TALES FROM THE BULLY PULPIT

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Monday, September 13, 2004

So, Teddy Roosevelt steals a time machine from H.G. Wells no, this isn't the beginning of a joke, so hush and he takes it forward to the year 2000 where he meets the ghost of Thomas Edison, who fixes it so it can travel in time and space. Then they travel to Argentina in the year 2008, where Jorge Hitler, the descendant of the Nazi leader, has concocted a scheme to invade Mars and join with the green-skinned Martians to purge the inferior blue-skinned Martians...

OK, maybe it is the beginning of a joke, though if TALES FROM THE BULLY PULPIT is a joke, it's an incomplete one. Far be it from me to disagree with the likes of Brian K. Vaughan and Phil Hester, both of whom praise this book in their back cover blurbs, but I'm far more inclined to go with Robert Kirkman, whose celebratory blurb starts with "I've read [this book] nine times now and I still can't make heads or tails of it." He concludes that it's "ONE OF THE BEST COMICS EVER MADE" [emphasis his...or BULLY PULPIT's editor, perhaps], but I conclude it's just confusing. Even comedy needs a few base concepts that we can accept or which we're willing to spend our disbelief over. BULLY PULPIT, on the other hand, throws us the initial curve ball that Teddy Roosevelt would want to travel in time, without ever explaining why, then throws in the "fact" that he steals the time machine from Wells (who, as we all know from the movie TIME AFTER TIME, also built the time machine he wrote about), then tosses in Thomas Edison for good measure. The silliness of Roosevelt time traveling would have been enough, probably, but this book tries to outdo itself with each new outlandish concept, so that by the time we get to a future Argentina ruled by Jorge Hitler and the final battle (which we don't actually see) between historical good guys Theseus(?), Marcus Tullius Cicero, Paul Bunyan, and Ben Franklin and their evil counterparts Julius Caesar, Mao Tse Tung, his feline interdimensional counterpart Chairman Meow...oh, good grief, surely you've got the picture by now. By the time we get there, there's simply so much zaniness that it loses any effect it had. BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE this is not.

And yet...amidst all this free form frivolity, there are glimpses of intelligence at work, both in the script and in the artwork. When Teddy and Edison land in the Nazi-controlled Argentina, for example, they walk down a street populated by people in SS uniforms, S&M wear...and a guy in a MAUS-style mouse head, complete with a Star of David pendant. There's a dirty movie theater called Der Jizzenhaus playing the movies AMERICAN HISTORY XXX and DAS BUTT, while on the wall across from it is a "Wanted" poster with the face of no less than Indiana Jones. And when they finally meet Jorge Hitler, his mixing of Spanish and German ends up being one of the funniest parts of the book especially if you already have a smattering of both languages. Again, BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE this is not but for a different reason.

I suspect that if you can suspend your disbelief long enough to accept everything Cereno throws at you, then BULLY PULPIT will be entertaining enough but not at $6.95 for a single one-shot. I'm not sure what's gotten into Image here, but a story like this could've been released as a two- or three-issue miniseries, with each issue being regularly priced. Then we'd have the illusion of a better deal, anyway.

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