team: Jim Shooter writing, Jack Springer penciling, Vince Coletta inking
Theme: #MeToo: The Real Hollywood Story
Warning: This sucker is 70 pages, so it’s a bit long to discuss, but here we go!
The Story: Alison Blair, former pop idol, has been reduced to teaching aerobics at a very 80s gym. One of her students, Eric Beale, owns a film production company. When she says she can’t talk to customers, he buys the gym on the spot and repeats his request/demand that she join him for dinner.
Instead, she takes a quick out by leaving with Fred Stanachek, a shy nerd who was nervously talking to her. He gives her a ride home and gets a kiss. This was surely intended as a vicarious win for geeks everywhere. Talk to a girl! You might score!
Alison gets home, undresses, admires herself in the mirror, and talks about her life to nobody in particular, in some of the most Silver Age dialogue imaginable. Ororo calls from New York to check in, and Alison assures her that she’ll be discreet with the use of her “turning sound to light” powers, lest she become a victim of anti-mutant sentiment.
The scene moves to Beverly Hills, where the middle aged (or more) Oscar-winning film producer
Roman Nekoboh kicks the latest starlet out of his bed at “the crack of dusk.” He dons dentures, girdle, and toupee. He’s spent some time with Alison somewhere recently (More on this below. Much more.) and plans to make her his next sexual conquest.
Alison’s gig that evening is at a nightclub, where she regales the bar with a cabaret version of Elton John’s hit “I’m Still Standing.” Paparazzi have heard that she’s hooking up with Roman. That’s news to Alison, but when she returns to her second story apartment, he’s inside with wine and roses and wandering hands, pinning her against a table. He threatens to ruin her career, but she kicks him out anyway.
The next day, he stalks her on the street in his convertible. She pops his tires with a laser blast, but he chases her on foot! He’s not in good enough physical shape to chase a fitness instructor very far, so instead he fakes a heart attack to draw her back.
Amazingly, she lets this creep buy her coffee, and before you know it, she’s starring in his movie and accepting lavish clothing, jewelry, and a fancy condominium. After a week of this, she falls for him despite herself, and she’s relieved to find he doesn’t care that she’s a mutant.
But Roman has financial problems, and his idea for a movie starring Alison runs aground on her previous association with the X-Men. In steps the not-so-white knight, Eric Beale, with a pile of money. Alison warns Roman, “He’s not a nice man,” even though from everything we’ve seen, Roman is as bad as Eric. After weeks of international travel and shopping with Roman, Alison suddenly does a reality check. Why am I drinking a martini in early afternoon? When did I start smoking? Look at the weight I’ve gained since I stopped being a fitness instructor.
Then Roman breaks the news that he’s going to use her mutant status as a publicity tool so that he can control the news rather than being its victim. He sets up a demonstration at the airport: A bikini-clad Alison absorbs the sound from a jet airplane to create a pyrotechnic display. Roman has miscalculated; the crowd is terrified rather than dazzled. Alison becomes the target of brick-throwing thugs. This doubles her resolve to make the movie as a representative of mutantkind.
Now taking her career into her hands, Alison hits the gym again to regain her physique. She starts making demands about the movie script, wanting it to be classy instead of just the throwaway sex-and-violence blockbuster that Roman envisioned. Alison also discovers that her powers have changed; she can now store sound energy to convert to light later, rather than needing sound on the spot all the time. Her laser light ability comes in handy for making special effects when the film crew heads to the South Pacific, and again when Roman and Alison have to fight off an anti-mutant mob at a test screening theater.
But then Alison is called to a meeting where Eric Beale drops a bomb on her: He was only backing the film to get leverage on Roman. He’s signed Roman to an exclusive contract, barring him from contact with Alison. The movie Roman made with Alison will be destroyed, unless Alison signs a contract with Beale too. She refuses and burns the film print herself. Roman meets her outside and is relieved that she didn’t sign the contract with Beale. Alison tells Roman that although she loves him deeply, she needs to make her own way in the world, so she leaves him wistfully.
My Two Cents (on some minor issues before tackling the elephant in the room): You probably know that Dazzler was conceived as one of Marvel’s several cross-overs writing actual pop stars like Alice Cooper and KISS into comic books, at a time when the company was especially in danger of bankruptcy in the late 1970s. The tie-in to a real female singer was dropped before execution, so the disco queen Alison Blaire made her debut in X-Men #130 (1980), then in her own series which lasted three years. She fought some super villains, but at least toward the end, it was mostly a workplace romance comic, a throwback to the pre-Fantastic Four days. Vince Colleta's art certainly plays up that aspect.
“Lisa Lyons, the bodybuilder” gets a namecheck when Alison is at the gym. Lyons was the first female celebrity bodybuilder/fitness model, and Shooter likely had her career in mind when writing this story.
Beale declares at one point that the film print was worth “hundreds of millions!” That seems pretty steep for the mid 80s.
Roman Nekoboh’s surname is “Hoboken” backwards, so that’s a place name pun. His first name reminds us that Namor the Sub-Mariner got his name precisely that way, spelling a common word (“Roman”) backwards. But “Roman the Oscar-winning director/sex predator” likely references Roman Polanski, who fled the United States in 1977 after pleading guilty to drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Polanski won numerous awards for subsequent movies made in Europe, and not until 2018 was he expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The connection between Roman Nebokoh and Roman Polanski is hammered home by Roman’s unsuccessful sexual assault on Alison early in the story. This leads us to discuss...
