Vertigo Visions: Prez

Short Review: Well intentioned, but heavy-handed, look at the kids of today.

As you might guess from the full title (Prez: Smells like Teen President...) this 56-page special draws more than the occasional comparison between today's youth and the hippies of Prez's world. It fits the world's only teenage president into history as an extension of the sixties dreams, which went the same way as the Beatles and J.F.K, and left todays world darker by contrast. This is a challenging character to pick up, since Prez has already been given a revival at the hands of Neil Gaiman, and the resultant story, The Golden Boy, is one of the finest of the nineties so far.

So, this walking slacker/grunge cliche caller Prez Junior decides to follow a newspaper report of a sighting of Prez, who he believes to be his father, and brings two other slacker/grunge cliched dudes along with him. Along the way, as the blurb would have it, they find America, and at the end, Prez Junior gets a heapin' helpin' of preaching done at him, mostly about the ills of our society. The heart of this book is in the right place, and it's the first book to look at grunge from the outside, and talk about what the youth feels (which, by itself, makes it not a grunge book), but the pep-talk doesn't ring true, and some of the messages are hammered home more than strictly necessary. Of course, my unwillingness to take the lessons may just be a symptom of youth today.

Eric Shanower's art is clean throughout , even when its subjects aren't, and the decision to leave some scenes wordless bears great fruit. Incidentally, I'm not a grunge person (although I do slack with exceptional skill), but the constant swearing seemed more a quota effort by the author, than an attempt to depict real people.