Published by DC Comics, Prez—a speculative, almost-dystopian story set in 2036 about a quick-witted and optimistic 19-year old with a sardonic mouth who becomes the president of the United States by way of Twitter—is starkly different fare compared with the publisher's other comics, a vista spackled with the usual rebooted superheroes and cartoonish sleuths.
More importantly, Russell's vision, as fully-realized and complex as it is devastating, is an astonishing overhaul of the little-known original comic of the same name. Created by writer Joe Simon and illustrated by Jerry Grandenetti, the first iteration of Prez ran for four issues, from 1973 to 1974, and thrust the titular Preston "Prez" Rickard into situations that can best be described as garrulous hysterical surrealism—battling legless vampires and malevolent chess players was more of a common occurrence than not. (After the series was canceled, Prez appeared in more DC continuous titles and standalones than his own throughout the next few decades, if that's any indication.)
So when DC Comics asked writer Mark Russell (along with artist Ben Caldwell) to helm the resurrected Prez after the publication of his first graphic nonfiction book, a modern take on the Bible with cartoons by The New Yorker's Shannon Wheeler, he couldn't help but agree to revamp it as "something satirical, as opposed to a vigilante superhero who throws people out of windows."
"It's intriguing, the idea of a teenage president," says Russell, his voice oscillating between bandwidths, his eyes certain behind his glasses. "You're talking about someone who's a complete political outsider taking over the highest political position in the world ... somebody who can come in and break all of the political barriers and expectations of politics. Someone who can actually do something."
It seems to be the central thematic element in our conversation, the wheelhouse of doing something, which was part of what Russell excavated from the first iteration of Prez and transplanted into the second: raw energy, verve, and a core commonality.
"They're hastily written, and the characters weren't really fleshed out—they tend to be a little stereotypical and archetypal," he says, giving an overview of the inaugural Prez line. "I wanted to do something that borrowed the certain frantic, crazy energy from the original series, one that felt like an actual, genuine commentary on politics."
He elaborates on transferring the overarching cultural anxieties within those issues, instantly redolent of the early '70s and clustered around tensions between the Great Generation and the baby boomers and "people's fear of teenagers and in the 1970s."
But the biggest correlation between both versions of the kid president comic is Prez Rickard himself, who Russell implanted in the reboot with an altered timeline. In a metafictional and slightly tragic twist, Russell's version of Rickard is a president-who-never-was, having lost the same election that made his name a minute but veritable DC institution in the first place. Rickard's momentous loss makes him Beth's sympathetic mentor and future VP.
I tell Russell that their relationship reminds me of Dante and Virgil in The Inferno, with the government as a kind of hellscape. The connection jumps—I'd like to think I've made him laugh—before he answers. "That's a good way to put it, like Beth is being lead into the abyss, or the inferno, and Prez Rickard is her Virgil," he extrapolates, "and each circle gets a little deeper and a little darker, and he's the one who knows exactly how dark it's going to get."
And dark it gets. Prez contains a frankness concerned with how individuals are encumbered by limited possibilities, or, as he puts it, a "trial-and-error process called life." It's a fictive reality that could read as bleak if it weren't for frequent bursts of levity, like Beth's carefully articulated fashion aesthetic, a blend of "iconoclasm and punk chic" with a touch of Grimes. (For the record, Beth's favorite band is named Transvaginal Mesh, which Russell borrowed from class action lawsuit infomercials he saw on TV during a trip to Los Angeles.)
Beth, too, clashes ideologically with the world foisted upon her after a series of events rule her election-by-Twitter as constitutional. As Russell describes it, Beth views the corrupt government she's handed (and manhandled by insidious adults like the Machiavellian Senator Thorne, who serves as a secondary antagonist) as "an obstacle to common sense." Her presidential animus is to oversee policies that aid the public, and anything that obfuscates that is the opposite of rational thought. He emphasizes that in the universe where Prez is set, there is no such thing as liberal or conservative, and neither is his female protagonist's stance. Instead, it "stands in the way of material or political progress."
