Panel Vision - Comic Book Presidents

In case you aren’t one of my American readers, and I know you exist thanks to blogger’s analytics page, we over here in the states are currently in the midst of a fairly crazy presidential election build up.  We haven’t started the primaries yet but they’re looming ever closer and it’s been a wild ride punctuated by a slew of hilariously awful Republican candidates and the still ludicrous convolution of the Democratic leads.  I’ve already released a number of articles capitalizing on this particular election cycle so here’s another one because if you think the real life candidates are insane…well you’re right but here are a bunch of completely weird and out there superheroes and villains who somehow managed to take the highest office in the land against the better judgment of the electorate and editors everywhere.

SUPERMAN

The fact that Superman has been elected president isn’t all that surprising, what is kind of surprising is that he’s been elected president 3 different times across 3 different eras of comics.  His first stint in the oval office comes from my favorite era of comics: the ‘70s.  I’ve mentioned before that what I love about the ‘70s is that they still had the crazy out there concepts of the ‘60s but they treated them with a greater degree of adult storytelling than the one-offs and just for fun nonsense of the Silver Age.  In the case of this story the idea is that Superman suffers amnesia and forgets he’s really Clark Kent so crafts a new identity as the President.  Okay, the mechanics of him becoming President are a little sketchy but I’ll accept it as an excuse to get Superman in the white house. 

Grant Morrison actually used a similar set-up when he was fleshing out the parallel reality of Earth-23, a world where the predominance of Earth’s superheroes are black.  Their Superman has the secret identity of Calvin Ellis, America’s president.  In case the parallel wasn’t clear enough a lot of online fans have taken to dubbing this character “Obama-Man,” not that it’s an unfair nickname.  Superman’s final stint in the oval office that I know of comes from the bane of DC Comics’ history Armageddon 2001. 

Armageddon 2001 was an ‘80s event about a possible future where DC’s heroes were betrayed by one of their own, it’s a decent comic that had the ending spoiled by a leak at a time when that kind of thing never happened.  However, even if the main story ended up garbage because of the leak the tie-ins, which featured a bunch of weird jumps forward in hero’s history, were pretty cool and in one it was revealed Superman’s most likely future was becoming President of the US and I do mean Superman.  Unlike the other two cases, here Superman actually ran as his superhero persona and won.  The best part of the comic is seeing him employ his super powers mid diplomatic meeting while world leaders have to address him as “President Superman.” 

LEX LUTHOR

And we see there is nothing Superman can posses that Lex Luthor cannot also posses during a different period of continuity.  I’m willing to bet that some readers probably already knew Luthor was once President thanks to the DC animated movie Public Enemies, which was actually a pretty decent approximation of Luthor’s misspent time in the oval office.  The idea to make Luthor president is actually a pretty smart call, a nice extension of the ’87 Superman comic’s idea that Luthor should posses power equal and inverse to Superman.  So, while Superman has amazing physical ability Luthor got incredible wealth and business power so extending that to becoming President is the next logical step. 

I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that Superman, a reporter, would just let Luthor get elected President when he knows Lex has been perpetrating unspeakable evil for decades now but the idea of him being President is at least fundamentally sound and it happened to hit right around the time of the 2000 election when political disenfranchisement was kind of a big thing.  Unfortunately that same timing doomed the idea as after 9/11 one year later nobody really wanted stories about an evil US government so Luthor’s role as president got quietly swept under the rug.  He popped up during some incredibly forgettable event comics like Our Worlds At War but for the most part his presidency was a dud, though it is kind of funny that even though he ended up dawning his green and purple power armor to fight Batman and Superman during his last days in office, what actually got Luthor impeached was that he was using steroids.  It’s always the little things.

WONDER WOMAN

I’ve discussed this cover before but in case you missed it here’s the deal.  Wonder Woman was invented by a trio of polyamorous radical gender psychologists attempting to create their perfect vision of the kind of modern woman who had the power to match her male peers but her greatest strength were her feminine qualities like kindness and compassion.  The three, led by Will Marston, literally considered Wonder Woman propaganda for their idea of the new woman that, they felt, should rule the world so it makes a good amount of sense they had her do just that in her 7^th appearance. 

The story is pretty amazing, mainly revolving around Wonder Woman running for president rather than BEING President but she still wins in the end meaning that 2/3rds of DC’s big name heroes have served as commander in chief.  The only DC mega hero who hasn’t held the office is Batman weirdly enough, which I think is more about DC not wanting to slip it’s dark knight into the role of public servant.  Though Bruce Wayne did serve as a Supreme Court judge in the elseworlds story Whom Gods Destroy but that’s a story for another time. 