The Rest of the Story (I think): OK, it took me hours to reverse engineer this train wreck, but I may have figured out how it happened. But it will take a little while to explain, so bear with me.
Like the New Mutants Graphic Novel, this one bears several marks of having been an a regular comic book issue (or perhaps two or three consecutive issues) hastily re-jiggered into a 70 page graphic novel in order to satisfy a contract commitment at the printing company. Evidences:
(1) It was written by Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who was frequently writing Dazzler at this point, albeit with regular fill-in issues.
(2) It was drawn by the usual Dazzler team of Frank Springer (pencils) and Vince Coletta (inks).
(3) It introduces a major change in Dazzler’s powers, namely her ability to store energy for use even when there's no loud noise around. News-stand readers who don’t have access to graphic novels would have missed this pivotal moment, so it seems unlikely to have been planned to occur outside of her regular series.
(4) Dazzler’s identity as a mutant is exposed to the world, so that she gets blacklisted. Again, a major event, outside of her regular series.
(5) The first several pages of the graphic novel (the scene at the gym) are filled with swipes from Dazzler #31, with Dazzler’s love interest Bill Remington having been replaced by corporate tool Eric Beale (the guy in the mustache in the image on the right below:
The Graphic Novel introduces Roman from scratch, when in fact he’s been in several issues of her comic book recently. Let’s run through those.
• We first meet him in Dazzler #29 (May 1984), in much the same way as we did in the graphic novel, except he looks even older, and there’s no girl in his bed. He awakens, dons his false teeth, girdle, and toupee.
This is very similar to the transformation of Funky Flashman in Jack Kirby's
Mister Miracle.
Later, Roman gropes Alison in his private jet while pitching her on the idea of becoming a movie star to rescue him from his financial difficulties. They are forced to parachute out of an airplane together.
• Then in Dazzler #33 (August 1984), Roman takes her to a Hollywood party and tries to prevent any other movie executives from talking to her, but she gets a job dancing in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video anyway. (Sorry, Teddy Ungard’s “Chiller” video. Easy mistake.)
• In issue #34 (a
Millie the Model homage in which Millie and Chillie appear), she spurns Roman romantically in both an apartment scene and a car scene, both of which are recreated in the Graphic Novel as if occurring for the first time. So while to readers of the Graphic Novel, Roman's appearance in her apartment is out of the blue, to readers of the comic book, it’s a malignant escalation of his campaign to win Alison, albeit replaying some beats with more force this time around.
Between the repeated scenes and the repeated art and the bizarre shift in tone 1/3 of the way through the book from “Roman Nebokoh, violent predator” to “Roman Nebokoh, sympathetic fading star,” here’s what I think happened: The bulk of this graphic novel was intended as two or three issues of the regular Dazzler comic book, picking up the Roman Nebokoh thread from his previous appearances in Dazzler #29, 30, 33, and 34. Roman was going to finally convince Alison to be in his movie, and thus the rest of the plot follows.
But when the tale was elevated to graphic novel status, suddenly it needed to stand alone more readily, as well as extra pages hastily added to meet the page count. So we get a new introduction made of swipes of Dazzler at the gym, except now the scene is used to introduce Eric Beale. And we get a replay of Roman’s introduction and his girding himself for romantic battle, except now there’s a
belle du jour in his bed as well, which marks him as a rake, like Harvey Weinstein pressuring scores of starlets into servicing him sexually.
Then to cap it all off, the “first meeting” between Roman and Alison is now an attempted rape scene far more sinister than the already egregious handsy scene in the airplane, also
way more sinister than anything that subsequently happens in the graphic novel. Perhaps the artist took liberties with the script? It just doesn’t fit. It can’t have been originally intended. And because it’s there, it poisons the narrative, turning an ambiguous “Alison should think twice about this powerful Hollywood guy’s intentions” into “Alison has lost her marbles/scruples and fallen in love with a violent predator.”
The brief appearance of Freddie the nerd, after getting a wish-fulfillment kiss from Alison on behalf of all the fanboys out there, also speaks to the cobbled-together nature of the story. As does the introduction of Eric Beale in the first few pages, followed by his long disappearance until the last few pages. Jim Shooter is not that incompetent. (No, really.) He would have dropped some reminder in the middle about Eric Beale, if Beale had existed as a character when those pages were drawn and scripted.
So I’m pretty convinced that the beginning and end of this graphic novel were late additions to an intended Dazzler arc. Notably, the following issue, Dazzler #35, marks the last Springer/Coletta/Shooter work on Dazzler, probably because Dazzler #36 became a fill-in issue due to the void left when these pages were elevated to graphic novel status. If I had to put my finger on the exact scenes added, I’d say everything prior to the “Dazzler sings Elton John in the nightclub” was new, and so was the four page sequence in Beale’s office near the end. I bet the ending originally cut from “Alison and Roman watch a cut of their film and escape a mob” to “Alison decides to call it quits.” She is wearing the same clothes throughout.
Another possibility is that Jim Shooter felt the need for this non-Comics Code story to have more edgy content, so he retold the story of Roman and Dazzler’s encounter with more physical menace than the original version on the airplane. But again, bad call.
A couple of excellent analyses have been written on this train wreck as a “woman escapes an unhealthy relationship and regains her agency” narrative, though everyone seems to take the essential integrity of the narrative structure for granted, which I think is a mistake.
SuperMegaMonkey (to whom I am indebted for some of the scans I have used) runs through the Graphic Novel’s plot, its problematic themes, and examples of the swipes.
