New York is a “safe state” in the U.S. Presidential election: it predictably goes for one party (Democrats) the vast majority of the time and there is no believable data to indicate that it will go otherwise today.
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So with New York Comic Con having taken place just a month before the Presidential election, we heard from a few comic book fans that they intended to vote for Beth Ross — the “corndog girl” from DC Comics’s Prez, as a write-in protest vote for President.
Prez writer Mark Russell urges his fans not to do so.
“I would say don’t waste your vote. Please consider your vote seriously,” said Russell, who also writes The Flintstones, which itself had an election-themed issue last week. “That’s kind of what the election issue in The Flintstones is about: it’s about taking your vote seriously and really thinking about the mistakes of the past and the outcomes of the future when you’re casting your vote. It might be fun to throw away your vote on a write-in candidate, but like it or not, the outcomes of elections have real-world consequences for real people.”
He acknowledged that in a way it would be funny if “Corn Dog Girl” got hundreds of write-in votes, but that those voters might regret their actions if those hundreds were to help swing the election the wrong way.
“So please, think about these things seriously when casting your vote,” he said. “Don’t treat the electoral process like it’s a joke, even though it might seem like it is sometimes.”
In the comics, Ross rose to prominence after a video of herself catching her hair on fire while training fast food employees how to cook corndogs went viral. A desperate political operative used her momentary fame to place her on the ballot to appeal to disaffected youth and people bored or angry enough at the existing political system to spend their vote on a laugh.
It’s not that surprising, then, that Russell wouldn’t be altogether excited that in the real world, there may be people in exactly that frame of mind who are willing to “Vote Prez to clean up this mess.”
Back when Prez first launched, ComicBook.com spoke with Russell about the series, and our first question (in those halcyon days of July 2015) was how Ross compared to Donald Trump, since both of them were stars of “unscripted” media.
“Really, I think that is the main attribute of social media, is that fame is no longer associated with any sort of accomplishment, and is incredibly temporary,” Russell said at the time. “But the effects of temporary fame can be long-term. If you tweet something horrible in flight, you’ll be fired by the time you get off the plane; your career will be ruined. We literally live in an era of trial by Facebook. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done criminally or not; if enough people see what you’ve done on Facebook, you are done. They will destroy you.”
Prez, for those who don’t remember, was a six-issue miniseries that was intended to be followed up by a second six-issue series. After sales didn’t live up to expectations, though, that second miniseries was cancelled and last week, Russell was given the space of a single backup story in Catwoman: Election Night to finish Beth Ross’s story.
As to how he managed to get everything he wanted across in those 8 pages, he said simply that you can’t do that.
“What I did was, I just picked a couple of short storylines and put them together because they made sense together,” Russell explained. “I didn’t worry about any of the backstory or pushing the central plot along. I just wanted to tell a simple story about a President who’s coming into her own. She’s figuring out how to use the system in the way it was designed, which is to say in an incomplete way. You compromise, lick your wounds when you lose and you salvage victories when you can.”
Fans who want to get a sense of Beth Ross’s first hundred days can pick up Catwoman: Election Night #1 at your local comic shop or on ComiXology.
