By Ryan Riley, Correspondent
It is now one week before we vote for the next President of the United States and not surprisingly, it is still very much on all of our minds. One of the things I find fascinating about comic books is that, at their best, they showcase the overall mood of the world that they are reflecting (or distorting) in their stories. Indeed, as comic book stories are becoming increasingly relevant to the reality we live in, the medium of comics has become almost as effective as the motion picture in getting a message across.
I detailed one of the most spectacular examples of a comic book election in my column from last week on the "President Lex" storyline in DC Comics. But it isn't, in my mind, the most well-executed. With that in mind, I've detailed some of the best recent examples of the election process (and often the abuse thereof) in comics.
1. The Smiler vs. The Beast, Transmetropolitan
This story is currently available in Transmetropolitan: Year of the Bastard & Transmetropolitan: The New Scum.
In a future inundated with weirdness like restaurant chains that serves up cloned human meat, household appliances that can make any object imaginable and bowel disruptors, it falls on outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem to keep things real. After a self-imposed hiatus in the mountains, Jerusalem has returned to the city to spew his venom at an increasingly apathetic audience. But when the election comes around, he finds himself torn like never before. On the one hand you have the incumbent president, a.k.a. The Beast. During his time in office, the Beast has presided over an unprecedented increase in murder and poverty rates in the U.S. It sounds dreadful, but the Beast actually turns out to be the lesser of two evils in this election.
Gary Callahan, a.k.a. The Smiler, on the other hand, doesn't know the meaning of the word "integrity". He starts his path to the presidency by selecting a running mate with no stains on his record. He made sure of this by creating a clone and installing it as a senator two years prior. Once Jerusalem pulls the covers on these shenanigans, The Smiler successfully deflects the scandal and regains his approval rating by having his political director Vita Severn assassinated. Spider, who happened to be friends with Severn, suspected Callahan of having her killed. When Jerusalem confronts him with his suspicions in an official interview, the Smiler gleefully confesses to everything and goes so far as to threaten Spider's life once he gets elected. Unfortunately for Spider, the Smiler had all of his listening & recording devices nullified and erased, so he would have no record of his confession to use to prevent the Smiler from taking the oval office. And that is just the beginning of a term he spent attempting to delete precious freedoms from the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
2. Prince Charming vs. Old King Cole, Fables
This story is currently available in Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers & Fables: The Mean Seasons
The premise of the superbly-written series Fables is that many of the characters from the fairy tales we all grew up with, such as Snow White, The Big Bad Wolf and Pinocchio, have escaped from their conquered homelands and have been living in New York since the 17th Century. Since that time, their community (known as Fabletown) has only had one man as mayor, and that man is Old King Cole. The thrice-married (and thrice-divorced) Prince Charming, recently returned from travels abroad in Europe, sees a chance to gain access to unlimited wealth & power by calling for a special election and running for mayor of Fabletown. Charming, who has the special gift of wooing any woman he desires, applies his romancing tactics to the surprisingly similar field of electoral politics. This ability, coupled with some rather lofty campaign promises and a heroic showing in the battle against an invading army from their homelands, propelled him to a landslide election victory.
The question really wasn't whether Prince Charming would win the election; he always wins the object of his desire. Charming's rise to prominence is best summed up by an exasperated query from Dan Hedaya's character in the extremely underrated Tom Hanks movie "Joe vs. The Volcano": "I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?"
3. Mitchell Hundred vs. Rudy Giuliani, Ex Machina
References are made to this election throughout the various collected editions of Ex Machina.
Ex Machina takes place in the present, but there tend to be a lot of flashback sequences, many of which take place in the year 2001. The protagonist of Ex Machina is Mitchell Hundred, a civil engineer that encountered a possibly extraterrestrial device that exploded in his face. Shortly after the explosion, Hundred found that he possessed the ability to communicate with and command any type of machine (kind of like Micah from "Heroes", but not nearly as smooth). After a spectacularly unsuccessful career as the superhero "The Great Machine", Hundred decides to retire, reveal his identity and pursue a career in politics by running for mayor of New York as an independent. The polls of the time have him in dead last, but he gets elected by a landslide thanks in no small part to his saving one of the towers at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.
Hundred makes a far more effective mayor than a superhero, but his superheroic past and his powers ensure that he, like Michael Corleone in "The Godfather" films, keeps getting pulled back into his sordid past just when he thought he was out. Word around the campfire is that the character might be running for president in the book, so that should make for even more interesting stories.
4. Randy Fisk (a.k.a. Ravenshadow) runs for president, Rising Stars
This story is currently available in Rising Stars Vol. 3: Fire & Ash
Rising Stars is written by "Babylon 5" creator & current Thor scribe J. Michael Straczynski. It tells the tale of 113 people from Pederson, Illinois that gained superhuman powers from a cosmic event that manifested over the town when they were all in utero (in their mothers' wombs). Referred to by the rest of the world as "Specials", some of them went on to use their powers to serve their fellow man. Others let their powers go to their head and used them for selfish purposes. One of them, Randy Fisk, made a name for himself as the superhero known as Ravenshadow. Eventually, the amount of good that Fisk was able to do on his own reached an impasse, and he concluded the only way he and his brethren can truly save the world is if he were to run for president.
He ran in 2008 as an independent and was soundly trounced. He did no better in the 2012 election. So when he decided to run once more in 2016, everyone started to wonder whether he took too many blows to the head as a superhero. What no one counted on was a sex/murder scandal at would implicate both the incumbent president and his rival candidate. With the election just four days away, it was a choice between "...a murderer, an adulterer/blackmail victim...and a superhero." Who would you choose?
After a landslide election victory, Fisk moved to the next phase of saving the world. With the help of a fellow "Special" that can speak with the dead, Fisk went into a closed-door meeting with both the Senate and the House of Representatives and blackmailed them with all kinds of dirty little secrets like who really killed MLK & JFK, where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, etc. With this knowledge he ensured the full cooperation of the legislative branch of government. In the end, Fisk and his fellow "Specials" made the world a better place, but they were ultimately destroyed by the military/industrial complex Fisk cuckolded when he first took office.
Hail To The Chief
The stories mentioned above were (in my humble opinion) well-written and thought provoking. But in the end, we won't be able to elect a superhero to save the world. Our future president, whoever it may be, will ultimately be just a human being. It is that fact alone that emphasizes just how carefully we should select the people that lead us.
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