A Fan-Favorite DC Series Is Getting Re-Released as a YA Graphic Novel
2016's Prez is headed back into print in June.
A new edition of DC's Prez is on the way. On Thursday, the publisher announced plans to reprint their 2016 Prez series from Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell as a young-adult graphic novel. Titled Prez: Setting a Dangerous President, the reprint will collect all six issues of the main Prez series, as well as a new original story from the creative team. It will also include additional short story from 2016's Catwoman: Election Night one-shot, as well as a DC You's Sneak Peek of the series. Prez: Setting a Dangerous President arrives in all participating comic book shops, bookstores, and mass-market retailers and e-tailers Tuesday, June 4.
Prez, which was Russell's first work for DC, took the 1973 title Prez: First Teen President of the U.S.A. — which followed the exploits of teen president Prez Rickard — and turned it into a frank and impossibly-earnest satire. The series even featured multiple allusions to its previous volume, including having Rickard in a supporting role.
"This one is more darkly satirical," Russell told ComicBook.com in 2015. "I'm not really going for camp or kitsch value at all. Plus, I think the original one was kind of guided by misgivings about youth culture. It was done in the Vietnam era, when 18 year-olds were just given the right to vote, and it was fueled by this paranoia of, 'Now that we've allowed the hippies to vote, what are they going to do to this country?' It never really panned out that way – 18 year-olds have had the vote for 40 years now and they never took over the way the original Prez foresaw. So my Prez is much more about how the country has declined because the youth revolution never happened. Now, there's finally somebody who is completely outside of politics, completely uninformed in the mistakes of the past, who gets the chance to try something new for once."
What Is Prez About?
Prez: Setting a Dangerous President introduces readers to fast-food worker Beth Ross, against the backdrop of a national meltdown and the 2046 presidential elections. Due to a hilarious combination of events and a video of Beth getting her hair caught in a deep fryer, the 19-year-old viral sensation known as "Corndog Girl" becomes the youngest commander-in-chief in United States history. In a nation where corporations can run for office, the poor are used as human billboards, and tacos are delivered by drone, is the social-media sensation ready for politics, and is politics ready for her?
"I'm not trying to be right," Russell told ComicBook.com in a 2015 interview. "In fact, I hope I'm wrong about everybody in this comic. I hope somebody reads it twenty years from now and says, 'This guy didn't know what the hell he was talking about,' because that means we would have made some good changes in the world. I really write more for the future to be commentary on the present. I want to tell people what I think about the present without then getting defensive about it, so how I do that is by setting it twenty years in the future and using people they don't recognize."
What do you think of DC re-releasing Prez as a graphic novel? Will you be picking up Prez: Setting a Dangerous President? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
As mentioned above Prez: Setting a Dangerous President will be released in participating stores on Tuesday, June 4th.