That very same progress, or a societal forward-moving trajectory, is as difficult to obtain in Prez's America as it is our own. The fact that the parallels are evident is no mistake on his part—and Russell isn't shy about the more obvious links between our reality and his fiction. The writer purposely made, and continues to make, the United States in his comics reflect the one we live in now.
"I wanted [Prez to be set] in the future," he states, explaining the steps he took to fine-tune his setting, "but not so far into the future that it wouldn't turn into high-minded science fiction, but enough into the future so that I could world-build a bit, and also comment on the present of American politics."
It's almost impossible not to ask Russell about how the socio-political aspects of our own cultural environment crop up in Prez, and he's quick to point out some of the absurd (and terrifying) aspects that make appearances in both. While none of the published or forthcoming issues incorporate the current presidential primaries for the GOP or the Democratic tickets, a few details from the first few installments showcase "consistency between what is being said [in Prez] and what is actually happening" in our world—sometimes even in an eerie, prophetic way.
"There's a border wall that appears in Prez that Trump is advocating for," he points out. "It's almost very Trump-inspired, even though it came before his [official candidacy.] So, there's your border wall."
Russell had hinted at the political undertones of his comic earlier, so it's no surprise that a satirical comic whose inspiration is derived from a political institution is incisive about its general subject matter. It's hard not to agree with the "dualistic reality" that, as Russell propses, comes from both sides in our current political climate: the notion of fictions told by politicians versus political realities.
"We have a significant portion of the American voting population that is just clearly out to lunch ... [that] won't even acknowledge basic facts as they relate to biology, or climate, or basic American history. They've created their own narratives." He goes on to relate them back to the development of Prez's faulty institutional infrastructure, and how Beth's nemeses, like Thorne, manipulate the system.
"Thorne becomes the talking head of this type of sophistry—he suggests ideas that are completely whack-a-doodle, like the taco [delivery] drones, or deregulating pig farms so that he can put a battery farm next to an elementary school ... to use as a stalking horse for legislation that is clearly a bad idea." This, he concludes, is his main commentary on the political system.
I bring up the taco drones (which in Prez is more of a patented Taco Drone™), which both of us have named-dropped a number of times, and for a good reason.
Dismantling the notion of tropes in dystopian fiction, Russell's work doesn't take kindly to the take on technology as the usual futuristic, robot-phobic, and creatively lukewarm enterprise. In lieu of the standard "robots take over the world" plot is a refined, mature stance: that "technology progresses independently from our moral decisions on how to use it."
When it comes to said usage, Russell's imagination runs wild ("all science fiction is satire" is a one liner he throws at me that might as well be his mind's perfect descriptive catchphrase) the best example being Carl the End of Life Bear, the (also aforementioned) bear-bots who double as end-of-life caretakers. When I mention them, Russell seems to surpress a crackling, mischievous glee.
"That is coming, by the way," he promises me. "Don't worry. Whey you're 95 years old and laying in a hospital bed, there will be a mechanical bear that comes and offers you marijuana to help you as you slowly die."
"To be honest," I admit, "that doesn't sound quite that bad."
I'm reminded of a plot point [spoiler alert] that takes place in the first issue: Beth's father, who lies in a hospital under the provision of a Carl himself, and a final monologue he bequeaths to his daughter, well before his daughter has an inkling of her presidential destiny. It's Russell's handiwork: a monologue which relies upon computer and tech metaphors to describe the brain, and the ways in which the constant rewirings of myriad synapses ennoble us to evolve and change. In the same issue, the same pre-Prez Beth sits in on a college course, wherein the professor delivers another capstone:
"The Roman Empire was dead for 40 years before anyone realized it was gone."
As I ask Mark Russell what both of these mean—and should mean—to us, it is then that my laptop screen begins to waver, freezing his image into place, pixel-by-pixel. Despite this, the Prez writer answers me, unperturbed. Maybe he's not even aware.
"We don't realize decline while it's happening," he begins. "Perhaps today is the point where we have screwed the pooch. [Ben and I] wanted to show what it would look like 20 years from now, when it becomes apparent that we screwed up in the past. [...] This is what Prez is about—recognizing the apocalypse ... and our only solution to these problems is to take them seriously, and to get as many human brains as we can to get to work solving them."
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