During the day, Alison Blair is just your everyday aerobics instructor, leading exercise classes and getting hit on by sleazy Hollywood producers like Eric Beale. At night, she’s the Dazzler, an up-and-coming rock star who amazes her fans with the elaborate light shows at her concerts. What they don’t know is that Alison is a mutant and is creating the lights herself. Or, at least, they don’t know that until Alison’s boyfriend, over-the-hill singer Roman Nekobah, reveals the truth to the press. Roman thinks that it will make Alison a star. Instead, Alison finds herself hounded by the press, anti-mutant bigots, and the producers of a movie.
It really doesn’t get more 80s than this graphic novel about Dazzler. Unfortunately, this graphic novel was not a great moment in comic book history. Instead, it was just Alison in leotards and doing things with Roman that Jim Shooter and Marvel couldn’t get away with acknowledging in the monthly Dazzler comic book. A full page of art is devoted to just Alison undressing and looking at herself in the mirror. That was probably popular with readers of a certain age in 1984, but today, it’s just a reflection that there wasn’t much to Dazzler beyond how she looked. Not much happens plotwise. Eric Beale is a sleazy producer but he’s hardly a villain on the scale of Dr. Doom or even Sebastian Shaw. When writers and artists of the era complain about Jim Shooter’s commercialized vision for the company, Dazzler The Movie is a good example of what they were talking about.
Dazzler The Movie is mostly interesting as a roman à clef about how the character was created in the first place. Dazzler was developed by Marvel and Neil Bogart, the legendary (and legendarily erratic) manager of Casablanca Records. At first, Dazzler was going to be a multimedia project. Not only would there be the Dazzler comic book but there were plans to release Dazzler records and to have actual Dazzler concerts. A movie about Dazzler was a part of the plan but things fell through when Casablanca went bankrupt. Shooter continued to try to develop a Dazzler movie. When Bo Derek showed some interest, Dazzler was redesigned to resemble her. However, Bo insisted that the movie could only be directed by her husband, John Derek. After the box office failure of John and Bo’s version of Tarzan, the Ape Man, Marvel lost interest in the Dereks and the Dereks lost interest in Dazzler. It’s easy to see John Derek in the character of Eric Beale. Dazzler has a choice between selling out or continuing to do things her way and she decides that she doesn’t need an Eric Beale in her life.
The comic book lived on, though. Dazzler The Movie was Shooter’s attempt to draw more readers to the comic and to also express his hatred of Hollywood. It wasn’t much of a graphic novel. It was no God Loves, Man Kills. It didn’t get the acclaim of The Death of Captain Marvel. But it did keep Dazzler going. And she’s still going to this day.
