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I do not have the unpublished fifth issue which did get some meager distribution in the second volume of Cancelled Comic Cavalcade.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