I'm going to be staying on Joe Simon for one more day.

Yesterday I said that I really enjoyed the awesome weirdness of Brother Power the Geek but I can't say the same about Prez. You would expect a comic like Brother Power to be surreal but I wasn't expecting Prez to be even stranger.

Prez Rickard ends up benefiting from a new Constitutional Amendment that dramatically lowers the age of presidential eligibility by becoming the first teenage president of the United States. There is a whole lot you can do with that concept. Maybe it will turn out that Prez's youthful enthusiasm is effective and just what the country needs. Or maybe his inexperience and naivety will come back to bite him. Or maybe he gets attacked by the upper torso of a vampire rolling around on a piece of wood with wheels. Wait, hold on.... What??? Yeah, look at the cover of issue 4. That really happens. And that was the problem with the series. Simon doesn't capitalize on the concept. There is no political message in a comic about a 19 year old president. He just puts Prez in increasingly bizarre peril.

People occasionally joke that comic writers and animators in 60's and 70's were all on drugs. I would never suggest that the 60 year old (at the time) Joe Simon was on something but it would explain a lot. This series is WEIRD. Jack Kirby, who was working at DC at the time, also had a different perspective on the world and his writing could be a bit uique but Kirby was able to channel his creativity, and keep it together. Prez is just off the charts and it's cancellation after four issues is likely the result of its out of control writing rather than some conspiracy on the part of editors.

I can't say I recommend this one. It's more disappointing than bad. I like comics that are different but there should be at least some rules even in a alternate comic universe.

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