CAPTAIN AMERICA/IRON MAN/THOR

Yes, all of them have been President just not at the same time.  Captain America is the closest to a legitimate President as he served as President of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, a parallel publishing line started in 2001 based around streamlining Marvel’s characters for a modern audience.  However, after 10 years the goal of “a universe without cumbersome back-story” gave way to an insane amount of back-story as evidenced by the fact Captain America briefly served as President there but not in the main comics.  Marvel recently did away with the Ultimate Universe, mainly because of the issue with too much baggage and that very little in it really caught on with audiences save for Miles Morales.  It got destroyed in an event called Secret Wars, which is where a whole ton of Marvel alternate universes were mashed together into a patchwork world and one such universe featured President Tony Stark. 

In this world, Marvel’s Civil War event raged on for years and years to the point America became literally split in half between the blue on the west side and the Iron on the east.  Even though both Steve and Tony served as leaders Tony was much more official as President of the Iron, which was sort of a techno-police state given Tony’s weird ethos of security over liberty during the event.  Steve was above all others in the Blue but it’s not like he made laws or talked with other world leaders, mainly because the Blue was a lawless wasteland that valued total freedom.  

Then there’s Thor who was President in an alternate version of the Ultimate comics universe (are we seeing why the Ultimate’s goal of a continuity-free comic line failed so hard?)  In President Thor’s reality he made a deal with the shape shifting alien race the Skrull to get something called “Skrull Pills” that would grant super powers to anyone who took them.  Turns out trusting the conniving and secretive alien monsters was a big mistakes as the Skrull Pills were actually poison the Skrulls used to murder the entire human population and President Thor.  As you can probably tell President Thor is the worst President on this list. 

DR. DOOM

It’s a list about superheroes and supervillains who somehow took the highest office in the land, you had to know Dr. Doom would be on here.  Honestly I’d be more concerned if Dr. Doom hadn’t ever managed his way into the presidency, it’s one of the core super villain schemes.  What’s actually more impressive is that he’s been made President twice and one of them is still in continuity.  The first time Doom became President was in the already reviewed comic series Emperor Doom, in which he used the mind control powers of Zebediah ‘Purple Man’ Killgrave to get the entire world to just vote him leader.  I admit this isn’t exactly the same as President but given he chose to set himself up in the oval office after branding it with all his DOOM logos makes it close enough for me to fudge. 

The second time Doom became President he actually won in a general election, by popular vote, that he didn’t rig.  That means that the people of both DC and Marvel universes are so incredibly jaded and unengaged with the political system they BOTH elected super villains president because “eh, all politicians are crooks, they’re just more honest.”  Doom’s second stint in the white house comes from Marvel 2099, a future setting that explored the world of Marvel comics about 100 years in the future.  It’s a pretty well realized series about the cyber punk dystopia that the Earth becomes, crushed under the heal of the monolithic Alchemax corporation.  Alchemax’s global dominance actually ends up making Dr. Doom a defacto hero of this world, the only world leader still powerful enough to resist the machinations of Alchemax, so when he runs for President he’s elected in a landslide based solely on his platform of fighting the world’s largest corporation. 

HAL JORDAN

We’re getting down to the bottom of the barrel now but it’s still pretty impressive that Hal Jordan, test pilot, once served as President of the United States.  This was in another elseworlds comic that eventually got folded into the DC Multiverse called Generations.  The idea of the comic was that it followed the lives of Batman and Superman starting their careers in the ‘30s then aging and forming a family in real time.  It’s a great comic but one of the stranger aspects of it was that Hal Jordan just popped as President later in the series.  It’s never explained how he transitioned from a reckless army dropout turned test pilot into a career politician capable of actually winning the general election but at the same time we’ve demonstrated it’s way easier to elected president in comic book universes.  He does end up getting the Green Lantern ring around the end of the 2^nd run of stories in the trilogy, with the ring returning his youth somehow.  He also serves out the remainder of his term as President before becoming the US governments secret weapon for superhuman threats though we don’t get to see it unfortunately. 

