Continuing at our look at CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE, the Xerox-printed compilation of material that DC Comics wrote off in teh wake of the 1978 “DC Implosion” which saw 40% of their line cancelled and a number of staff members laid off. These stories were reproduced in this fashion so that DC could continue to hold the copyright to the works.
But CCC didn’t only contain books that were left unpublished due to the DC Implosion. Some additional material that had been lingering around the offices for a much longer period of time was similarly included and thus written off. This was the case with the next story in the collection, intended for publication as PREZ #5.
Even at the time it was created, PREZ was a profoundly weird comic book and a prime example of just how out of touch with the concerns of the company’s young readers it was in the early 1970s. The premise of the series was that the national voting age had been lowered to 18 (as had, apparently, the Presidential requirement) and so teenager Prez Rikard is sworn into office as the first teenaged President of the United States. Ostensibly, the series was meant to be satirical–but it comes across as simply being strange and tone-deaf in a lot of ways. Another DC product that showed that their staff of middle aged writers and editors simply didn’t get the younger generation.
PREZ was the creator of Joe Simon, a veteran comic book creator since the earliest days of the medium, and one with an unbeatable track record for coming up with hit concepts, typically in concert with his longtime partner Jack Kirby. Thinking that maybe Simon could come up with some new ideas for morbund DC, Publisher Carmine Infantino brought him into the fold and green-lit a number of Simon’s ideas. In addition to PREZ, there was CHAMPIONSHIP SPORTS, BLACK MAGIC (which reprinted 1950s material that Simon still had ownership of) and THE GREEN TEAM, among others. All of them were weird, none of them was much of a success, with the possible momentary exception of a new version of THE SANDMAN that Kirby was talked into illustrating.
Simon didn’t draw PREZ–that task he handed off to artist Jerry Gandenetti, with whom he’d worked for several years. Grandenetti’s work is chaotic and cluttered, often claustrophobic. It comes from a different tradition than the comic books of the period, owing more to the sort of humor found in MAD Magazine and its various copycats. It definitely created a sense of unreality around the strip–the images were so absurd that it was impossible to take any of the stakes seriously.
This story did eventually see print in a PREZ collection released in 2016, more than 40 years after it had been produced.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Prez was one of the first comics I ever read, coming across an issue at the local barbershop. Needless to say, I didn’t read another comic for four years.
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I’d say the reasoning behind PREZ is more comprehensible inside the Zeitgeist back then. Think of it as an early 70’s version of the style of writing in the original Silver Age Teen Titans. That is, the writers didn’t do it well, at all – but one can grasp what they were trying to do. It’s like the Super-Sons.
I still remember BLACK MAGIC. It was never going to be a runaway success. But I think it was reasonable on its own terms, as a reprint horror comic letting people cheaply read those types of stories, which weren’t easy available at the time.
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I remember this as selling fairly well and being around from 1973-’75.
It was nice to see older work that jack Kirby usually had a hand in (I think he was doing a lot of layouts, redrawing a panel or two and inking at Prize in that period).
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It lasted 9 issues — that doesn’t suggest it was selling well, not when it was that cheap to produce.
Kirby was doing more than layouts and redrawing back then, too. There’s a fair amount of Kirby writing and penciling in the original BLACK MAGIC run as well.
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Prez had a somewhat final appearance in Supergirl #10 that was published f(or some reason ) in late June of 1974, about 3 to 4 months after her book was cancelled and the strip got put into Superman Family,
The World again revisited being set on fire , , , ,
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I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that Simon’s Champion Sorts lasted three issues. Half as long as Schwartz’s Strange Sports Stories (which was somewhat pre-sold by the B7B series reprinted in a couple of DC Specials a few years before),
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Was that ever addressed as where it fit into continuity? A splinter timeline where Kara lived perhaps?
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I have no idea why I liked Prez so much when it came out.
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It was kind of weirdly and somewhat entertainingly deft (instead of just daft, like the Watergate hearings..
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During the late 60’s and early 70’s, as the Boomers were coming of age, there was a definite feeling among the youth that everything wrong with the world was caused by old people and if everyone just dropped acid, everything would be better. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was a real thing. Everyone over 30 was killed in Logan’s Run, a sci-fi movie from the time. Prez was ripped off from a 60’s movie, ‘Wild in the Streets’.” In the movie, the voting age is lowered to 14 and a rock star becomes President. Those over 45 are sent to reeducation camps and given LSD. Simon sanitized the concept for Prez.
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Wasn’t Logan’s Run originally 20 or 21?
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. . . in the source novel . . . .
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The Logan’s Run novel did indeed kill off everyone over 21. George Clayton Johnson, one of the authors, was a friend. He wrote an early draft of the screenplay. The producers thought that 21 was way too young for the upper limits of aging. The movie was filmed in Ft Worth, TX and the Water Gardens that featured prominently in the film are still there. Worth a look if you’re in the neighborhood
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There’s also the movie GAS! in which everyone over 25 dies and the surviving population starts dividing up into strange subcultures. Collectively I think of these creations as youthquake! stories.
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The committee hearing page is wonderful, full of detail.
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Grandenetti did a lot of odd (but interesting) DC work (Gunner & Sarge, the Specter with Murphy Anderson and Prez ). He was particularly remembered for his wash covers on Our Fighting Forces with Sol Harrison.
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I thought Prez was barking dog insane until I reread Brother Power.
Eagle Free is probably the worst part, a complete Native American stereotype. Although Simon still makes him loonier — in #1 he’s living out in nature, among his animal friends … who include zebras, lions and elephants. Classic indigenous animal relationships (not even the usual “escaped from a circus” explanation).
#3 though, with its portrayal of gun nuts willing to go to war to defend the second amendment, is remarkably prescient.
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