The Four Color Media Monitor

Comicbook.com found the following thought balloon about Barack Obama among all the balloons flooding the cover of the premiere issue of the new take on Valiant's Harbinger:
And says:

The Harbinger #1 cover features a character who is capable of reading the minds of those around him. Of the numerous thoughts displayed on the cover, one says, “Obama is destroying this country.” It might very well be the first anti-Obama message to ever appear on a comic book cover.

While this in itself is flattering, there's one drawback: in this Comic Book Bin interview from March with writer Joshua Dysart:

AF: Several of your previous projects, especially the late great Unknown Soldier for DC Comics’ Vertigo line, have strong humanitarian and political themes. Can we expect to see a healthy dose of this intelligent type of commentary in Harbinger?

Joshua: Yes, but not in the same way. Unknown Soldier was fueled by a sort of anger and even, in the beginning, incomprehension, on my part. And I think that's writ large in the book. It's a war book and I could never ever portray war as anything other than a horror-show or a joke and still sleep with myself at night. Harbinger gives me more room to move. More room to have fun. So yeah, it's unquestionably about corporate dominance, the baby-boomers fucking up everything for the rest of us, the struggle for social control between generations, protests movements and the economic upheaval we're seeing now. But that's less of an engine and more of a chassis, if you know what I mean.

AF: I completely get what you mean. What is it particularly about Harbinger though, as a comic book and concept, that appeals to you and is ripe for exploration of such themes?

Joshua: It's about kids just starting to use and discover their power to usurp adults who have all the power. I think that speaks to our time quite a bit. The occupy movement, the Arab spring, the global crisis of credit... in this country you have police using military tactics on civilians, you've got an environment in revolt and a collapsing monetary system. The truth is adults are leaving the kids a pretty shitty world. And the kids are pissed off about it. If I can get that into Harbinger, even a little bit, I'll be happy.

I hope he's not saying he'll turn the book into a leftist allegory along those lines. At best, what he's telling there is ambiguous, but if he's implying the Occupy movement's "goals" are throughly legitimate, or that the "Arab spring" is really leading to genuine improvements, that's where he stumbles. And unless he intends to write any allegories about corporations that allow their properties to be abused, as Time Warner and Disney are doing with DC and Marvel, I don't think he's setting out to do any good with the allegories he says are in store about "corporate dominance". It's always possible to tell stories about youngsters taking on evil adults who wish to exploit their talents for bad reasons, but if he's planning to make this into left-wing rhetoric, then he's only blowing it. If the new Archer & Armstrong could go this low, we can't be surprised if the new Harbinger ends up with similar problems.

I don't know anything about the artist he's working with named Khari Evans, but if he was the one who inserted that thought balloon on the cover, does that suggest he's a conservative? However, even if he's a leftist, and if Dysart is too, what it can tell is that of course even a leftist can say he/she is tired of a politician representing their side, though maybe not for the same reasons that a conservative can be.

Labels: indie publishers, politics