(Yet another Onomatoepeia essay. This one from last summer, when I was starting to get obsessed by the Presidential Election, and wanted to write about it, even though Ono is really all about comics. Not that that stopped me, oh no.)
With the US Presidential elections just six months away, the cold and clammy grip of democracy has overtaken American culture. Everywhere you look, people are talking about politics this or politics that, as if it actually matters whose name you tick in the ballot box on that fateful November morning; there are television shows, YouTube channels and even these cheap inky things called “news” “papers” given over to discussing the latest to-ings and fro-ings of the Democratic and Republican parties, attempting to make them as exciting as if they were the Democratobots and Republicons. And, as we all know, where there’s the faintest glimmer of public interest, then comics will be there to exploit that glimmer.
DC Comics, still high off the relative success of their Countdown: Arena votathon at the end of last year (And, let me tell you, if any vote has been rigged in this country in the last decade, it was that one - Hanging chad or no hanging chad, there’s no way that Wonder Woman would have lost to Wonder Woman like that. Don’t get me wrong, Wonder Woman’s tough, but she’s no Wonder Woman. And then having Green Lantern go down like that to Green Lantern? It’s like Karl Rove himself was hiding behind that Monarch mask. Man. Don’t get me started), were the first ones to be waving the “Vote for me and I’ll set you free” banner with the announcement of their new DCU: Decisions series, wherein we shall learn how each citizen of the DC Universe chooses to vote in a series of stimulating ideological debates set to the soundtrack of punching.
You may scoff at the idea of Judd Winick and Bill Willingham - surely the Hannity and Combes of mainstream comics if ever there was one - co-writing a story where their own personal political differences had the potential to bubble up and destroy the entire creative project, but reports from those involved have been remarkably positive, with the two agreeing not to attack each other directly but to trade characters and instead attack each other’s beliefs through hastily-assembled straw man attacks voiced by members of the Green Lantern Corps. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen Hal Jordan say “You’re nothing but a cut-rate Barack Obama” to John Stewart, only for Stewart to reply “Well, at least my political candidate isn’t a 71-year old appeaser of the more extreme parts of my party, subjugating his own principles in order to attempt to gain the ignorant redneck vote and in doing so, choosing to dumb down the political discourse of this country so that everything becomes a series of spokespeople saying that the other guy is hysterically overreacting instead of just trying to speak in sentences of more than four words. And what kind of name is Hal, anyway?”
(What DC have kept relatively quiet so far is that DCU: Decisions, and in fact the entire US Presidential Election Season, are tie-ins to their ongoing Final Crisis storyline. Final Crisis, which is scheduled to ship its final issue in November on the Wednesday following election day, will close with a hastily added page of the winner of the election wrestling manly with Darkseid himself before defeating the New God of Apokolips and declaring that that victory truly means that it is a brand new day in America. Rumors that, were McCain to emerge from the filthy scrum as the bloodier victor - and I’m talking about the election here, I should clarify - the ending of the book would be changed to his dying only for his soul to be collected by a new Black Racer who will be revealed to be Barack Obama himself, have yet to be verified.)
Dan DiDio’s desire to get more involved in the political process (Born, according to those who know him best, of the fact that his abstaining from voting in the year 2000 caused Al Gore to lose the election and the resulting guilt) is clear from the interviews he’s given about the subject. Take this, for example, from a recent piece at Newsarama.com:
“Some of you guys may have seen the tease ‘Superman Red or Superman Blue?’ on our chalkboard teaser image… Well, that’s to do with this series [DCU: Decisions]. I know that a lot of you guys out there think that it’s a really bad idea to piss off half our audience by declaring political allegiances for people’s favorite characters that they themselves don’t agree with, but I don’t agree. You see the long term damage such a decision could cause, but I can’t think of the long term, I’m just looking a couple of weeks out at best! That’s a clear throughline in, in everything I’ve done at DC. Think about it: Countdown! We didn’t know what we were doing there, but everyone kept asking ‘Are you gonna do another 52 when that series ends?’ so I had to say yes! One Year Later! It didn’t mean anything in the long run, but when I said it out loud for the first time, it sounded great! Same with Decisions. Maybe it’s going to make everyone upset to find out that Batman is anti-abortion and spends his off-panel time beating up doctors who give condoms to kids, but it’ll get a spread in the New York Times and that’s all I can think about right now.”
Of course, DC aren’t the only ones desperate for a piece of that hot hot voting action. Mark Millar, arguably the shyest man in the comic industry, recently started advertising his upcoming War Heroes series for Image with a poster of Republican nominee John McCain and Democratic hopeful Barack Obama with the slogan “John McCain would give you SUPER POWERS… Barack Obama would NOT.” Now, looking at it objectively, what sort of message is this sending the impressionable young Millar fans of voting age in the United States? Are we to believe that John McCain is a kinder, gentler, potential president who would be more willing to help us reach our true potential as ubermench? What does it say about the weasly, anti-superpowers Obama that he would try and keep us down like that? And how did Millar discover both gentlemen’s stance on the subject, when even George Stephanopolous failed to get either man to talk on the record about the fabled Kryptonian Gambit?
