U.S.A. R.I.P.

I really, really hope I'm wrong. 

But is it over for the nigh two hundred-and-fifty-year-old experiment in democracy dubbed the United States of America?  The Republicans long ago sold their withered souls in worship of their criminal cult leader. But that seems just fine with a majority of Americans, or at least a sufficient number to win the Electoral College and now possibly the popular vote as well. The Supreme Court seems to have been bought off by jokers with cavernous pockets. We now stand on the precipice of a theocracy with its help. 

The ugly truth is the ultra-rich have purchased their pet politicians who only pretend to pay lip service to the citizens, who are likely sooner than later to be robbed of even the illusion of a proper democracy in order that even more wealth can be transferred from a future serf class into the pockets of preening neo-nobility. We will be allowed enough pocket money to fulfill our roles as consumers, but little else beyond that. I really hope those saps who bought the Republican lies like being peasants. 

As the planet Earth is puking up humanity in general, we seem to not want to even go out with some dignity. We shall live a world thoroughly fracked but without enough potable water. The rising temps and the rising oceans will slowly but surely change the world in the centuries to come. Will man survive? Earth doesn't care. The Solar System cares even less. And the Universe doesn't even know of our existence. 

I am an old man and while sad and more than a wee bit bitter to see this day arrive, I know that my children will really be the ones to suffer. All of this so a handful of fat old white men can cling to their power a few hours longer. The very order of the world, one fought for generations ago by regular men and women who sacrificed it all, will be transformed for the worse. Ironically, my daughter who teaches history is scheduled to teach about "The Shot Heard Around the World" today. The irony drips she said, as he teaches about the beginning of the nation on possibly the very day it began its ending. 

The United States of America 1776-2024?

I really, really hope I'm wrong.  

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Prez - The First Teen President!

It seems a good day to revisit one of my favorite comic book collections. 

Prez The First Teen President collection from DC is pretty much a must get for yours truly. When Jack Kirby joined the ranks of DC in the 70's, his partner of many years Joe Simon had already been doing work for them, mostly teamed with the distinctive and evocative Jerry Grandenetti.

Simon had produced the weirdo Brother Power The Geek series which ran a whole two issues in the late 60's and in 1973 he teamed up with Grandenetti to give us the adventures of the first teenage President of these United States--Prez Rickard.

In one of those outlandish and now quite laughable attempts by the veteran comics talent of the time to tap the vein of teenagers and twenty-somethings, an increasingly important demographic in the comics market (the children were largely abandoned to Harvey and Archie), we get this sometimes painful effort. Grandenetti's artwork is the draw for me, I love his energetic artwork which crackles across a page in sometimes unexpected ways. But in this series Joe Simon's story accomplishes more than it should, thanks in large part to the unusual power of the core concept. The potency of youth culture was dominating the world pop culture world of the 70's as attention slipped from the fading war effort overseas to economic woes at home.

I have all four of the Prez issues which hit the stands. I've often kept them close to my Kamandi collection by Kirby. Weirdly I think they both are attempts to offer up a caustic eye to both youth culture and the larger one which often seems so absurd when its foibles and flaws are exposed. Both Kamandi and Prez strike that vein, though of course Kamandi did it much more successfully. (On another note, I just realized that on most of the covers Prez's sidekick Eagle Free shouts out the threatening situation for the reader's benefit.)

I do not have the unpublished fifth issue which did get some meager distribution in the second volume of Cancelled Comic Cavalcade.

The second issue was one of just two which gathered together material from many abruptly cancelled series to iron out some legal niceties.

I also do not have Prez's single crossover appearance in the Bronze Age in the pages of Supergirl. This tale written by Cary Bates should be a real hoot. Here is a glimpse.

And since I've never ever bought and/or read a single issue of the Neil Gaiman's Sandman, it goes without saying I've never seen any of Prez's appearances in the Vertigo universe.

And that includes his one-shot comic by Ed Brubaker and Eric Shanower. Shanower discusses this comic here. I'm looking forward to getting into this volume, it should be enlightening to say the least.

Also included are several pages from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Back.

