The two Lewis Carroll classics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass are two of my all-time favorite novels, so I was quite surprised and intrigued when I saw this comic. I had to look up the history online to find out where it came from, and there’s not much info, other than back in 1951, the same year the the original classic animated Disney film was released, a publisher published two issues of this series (listed as #10 and #11, despite actually being #1 and #2).
The series featured new stories of Alice, drawn in the style of Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations from the novel, but aged up a bit to look more like a teenager, than the 7-year-old girl that she is in the novels. No credits are listed, but I can see each story is signed by “Davy Berg”, and looking him up that is Dave Berg, a longtime contributor to Mad Magazine, so he drew and perhaps wrote the stories, as well. This collection, put together in digital form by MINI-KOMIX, includes all of the stories from the two issues, one is 1 page long, and the rest are 5-8 pages long.
In these stories, Alice lives with her unnamed parents (no mention is made of the older sister or brother that she has in the novel), who are drawn to look like stereotypical 1950s sitcom parents. Her father, who has black hair with graying temples, is always shown smoking a pipe. Her mother is always dressed in a short-sleeved dress with an apron on, and high heels. Despite having “new adventures in Wonderland” in the tagline, most of the stories don’t involve Wonderland, they just have Alice experiencing similar fantastic adventures, where she randomly travels to new seemingly magical lands and meets other strange characters. Most stories end with Alice returning home, being unsure if what she just experienced was real or not, and getting punished (by being made to stand in a corner facing the wall) by her disbelieving parents.
In FLYING SAUCERS, Alice discovers that one of the saucers (plates) on her parents’ shelf can talk and fly. The saucer shows Alice how to shrink herself (by spinning around as fast as she can while spelling “Wonderland” backward) so that she’s small enough to ride on it as it flies her to “The Land in the Shadow of The Giant” where a bunch of tiny people are being terrorized by a constantly hungry giant.
In THE MAN WHO MADE WEATHER, Alice goes out in the rain, but her umbrella catches the wind and she’s blown up into the clouds, where Mr. Merriweather, an old man with a long beard who is responsible for making it rain or be sunny, depending on the weather reports. Alice inadvertently becomes his new assistant and helps him keep from getting fired by his boss.
In THE LOST RAGDOLL, Alice can’t find her favorite doll. Thinking she accidentally dropped it in the laundry chute, she looks inside and falls in, landing in a magical Kingdom, where everyone wears all the dirty clothes that people put in their laundry chutes. She finds the King, tending to her ragdoll, whom the King thinks is a baby. When Alice tries to take her doll back, the King has her arrested for stealing “his” baby. But of course, it turns out that the ragdoll can talk, and when she’s given milk, she grows to a giant-size and starts terrorizing the Kingdom. Alice must rush back up the laundry chute to escape.
In ROCK-CANDY MOUNTAIN, Alice meets a man who lives at the top of big ice-cream mountain with a cherry on top, who creates giant quantities of various candy and sweets, like a crazy Willy Wonka. But his problem is he can’t sell it. Alice tries to help him out, and this leads to an accidental deluge of chocolate fudge that floods the city.
ALICE IN BUGVILLE has Alice discover a talking worm, who shrinks her to insect size and takes her down to the basement where an army of talking insects, including termites, are preparing to destroy her house. But after Alice saves them all from a mole who attacks them, they agree to call off their plan. Alice is restored to normal size and convinces her mother not to call the exterminator to drive the insects from their house.
Three stories feature Tweedledum and Tweedledee, drawn as two fat identical red-headed boys. In SUPER-DOOPER SPECIAL, Alice travels to Wonderland (after a talking mailbox tells her to put a stamp on herself to fly there) to try to talk them out of fighting all the time. In TOPSY TURVEY, she talks them out of another argument. And in THE TWEEDLE TWINS VS THE HORRIBLE GROARK, which doesn’t feature Alice at all, the twins try to figure out a way for people to tell them apart (as sometimes even they aren’t sure who is who), and end up confronting a green monster called the Groark.
These are all fun little silly stories that would fit right in with Archie Comics tales from the era and should be appreciated by fans of all ages.
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