Prez Writer Mark Russell on the Hope and Humor of Beth Ross — And Why She’s Not Like Donald Trump

Writer Mark Russell and artist Ben Caldwell have taken DC Comics’ Prez — one of the silliest concepts in the history of silly Silver Age comics concepts — and turned it into a coolly subversive, self-aware comic full of one-liners and subtext.

It’s one of the better-reviewed titles of the DC You relaunch campaign, which began over the summer and rolled out twenty new #1 issues and more status quo shake-ups for DC.

Russell joined ComicBook.com during Comic-Con International: San Diego last month to talk about Prez, the DC You relaunch and, of course, everyone’s favorite viral political sensation, Donald Trump.

Prez #3 is on the stands and available on ComiXology today.

So you’re writing a comic book about a YouTube embarrassment who becomes a serious Presidential contender, just as reality star Donald Trump has gone on a shock and awe campaign to make himself a Presidential candidate. That has to be some kind of sign, right?

Um, yeah. He’s just human excrement, isn’t he?

On the one hand, I kind of admire that he’s honest and just says that first thing that comes into his gullet, but on the other hand, everything he thinks is so reprehensible and it’s not so much that he thinks it that bothers me; it’s that I know there’s millions of people out there who are thinking the same thing, who just aren’t rich enough to be honest about it. It bothers me that he kind of exposes this dirty underseam in American political life.

And also, just the entitlement that he thinks he’s great at this because he inherited $500 million, which he then parlayed into a reality show. That makes him a genius!

There was a lot that happened in that first issue, but it was primarily world-building, rather than focusing on the one central plot of the election. Do you think that gives you a little more gas going forward?

Yeah. What I didn’t want to do was give the sort of Mork and Mindy introduction, where there’s like one panel that explains she becomes President and then she jumps right into it. For me, power is about a journey. I wanted to talk about the politics of our electoral system and I wanted to show her sort of go from somebody who has no power, who’s just working in this corn dog stand and has no money or anything, and yet grows into the most powerful person on the planet. This sort of reluctant Messiah story, as opposed to just “Alright, now she’s President.”

You really get to know people before they have power, before they have everything at their feet, which I think maybe is why Donald Trump comes across as so shallow; he’s never had to make that journey. He had that Mork and Mindy opening to his life where he just had all this money dumped on him and he’s been Donald Trump ever since. I didn’t want that to be the case with Beth Ross. I wanted her to be a genuine human being who had to develop into being a leader.

I think it’s interesting that this first arc could go the other way and she could easily become a terrible person.

I think there’s always that potential for somebody, when you’re given power. It largely depends on how that person wants to use it, which is why we’re so distrustful of high concentrations of power.

But what I wanted to show with this was more like how somebody who didn’t owe favors, somebody who hadn’t been brought up in the corrupt political system, how they could use that power to solve some long-term problems. They’re not constantly worried about the problem of re-election, so maybe they could turn around to see the rest of us and help us out.

The reason I obviously say that up front is that there is this through-line of when you look at Prez, the idea is that you don’t have to be famous for anything good, but you have to be famous in that moment to capture the public’s attention.

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.

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.

On the other hand, it allows people to organize and to communicate. It’s really broken down the gatekeepers of information. There’s no way you can bomb somebody in Yemen and keep it a secret anymore, because of social media. So it’s a double-edged sword and really, I think what this comic is about, is about the implications of a world where you no longer have privacy, you are instantly judged, and yet the gatekeepers are still trying to maintain their power. And how do you break them down to allow the good sort of ramifications of this new, interconnected, social media world to germinate?

What went into the decision to use existing brand names for things like Twitter and Facebook and things instead of going with a DC generic? There’s been some discussion about “will Facebook really be around in twenty years?” and all that.

That’s a question everybody’s asked me, but I wanted to use something everybody would recognize. If I called it like Instabook or something, everybody might not get what it did, but Twitter, everybody knows what it’s there to do.

Also, I think people make assumptions based on the fact that we’re in the infancy of social media. The first ten, twenty years of any industry, there are all these players who come and go. Look at the automotive industry; there were Studebakers and all these different auto companies, then at some point it consolidates. A few successful brands destroy their competitors and they consolidate buyers.So I think it’s very possible that Twitter will be around in twenty years if they manage to destroy other social media.

In fact, there’s a reference in an upcoming issue of Prez to the tenth anniversary of the end of the social media wars. It’s like, “We’d like to congratulate Twitter for its victory in the social media wars, and we’d also like to take this opportunity to mourn for the ten million dead.” So this is very much a part of the fabric of the mythology of the comic — that Twitter prevails as a social media, and becomes a lot more powerful and in a way a lot darker as a force.

The other side of that is, even if you’re wrong in that, the original Prez was dated in a lot of ways too but the actual story holds up pretty well.

Yeah, I’m not trying to be right. 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.

Kind of like Transmetropolitan.

Yeah. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m making fun of somebody who’s just like you, in the future.”

What do you think are the biggest things you took away from the original Prez?

What I really loved about the original Prez was its energy; every page was a left turn. You never know what’s going to go on from one page to the next. I thought if I could combine that energy with a serious meditation on power, it could be something sort of special.

There’s a lot in this book that reminds me of a film like Bob Roberts, that focuses on the idea of politics as theater.

Yeah. It is artifice. Politics is kind of a shell game. You say three or four different things to different people depending on what you think they want to hear, and you have to guess which one the real opinion is under. It really is the art of creative lying.

That said, it’s still a DC Universe book. When you were pitching this, did you tell them that you didn’t want to have to tone down and generic brand everything?

Yeah. They gave me great latitude to do what I want. I think what they liked about this when I pitched it to them, was the fact that it was not trying to be a generic, PC, comic book approach to the subject. It’s something a little edgier and more serious. I think that’s what appealed to them about the project.

Is this kind of bluntness and politics something that carries through from the rest of your work?

It’s kind of a through-line that I carry through from the rest of my life. I try to be honest and amusing at the same time, which usually helps if you’re honest.

I got this job because of a book I’d written called God is Disappointed In You, which is a short and funny version of the Bible. At DC, they really liked that book apparently so they contacted me about Prez. But it’s not a voice, a style, it’s how I approach the world and I hope I bring that to everything