And there is this from Grant Morrison's Multiversity Handbook. It seems in some corners, Prez occupies an exceedingly groovy Earth.

But that's not all.   

It seems Joe Simon had drawn his inspiration for a story about a teenage president from a wacked out movie from AIP (American International Pictures) called Wild in the Streets.  It's a straight-up weird movie about a self-absorbed rock singer named Max Frost with severe mother issues and boatloads of money who finds himself able to influence his fans who he calls "troops" and eventually finagles things so that he becomes President of the United States.

But that's only after we see him and his crew (Richard Pryor is the drummer in the group by the way) smoking dope and dropping acid and mostly lying about on cushions in an over-the-top mansion. They moan about how rough it is that youth are ignored in a country run by old people and when a local pol named Fergus (Hal Holbrook) decides to leverage the youth by offering to lower the voting age to eighteen Max is able to work a deal to get it to fifteen. Later things make it possible for fourteen to be the age for all members of Congress and the Presidency.

There are riots, LSD, and rock concerts (limited to one song each time and some of them not terrible), all the things associated with 60's youth. At one point Frost's boys pour LSD into the water in Washington and trip out the entire Congress and later when Frost takes power he institutes "Paradise Camps" for folks over 35, where they are fed LSD as part of an attempt to alter their attitudes.

It's pretty brazen stuff and in the end rather grim. Joe Simon and Jerry Grandenetti took the idea of a teenage President and gave us an entertaining satire with enough steam to keep it potent but never do they let the dismal nature of real politics overwhelm their adventure. This movie seemed to start in the dark, brighten a little, but end in a very grim place. I guess we're supposed to reject the vain desires of youth culture it presents, but really everyone looks really bad.

Prez does it better, or least more joyfully. 

Now if you are eligible and haven't already taken care of it, go vote. America needs everyone to save the day. 

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The Life And Times Of An American Icon!

It's a long and winding road to the White House. As we close in on the next most important election of my lifetime, let's reflect on the personal history of one notable seeker of the office. 

Yogi Bear began life like many a young bear, interested in the world and friends and good times.

But an increasing addiction to food, especially that sweet, sweet honey proved to be a challenge for the eager bear, even at the cost of some personal relationships.

He even eventually resorted to stealing food from his neighbors.

He conducted elaborate frauds to swindle food from strangers, which brought him into conflict with the authorities.

Yogi also had an artistic side, but sadly his desperate need to express himself only added to his problems with the law.

But love was always in the life of Yogi Bear, and that love motivated him to seek a better way.

On his birthday, when he was officially an adult bear, he made a decision to change his lifestyle, to overcome the passions that were slowly ruining him.

So he rounded up his many friends and said farewell for the time, to pursue his new dream.

He thought military life might make him all the bear he could be. And it worked for a time.

But his stint in the armed forces ended soon enough and again looking for direction, he rediscovered his artistic bent, and found he had a knack for the show business, where he made some new friendships.

Eventually he found a great deal of financial success and some small critical acclaim, even making his own moderately successful movie about his own life.

But alas he found he still lacked that all important something, that Je ne sais qua that makes life worthwhile, so using the G.I. Bill he went to college to seek great knowledge and enlightenment.

After college he tried many different spiritual paths to greater understanding of a humble Bear's place in the grand scheme of the universe.

Eventually, having centered his existence, he reconnected with his good buddy Huckleberry Hound and helped him in his campaign for the ultimate national office.

That tireless effort resulted in Yogi's appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, a role filled with responsibility he found was just what he'd been seeking.

And later still, Yogi himself ran for the highest office in the land. He won, despite vigorous competition from an old comrade.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Hopefully this light-hearted effort helps break the tension. 

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Tales Before Narnia!

It can be argued that C. S. Lewis’s influence has been even wider than his friend J.R.R. Tolkien’s. For in addition to the Narnia series, Lewis wrote groundbreaking works of science fiction, urban fantasy, and religious allegory, and he came to be regarded as among the most important Christian writers of the twentieth century. I look a look at The Space Trilogy early last year. In this collection titled Tales Before Narnia - Classic Stories that Inspired C. S. Lewis, much like another dedicated to Tolkien, we have stories which might have inspired the writer's children's classics.  

