Presidential Comics?
Posted by irrg
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with these two books. A comic… about politicians. Oh boy. But hey, Obama has put out two books just on himself and his ideas, who’s to say a 22 pager about him can’t fly? And McCain, hey, the man’s lived for 200 years, that’s 10 years per page!
So, with a little bit of reluctance, I went in and read these two books.
The Obama book was probably the clearest in it’s “main characters” motivation. Obama’s story was told from his childhood to now, with the story starting on the eve of his greatest defeat in the battle against the evil Skele, er, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Obama’s story is told, with fairly little sidetracking for skeletons in the closet and whatnot. Art is decent, prose is decent, but it didn’t leave me feeling much in the end.
McCain’s 400 years among mortals are told starting with his POW years, hopping to his teenage years and moving onward from there. The story feels like it’s pointing out some serious character flaws in McCain without feeling like “liberal news media”; it’s all known stuff, including McCain ending at the bottom of his 855 student class at the Navy Academy. His divorce is treated fairly objectively, without much judgement; in fact, in both books, judgement is left to the reader. Art, again, decent, but neither book had much to write home about.
All in all, good reads if you want to do more than listen to TV commercials. The books by each respective candidate would ofcourse make for a more in depth experience than anything like this.
The one thing that bothers me though is unrelated to the political aspect of these books; It’s the design/lettering on these books. Lettering is fairly bland, looking very mid-90s indie book and not very refined in any way. Credits in the back of the book seem to be set in Times New Roman. I’m not sure what IDW is doing with it’s design direction; Transformers books also are a far cry from the tech-savvy-looking design of the Dreamwave books. It seems that only the Ashley Wood books are really well thought out from a design POV; most likely, this is thanks to the awesome design work of Tom Muller. I wouldn’t mind seeing IDW step up its game here.
