A POTUS Among Us: In Obama, Comics Fans Spy a Fellow Traveler

by Glen Weldon

So yeah, as previously noted, there was this article in Britain's Daily Telegraph, entitled "Barack Obama: The 50 Facts You Might Not Know." Here's another fact you might not know: That article created a bit of a stir last week among one specific and defiantly geeky sector of the populace.

Across the vasty funnybook blogosphere, that article's very first item — just eight little words — sent hearts to fluttering, tongues to wagging and computer pixels to ... um, doing whatever it is that computer pixels do. Phosphoring, let's say.

The eight little words? "He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics."

Actually, it wasn't all eight of those words. It was just the second one.

Collects.

That one verb sent a thrill up the leg of many a funnybook fan, and got us parsing away like so many Talmudic scholars. (If Talmudic scholars wore XXL X-Men tees.)

To wit:

Well, let's just start with that verb tense. As in: Present! As in: Continues-to-this-very-day!

To say nothing of the word choice itself. To collect, after all, is a fundamentally different prospect than, say, to read. Because packed neatly inside collect is the notion of cataloging, of alphabetizing by publisher, title or lead character.

The word collect is redolent of the chase, of the perpetual, never-to-be-slaked thirst for completeness that is the very engine of full-on geekery.

So yeah, it's an intriguing prospect, a fanboy POTUS; I get that.

But I hereby caution my geek brethren and sistren to curb the collective enthusiasm until we know more.

After the jump: We coldly examine the evidence ...

Let's consider the source. This is the print press we're talking about, and ink-stained wretches as a species have a long and inglorious history of misunderstanding comics, not to mention who reads them and why.

Their grasp on the medium is a tragically ham-fisted one, if we gauge by the sheer, maddening regularity with which the words "POW!" and/or "ZAP!" continue to turn up in newspaper headlines.

So the assertion in question remains, at least in my mind, seriously in question, lacking anything that resembles sourcing.

In a few days we'll likely discover that the Telegraph overstated the President-elect's fondness for the form. Maybe the guy just really dug the Tobey Maguire flicks (the first two, anyway), or the Schwarzenegger flicks (the first two, anyway). Or maybe he's still got some old Spideys in storage somewhere.

Or maybe one night Obama, exhausted from a particularly grueling series of campaign stops across the Midwest, just poured himself a glass of wine, fired up his laptop and starting poking around eBay to see if any of the comic books he remembered from his childhood were floating around. He certainly wouldn't be the first non-geek who found himself induced to click Buy It Now by the heady mixture of nostalgia and Pinot Noir.

Whatever the truth behind Obama's comic-book connections, I do understand why so many of my fellow comics geeks seized upon that article.

(The tireless, unsinkable Heidi MacDonald, she of the go-to funnybook-industry blog The Beat, has been all
over this. Some of her commenters have even gone all Doris Kearns Goodwin on us, offering up historical overviews of the relationship between comics and chief executives.)

In the end, I expect, we embraced the prospect of Barack Obama as Geek in Chief because it jibed with what our guts have been telling us.

Oh, yes, we've had our eye on him for a while. We've suspected.

There were the outward physical trappings: the skinniness. The ears. And then there was that suspicious name-checking he did on the stump.

Perhaps, we thought, these were more than just cultural references. Maybe he was sending us coded signals. Maybe name-dropping Jor-El was, to us geeks, what invoking the "culture of life" was to the religious right.

As to the question of what, exactly, a preference for characters like Spider-Man and Conan might say about his psyche -- that's a topic for another day, although we've touched on the general subject before.

And anyway, I'm gonna need a little more confirmation before I set about reading those particular tea leaves. Because, frankly, it's difficult to see that specific combination of characters and come away thinking: Hope.

I'm afraid that particular dynamic duo reads more: Narcissitic/adolescent self-pitying wish fulfillment (Spider-Man) with overtones of bloodlust and hypersexualized misogyny (Conan the Barbarian).

So, you know: Developing ...

Be that as it may, and even though the jury's still out on whether Obama really belongs among us, my people are making the necessary preparations, just in case he does.

We've got the goblet of wine for the initiation ceremony already poured. And just to be on the safe side, we've started going over the lyrics.