Brian TruittWhile Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and more candidates enter the 2016 election seemingly every day, at least we know a teenage girl named Beth Ross is winning the presidency in 2036.
Debuting Wednesday from DC Comics, the futuristic comic-book satire Prez smartly skewers politics, culture and technology but also introduces a cool heroine who'd be the right woman for the job no matter what year she entered the White House.
"I wanted somebody who would come into office without the same baggage that politicians (have), owing people favors and having played the game and knowing what to say to get elected," says series writer Mark Russell, who penned a modern and irreverent retelling of the Bible with God Is Disappointed in You.
With shades of Idiocracy, Russell and artist Ben Caldwell imagine a USA where Americans can vote for president using Twitter and candidates will do anything to get elected, even going on weirdo YouTube shows.
Thanks to a viral video filmed by her fast-foot co-workers, 19-year-old Beth goes from corndog-slinging Oregon fry cook to social-media sensation and on to the Oval Office due to a loophole in the Electoral College voting process.
Blunt and honest, she doesn't initially want to be president — her ailing father also needs her care and attention. But one of the things that convinces Beth to embrace being POTUS is there are massive crises at work that, if not dealt with, could cause a major extinction-level event on the planet. And other politicians are too busy trying to get elected or reelected to bother with such things.
"She comes into office assuming that she's an accident of history," Russell says. "She's going to be gone in four years, therefore she can do what needs to actually be dine as opposed to build alliances and keep everyone happy."
In terms of being a leader of the free world, Russell figures Beth is progressive yet pragmatic. She's going to think outside the box and not always use conventional political solutions for problems. For example, other presidents staff their Cabinet with other politicians, yet because Beth doesn't actually know any of these people, her Cabinet is filled with actual experts — her science advisor is a character modeled on real-life guru Neil deGrasse Tyson.
DC Comics' original Prez series in the 1970s "is, to be fair, beyond obscure" so Russell admits he's been given carte blanche to be creative as possible with his series. "I'm not playing with the family jewels. They can let me go in the sandbox and I'm not going to hurt anything."
The writer's also bringing in some characters from that old comic. Preston Rickard, the teenage president in the original Prez, is Beth's vice president in the new book. Also returning is Boss Smiley, CEO of the world's largest retail corporation and the intellectual and de facto leader of the evil Build-a-Burger Group — the villainous cadre is a play on the Bilderberg Group, a secret elite society thought to run the world from behind the scenes by conspiracy theorists.
In the future of Prez, a Corporate Personhood amendment has been passed where companies do not have to reveal the identities of their chief officers, so the CEOs of various corporations have glowing logo masks to obscure their faces. When the Build-a-Burger group meets in their fast-food franchise headquarters, Pharmaduke has a dog with a syringe, Grizzly Tobacco has a bear and Boss Smiley wears a smiley face as they make powerful folks such as Senator Thorn do their bidding.
The first arc of three issues focuses on the absurdity of the election process, but Russell wants to use modern parables as well to make his points: One story coming up, which looks at the creative economy and the difficult of living outside the corporate system, involves an environmental activist, a journalist and Boss Smiley's giant-sized gerbil cage.
But Russell sends up smaller-scale aspects, too. In the first issue during a debate about food stamp reform, Thorn takes on a presidential candidate and espouses the virtues of "taco drones" to deliver calorie-ridden, nutritionally questionable culinary goodness to the starving in order pander to the enchilada-loving constituency.
"The big Achilles heel of every politician is they want to be loved, they want to be popular, and it comes at the direct expense of their ability to lead," Russell explains. "They become manipulated — you have to market something to the people and make it popular, and then the politician, even if they have their own misgivings about it, has to go along for political survival."
It would seem that no one would want to be popular more than a teenage girl, but Beth is intelligent and doesn't want to be an ingénue led along like a puppet.
"She's naïve in the sense that she doesn't know how politics work but that really is a source of strength for her," Russell says. "She very much has her own ideas about what's wrong with the country. She just does not know how broken the American political system is, and that's really what her education is in office."
Russell sees satire as "quality control," and we the people are always looking for ways our society is going wrong. "Prez is an attempt to identity those and also to come up with solutions for them," says the writer, who feels the comic has more of an indie vibe than the traditional superhero-filled "capes and spandex" DC fare.
"That's really what appeals to me, the idea that I can be honest and sort of edgy and satirical, and know that some kid in Iowa is going to be able to get my comic at a Walmart."
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