I am especially interested in “The Wood That Time Forgot: The Enchanted Wood,” a never-before-published fantasy by Lewis’s biographer and friend, Roger Lancelyn Green, that directly inspired The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There is also E. Nesbit’s charming “The Aunt and Amabel,” in which a young girl enters another world by means of a wardrobe and of course “The Snow Queen,” by Hans Christian Andersen, featuring the abduction of a young boy by a woman as cruel as she is beautiful. Here's a list of the other stories in this fascinating collection. 

“Tegnér’s Drapa” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Magic Mirror” by George MacDonald
“Undine” by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué
“Letters from Hell: Letter III” by Valdemar Thisted
“Fastosus and Avaro” by John Macgowan
“The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque” by Sir Walter Scott
“The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” by Charles Dickens
“The Child and the Giant” by Owen Barfield
“A King’s Lesson” by William Morris
“The Waif Woman: A Cue—From a Saga” by Robert Louis Stevenson
“First Whisper of The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame
“The Wish House” by Rudyard Kipling
“Et in Sempiternum Pereant” by Charles Williams
“The Dragon’s Visit” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Coloured Lands” by G. K. Chesterton
“The Man Who Lived Backwards” by Charles F. Hall
“The Dream Dust Factory” by William Lindsay Gresham

Much more Narnia is on the way as I begin a two-month exploration of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I will begin next week with The Magician's Nephew. 

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The Tramp And The Dictator!

There was a time when Charlie Chaplin might well have been the most famous person on the planet. His career as one of Hollywood's earliest screen stars began in 1914 when the "Tramp" suddenly appeared in a small film called Kid Auto Races at Venice. The character was funny but abrasive at first before becoming the charming everyman hero of classics such as The Kid, The Gold Rush and City Lights. 

Ironically it seems Chaplin was born the same week in the same month in the same year as another famous 20th Century figure -- Adolph Hitler. When Hitler rose to power in Germany during the Great Depression, governments were hesitant to speak out against him. At first, he'd been a strong man dictator who helped raise Germany out of the quagmire of an exploded economy, but then he turned his sights on other surrounding countries and used his new military power to begin his conquest of Europe. The threat to world peace was looming but people wanted to ignore it. 

In 1938 after seeing Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will he decided to make a comedy mocking Hitler and calling attention to the suffering of the Jews (he had no idea of the real scope of the horror at the time). He worked for over a year and a half using largely his own money to make The Great Dictator. The movie had the support of FDR, but many warned Chaplin that it was a mistake. In those days when America remained silent, the Nazi Party was beginning to hold sway. (Note: It had fallen to The Three Stooges to call out the evil first in their classic short You Natzy Spy!) The evil identified and mocked by Chaplin so effectively was nearly poised to strike all over the world. But The Great Dictator was a success, and it became Chaplin's most lucrative film eventually. 

The story follows two men who happen to look alike -- a humble Jewish barber and a grandiose dictator -- both played Chaplin. The movie offers up some dandy comedy, but even more sympathy for a people put upon by a grim and deadly power. At end of The Great Dictator, Chaplin breaks character to some degree and speaks directly to the viewer warning them of the dangers abroad. It was an artistic gamble, and many criticize this decision to his day. But his heartfelt speech was potent then and is potent today. I think it's a bit too long, reaching its climax and then lingering too long after, but its message is nonetheless powerful. To listen to it just used this link. 

The United States is on the cusp of the most important election since the Civil War. We can choose the future and elect the supremely qualified Kamela Harris to become President and move forward into a better time, or we can once again select the doddering madman Trump to be our very own homemade musty Hitler. As I write this, the future is not yet known. I have some small dread we will make the wrong decision yet again, but I have a greater hope we will move beyond the petty hatreds which fuel that malign influence and make the right decision, the only decision which makes sense for the future of us all. The last thing the world needs is a "great dictator", if even for a day. 

I voted yesterday. I rather suspect you can guess which way my vote went. 

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