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but rarely as major storytelling devices like JFK. Lyndon Johnson appeared in a
few comics, including the oddly titled Great Society Comic Book:, features
Super LBJ and his Super-friends (1966), and Richard Nixon made numerous one
or two panel appearances in which he inevitability orders a superhero to perform
an important mission. For all intents and purposes, the role of the President in
comic books had receded to the pre-Kennedy notion of great leader, the one
major difference being that the depicted President was now the same as the one
in real life.
The next major transformation in the portrayal of presidents in comic
books was a 1972 series entitled Prez that was cancelled after only four issues.
The short-lived series followed the adventures of Prez Rickard, the first teenage
President of the United States. According to the comic book, after eighteenyear-olds began to vote. Constitutional age requirements were soon lifted, and
the young Prez is designated Pres. In order to be elected President, Prez has to
battle a crooked political boss named Boss Smiley and his political advertising
genius. Misery Marko, who claims to have helped elect four of Smiley’s
presidential candidates (Simon 12). Once in office, Prez attempts to fix many of
the nation’s problems while battling environmental disasters (issue # 1),
terrorists (issue # 2), and vampire ambassadors from Transylvania (issue # 4).
Prez’s main policy initiative appears to be traveling the world and encouraging
peace between nations.
The Prez comics seem to be a youth-movement retelling of the Horatio
Alger theme that anyone can be President. In the past, the young man who heard
the tale was encouraged to work hard, learn more, and one day he could be
President; in 1972 the youth is told that he should stay pure and strive to make
those around him understand how things should be, because while the office of
the President is noble, the m en who hold it are not. Prez was one of the first
comic book attempts to differentiate between the President in theory and in
person. This view certainly owes part of its existence to the growing youth and
peace movements, the increasing unrest surrounding the war in Vietnam, and
Richard Nixon’s inability to connect to the primary readers of comic books:
young males. It also marked a point where comic books began to become more
politically savvy. Certainly Prez is juvenile and far-fetched but it also poses
political questions and theories to its readers that were relatively new to comic
books (at least since the advent of the Comics Code).
The Prez comics are interesting not only because they portrays social
changes occurring in the early 1970s, but also because their characters and
themes have been twice revisited and mingled with contemporary adventures. In
1993, Prez Rickard appeared in Neil Caiman’s Sandman, a comic book about
Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams. Caiman retells Prez’s tale but paints the young
President as a Messianic figure who helps the poor, creates peace, and changes
America for the better. In this story Prez dies and finds out that Boss Smiley, the
cormpt political boss, is the lord of his world, and Prez must serve him