Everything I’ve learned in life I learned from comics
It might have escaped a few of you that today is election day in the USA. You might have noticed a little bit of the media coverage surrounding it and probably even have your own opinion. However, I say to you NAY! you have no opinion unless you have learned of the history of the candidates in the one true manner, through the medium of the comic book.
I picked these up a few weeks back but held off writing about them until now not because I am lazy git who played too many computer games at the weekend, but because I didn’t want to slew the election results with my razor sharp wit and challlenging rhetoric. I’m not entirely sure what rhetoric means, wait here a moment while I go and look it up. Yup, sounds about right: From the Wiktionary definition, 2: Meaningless language with an exaggerated style intended to impress.
I read the Obama book first, hoping that the McCain one would be a war comic chaser to the rather wordy history of “Barry”, and I learned many things. I learned of his love for poker, his killer afro, his bullying at school due to his name, that not all of his schools in the Phillipines were terrorist training camps (I may have read too much into that paragraph in the book) and that he is master of the fist bump (as also seen on the youtubes).
Being a fairly inexperienced politician there was quite a lot of detail about his various campaigns and a few pages on the election campaign, but it focused on his growing up, so as to wring as much adversity out of the story as possible. It was a basically a puff piece written in comic form, exactly what I expected. However, I then turned to the McCain book.
This one was written and illustrated by different people to Obama’s, and I assumed that writer Andy Helfer would be a supporter of McCain’s, so as to allow IDW to be fair about things. I looked him up just now and found he’d also written a graphic novel biography of Ronald Reagan. However, I can pretty safely say that he’s not a fan of the republican candidate. The book starts back in Vietnam, with art looking like some of the most recent Punisher books, and gives the history of his family and their military background. It spends ten pages talking about his military career, outing him as a bad pilot who crashed a lot and the foolish person who happened to be sitting in his plane when another parked nearby had an accidental firing of a missile, taking out his plane and in the process seriously damaging the USS Forrestal leading to two years of repair work.
It then moves on to suggest (through pictures rather than words) that he was a party animal who ran off with his second wife and that during their marriage he drove her to drink and drugs. It doesn’t skimp on his problems with the savings and loan scandals of the late 80s and only really casts him in a good light when he went up against Bush in 2000 for the republican presidential nomination, blaming that defeat on the church, and when he supported Kyoto and gun control laws. It has lovely pictures of Rumsfeld watching as someone is waterboarded and finishes with a face off between McCain and Obama with a balloon saying “and may the best man win”. I have no doubt who Helfer reckons that is.
Anyways, I think it’s going to be close in the election. I was over there just after the last one and was there for a month of the campaigning, sharing with an unexpected Bush supporter (he told me that John Kerry’s domestic policies were crap and that he didn’t care much about foreign policy…), and from that experience the main thing I’ve learned is that what we see outside of the US is often very different to what’s going on over there.
I’m working on an election results drinking game. If a state comes back for the Republicans drink a shot of red Aftershock. If a state comes back for the Democrats drink a shot of blue aftershock. I’m not sure what to do if they return an independant candidate though…
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Posted: November 4th, 2008 under blog.
Tags: comics, elections, fist bump