Where’s Fredrick Wertham When You Need Him?

Sadly, No! grazed the ravings of Poster Girl for Overprocessed Hair and secret comic book nerd Debbie Schlussel, who is outraged that “Spider-Man is in the tank for Obama.”  During the campaign, the president-elect named Spider-Man and Batman as his favorite characters, and Marvel has rushed to exploit the endorsement, releasing an issue featuring an Obama cameo less than a week before the inauguration.  But Debbie is appalled by the company’s attempts to dupe direct market aficianados into buying multiple copies of this naked chunk of collector bait, and believes such crass commercialism has no place in an industry that was apparently founded to fight the Nazis.

Once, comic books were against Nazis and Hitler and were very up front in supporting America’s fight against them.  But those days are over.

Once again, Debbie goes where others fear to tread (whether for reasons of cowardice, self-respect, or a restraining order) and exposes Obama’s use of comic book characters to conceal his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood (although, to be fair, they only accepted his white half).

In the plot, the Chameleon tries to kill Barack Obama before he gets inaugurated–feeding into the BS narrative that Obama is a martyr-in-waiting more so than any other President.

This narrative, of course, depends on that old canard about there being a rash of attempted and successful political assassinations within living memory, and — and! — a history of racial violence in this country.  The incredible coincidence of events that would require both those things to be true — at the same time — strains probability until it’s just shy of popping a hernia.  In fact, Obama is less likely to be attacked than previous presidents; as a practicing Muslim, his fellow terrorists would hesitate to martyr him for fear they’d just be dispatching the guy straight to heaven and his 72 virgins.

Boy, I long for the days of Superman, Sgt. Fury, and other comic book superheroes fighting the Nazis . . . not sitting down to talk and eat wienerschnitzel with them or praising Presidents who want to do just that.

Screw that.  I long for the day when our Presidents were fighting the bad guys!  And not just Super-President, either:

From Toonopedia:

The basic idea was to go the 1960s TV cartoon Super President one better, putting presidential incumbent Ronald Reagan himself, along with several top members of his administration, in red, white and blue costumes like Captain America’s or The Shield’s, and sending them out to do superhero work among the rice paddies and sand dunes of America’s most hated enemies. This was accomplished by means of a technological marvel invented by a Professor Cashchaser, that gave the Raiders the bodies of young men (and instantly instilled commando training too, apparently).

The stories were just packed with the visceral thrills of seeing America’s Main Man in action. And that’s not all! They were also packed with amazingly dumb, campy references to Ron’s film career. This comic book version of Reagan seemed to have trouble distinguishing between movies and reality — which, of course, many political pundits would have thought made it true to life, if they’d been aware of the comic’s existence.

Reagan’s Raiders was about as successful as the rest of the Solson comics line. It lasted three issues, all published in 1987, and has since been seen mostly in “Best of the Worst” retrospectives.

It’s a wonder Ben Domenech and other Red White & Blue-diaper babies raised on Red Dawn didn’t use a small part of their allowances or trust funds to snap this title up at the time and make into a 3-color sensation, bigger than Mr. Muscles or even Brides in Love.  But comic books are not solely about presidents gaining superpowers or the support of superpowered partisans; sometimes the medium is used to send our children uplifting, conservative messages in a graphic, but tasteful way.

I saw this in a collectibles shop in Portland, and while I didn’t feel inclined to pony up $18 for the book, the subhead, “THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION” makes me think Debbie probably has this one securely bagged in mylar and resting snuggly between her mint copies of The Haunted Tank and Tintin in the Congo.

Posted by scott on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 4:50 pm.

It’s worth noting that Schlussel has claimed to be a comic book fan and expert in the past. However, her ‘expertise’ doesn’t extend past having a large collection of Wonder Woman images and comics on her computer.
Now, I’m not saying that this implies anything about Debbie…I’m just saying that she also seems to have a lot of pictures of barflies and stills from porno flicks as well. Just sayin’.

Left by D Johnston on January 10th, 2009