The answer lies in Millar’s shortlived stint as political commentator for the CNN Network. Looking for a vital new voice well-versed in popular culture and bringing politics to the people, CNN management turned to Millar, the man credited with turning Iron Man into a tool of the right-wing in Civil War and creating Captain America’s unique take on foreign policy in The Ultimates. For a grand total of several hours, Millar was on staff at the 24/7 news network, interviewing the Presidential hopefuls about matters that the everyday Joe Public cares about. Although he was fired once that same management got to look at the tapes of his interviews, some of the material has leaked out online. Here, for example, is a section of his interview with Barack Obama:
Millar: Hey, it’s MM here, your man on the street and I’m here talking to Barack Obama. Barry, do you mind if I call you Barry?
Obama: I’d, uh, I’d rather you didn’t, my name is Barack…
Millar: Listen, I’m as liberal as Tim Robbins having gay man sex with Sean Penn, but I’m also standing up to those terrorists out there killing our boys. What are you doing to stop America being blown up by exploding Islamofascists?
Obama: Well, firstly, I don’t think the term “Islamofascist” is a particularly helpful one, it’s a lazy stereotype created by…
Millar (Interrupting): A problem I have with fellow liberals like me is that they point the finger at guys like Bush and Cheney and don’t take responsibility for the way in which their eating tofu and driving Priuses damages the environment. The environment is screwed which is terrible, but oddly exciting. What will you do to save the world?
Obama: I’m not sure I understand, I don’t…
Millar: Will you give Americans superpowers to let them kick the ass of Johnny Foreigner or do I have to go and get an answer from a real man like John McCain? Yes or no, Barry? Answer the question.
Obama: Are you really from CNN?
Thankfully, Millar’s television experience isn’t a complete waste. In addition to raising the profile of comics in mainstream media - that New York Post article “Is This Comic Writer A Freaking Moron?” had some very kind things to say about Neil Gaiman - Mark has announced that the second “wave” of his creator-owned Millarworld books will launch with a brand new series called All Political Reporters Are Pussies And Only I Understand What’s Going On; the first issue is entitled “This is my face as I screw all your political parties are belong to me.”
Marvel Comics, of course, is also trying to get into the act. You may have thought that the “Colbert ‘08″ posters appearing in the background of various Marvel stories throughout the last few months was some kind of desperate TV groupie behavior engineered to get the publisher into the good books of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, but insiders at the publisher are happy to leak that it’s actually the start of something much, much bigger.
“The idea actually came from watching Fox News one day,” our souce who most definitely isn’t Dan Slott, writer of Amazing Spider-Man and Avengers: The Initiative, no matter what you might think, said. “We were all in New York for a Spider-Man Brain Trust meeting, planning out how best to bring back everything we loved from 1976 while paying lip-service to being contemporary. Someone - I think it was Bob, you know, Bob Gale, the guy who wrote Back to the Future and that terrible Daredevil run that never got put in a trade because it was so bad? - had come up with the idea of a plot where Peter goes back to college again and meets Deb Whitman’s sister who suspects that he’s Spider-Man but… get this… she’s a blogger and so puts it on her blog and then we have this whole plot about how bloggers are really dumb and bad. But while we were all high-fiving ourselves around the office, Joe Quesada came in and asked if we were paying attention to the news. It was the day that Hilary Clinton had lost another primary and everyone was saying that she’d have to win over the super delegates in order to get the nomination.
“As soon as Sean Hannity sneered the words ’super delegates,’ the idea came to me almost immediately. I ran to the nearest computer and started to type. Five days later, I had the pitch. It took three seconds for Joe to approve it.”
The result of Marvel’s ingenuity will be seen in October’s brand new series, The Democratic Superdelegate. Written by Dan Slott and drawn by Joe Quesada himself, the series will see the Marvel Universe Stephen Colbert give up party politics for the cause of making politics a party for everyone involved.
“The idea is that, each issue, Stephen will intercede in an argument between this charismatic black dude that everyone seems to like but doesn’t really know that well and this older white woman whose heart is in the right place but comes across badly in public situations. They’ll be having this whole back and forth that gets more and more extreme, like Road Runner-extreme with bombs and throwing each other off buildings and whatever, and then they’ll have to go to the Superdelegate to sort everything out and fix all the damage they caused. We’re thinking of Sam Wilson, the Falcon, for the black dude, and Agatha Harkness for the white woman.”
(Because of Marvel’s stated intent to not endorse one political party over the other in this election year, this new series will be balanced by the relaunch of one of their more popular titles as John McCain’s The Republican Punisher, recasting the Republican candidate as Frank Castle’s best friend in Vietnam and coming up with the famous skull chest emblem while sharing cellspace as a POW with Castle. In the first issue, Tony Stark will appear and announce that he is supporting McCain’s campaign, but is so conflicted about it that he’s started drinking again and goes to sleep each night weeping in self-hatred and cradling Steve Rogers’ Captain America cowl.)
All of this ignores the important and no-less-indulgent work being done on political subjects in independent comics; the Hernandez Brothers are working on a special issue of Love and Rockets explaining why Hopey is considering Ralph Nader’s latest suicide run for office, and Chris Ware’s next Acme Novelty Library will feature a beautifully-designed cut-paper reconstruction of the first ballot box Ware ever saw, stained by the tears of his own masturbatory ruined dreams.
It seems that no matter where you may try and find escapism from the endless rhetoric and mudslinging of the flawed, cruel democratic political process, it will catch up with you; even this fall’s Peanuts reruns will feature, for the first time, a rerun of the infamous “Lucy models herself after Nixon” sequence, complete with Photoshopped-in references to George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. There is, at it tuns out, just one thing for the more electionphobic amongst you to cling to throughout the next few months: It’ll all be over by December.
For a few months, at least.
Content © Graeme McMillan, 2008.
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