TIN MAN/AMERICAMANDO

Okay confession time: part of the reason I created this list was to talk about these amazing bozos.  One of the weird things about comics is that sometimes you’ll get writers stuck at one company wanting to tell a story with heroes owned by someone else.  To accomplish this they make up analogs heroes, like how Marvel’s Moon Knight was literally invented to be discount Batman by world’s biggest Batman fan Doug Moench.  That’s the origin of the incredibly weird subsection of DC history referred to as Lord Havok and the Extremist, a group of transparent Marvel knock-offs living in an incredibly transparent knock-off of the Marvel universe.  Lord Havok’s cadre of characters has held a place in fan lore forever now more because they were a late addition to DC’s multiverse and one of the few original universes rather than just a holding pin for purchased characters.  As a result, whenever DC recreates its Multiverse these guys tend to pop up. 

So, in 2007 when DC was redeveloping its brief lived 2^nd Multiverse they showed up in a mini-series called Lord Havok and the Extremists.  In it, the Lord Havok universe was altered to better reflect Marvel’s Civil War, because everything in modern comics comes back to Civil War.  So in this new world Tin Man, the Iron Man stand in, ended the Civil War by being elected President only to be brutally assassinated by Lord Havok causing the Presidency to pass to his opponent Americamando.  The whole comic is really insane and ridiculous and I’ll probably come back to it somewhere down the line cause it deserves a whole review but Americamando is probably the height of the books insanity.  As what I think is a jab at Marvel, Americamando is depicted as a hard drinking, hard drugging, prostitute screwin’ President who basically doesn’t do anything beyond drink, snort, and screw his way through the day as his VP Blue Jay (hi, not-Antman) runs the country.  Oh and he’s sleeping with Blue Jay’s wife, just to really cement the awfulness.  Okay, President Thor is still the most incompetent President but Americamando is just the worst.

GONZO THE MECHANICAL BASTARD

Looks like I spoke too soon.  We don’t have time to get into the circumstances that hoisted Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard upon us all so I’ll just break down his weird, weird deal.  Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard started life as a fetal probe pushed into the DC Comics main dimension after a massive explosion destroyed the city of Bludhaven and tore a rip in space time.  He was basically adopted by the villainous Colonel Sanders looking bad guy Father Time and quickly absorbed every scrap of human knowledge in existence.  Then Gonzo grew into a machine man because logic has no place in this story.  After using his bio-mechanical parts to assume the identity of Senator Knight Gonzo got himself elected as part of an evil plot to inject everyone in the US with mind control chips as part of priming the Earth for an invasion by Darkseid, God of Evil from Apocalypse.  I kid you not, Gonzo is literally described as the construct of the Mathmagicians of the anti-life equation.   

To be fair, all this insanity could’ve worked in the hands of its original creator Grant Morrison but given the series this came out of, Uncle Sam & The Freedom Fighters, was being constructed from Morrison’s notes I’m not surprised it all went as wrong as it did.  Gonzo especially is one of the most “could’ve worked” elements of the story, a hyper-violent gross android sociopath feels like the kind of thing Morrison could write in his sleep but here it just comes off as more stupid jabs at being edgy or adult.  It also doesn’t help that nothing Gonzo did was ever acknowledged elsewhere and as far as the main DC Universe is concerned this whole thing never happened. 

PREZ RICKARDS/CORN DOG GIRL

I’ve spoken at length about the amazing 1973 voting PSA turned surreal political comedy Prez but it’s still worth noting that the guy who created Captain America once wrote an entire comic where a teenager was elected President and then fought vampires and living chess pieces and the bizarre ‘70s equivalent of the Tea Party.  It’s an insane romp that’s full of all kinds of amazing insanity like a living fleshy smiley face or the descendant of George Washington invading the White House with an army of historical re-enactors.  Most of DC chose to forget Joe Simon’s craziness ever happened but earlier this year as part of DC You Mark Russell brought the series back for a sequel/reboot thing. 

This new version is less about the kind of unrestrained madness that punctuated the original comic and more of a straightforward speculative farce on society as a whole with a particularly political bent.  It’s a great series, swapping in Beth the Corndog Girl as our new President instead of Prez Rickards.  The idea is that in the future we all vote using twitter so when Beth becomes a meme after getting her hair caught in a deep friar (yes, really) she ends up winning enough electoral college votes to luck her way into the presidency.  That kind of crazy, Idiocracy-esc randomness is a big part of the books great appeal and it actually does a good job recreating elements of the original like Boss Smiley.  Prez Rickards is also in the comic too though they’re playing pretty fast and loose with whether or not he actually served as President.  This might seem like a real failure, America voting for a meme, but given we’ve elected super villains, Norse Gods, alien beings in capes, and freaky fetal robots Corn Dog Girl is honestly a step up. 


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