Prez, Volume 1

Prez was brought to us by Mark Russel, an Oregon writer I was recently introduced to across a few different channels. I read his other recently hyped DC book, The Flintstones, a few weeks ago. And while I thought the book was a little too narrowly focused on people who agree with Russel 90% I do fall into that category so I enjoyed it as well. Besides Russell, there were a lot of other people involved in the making of this comic (because that is how DC rolls), but none of them really seemed to have much of a web presence to stalk. The one exception was Dominic "Domo" Statin, a man of color, who spends a goodly portion of his twitter presence retweeting other minority creators, which is pretty cool.

The art of the comic is vivid but still cleanly drawn and well defined. Which in my opinion can be hard for some modern comics to pull off. The color scheme reminded me a bit of scalped, since there were quite a few earth tones, but Prez is much more vivid, alive and crisp. Beyond that I also felt that the character designs were expressive enough without straying into caricature. Perhaps it is my own naivete, but I didn't recognize any real people, which would have been an easy direction to go in. This could have lead to Prez being another overly specifically catered comic from Russel, but it was published right before new president of one kind or another was going to be taking over the Whitehouse, so keeping things a bit less recognizable was a more obvious route to take then it might have been at other times.

I have not read the original Prez either, so perhaps this was brought over from that, but the idea to obscure all the faces of business behind corporate symbols was pretty ingenious. They would have been much harder to keep track of without them and it effectively reduced their humanity no matter how you feel about capitalism in general. The character design specifically for Beth Ross was also extremely well thought through and exacuted. So many different people seemed to have been involved with the art here that it's hard to figure out who deserves credit for it, but the effortless way in which she is a modern working class woman were incredibly refreshing. Although the fact that I'm so tempted to gush over a young woman of color being allowed to be a attractive, fun and charasmatic without being sexualized is rather depressing. My only real cratique on that point is, even if politics is in fact dominated by men, I still felt like the fact that Beth Ross seemed completely alone in a sea of older white dudes to be a bit unrealistic and annoying.

Finally, perhaps this is also because it's a remake, but one of the biggest plusses for this comic, for me, was the fact that this comic did not feel like my real life. Which is somewhat unusual for me right now. From the movie Man of the Year to Octavia Butler's book The Parable of the Sower, there is a lot of comedy and dystopia historically that has put an inept white dude and/or populist fascist in the Whitehouse as part of the end of the world/that would never happen. And now that Trump is in office they are making even more!

So to read a political comedy/satire that is actually maybe slightly hopeful and different (down to the owner of NJ being a good guy) was really uplifting and fun. A welcome escape from my everyday life. I hear that's why people read things, so that was nice.

Now I really need to read this guy's other books.