And now for something completely awesome.

1/10/07

10. Tales from the Bully Pulpit



Here's a great comic you may have missed. Tales from the Bully Pulpit! Published by Image back in summer 2004. Written by Benito Cereno, drawn by Graeme MacDonald.

If you love comics that are "crazily brilliant," then Brian K. Vaughan, in his back-cover blurb, says this comic is for you. And Robert Kirkman thinks it's one of the best comics ever made. He may just be right.

Tales from the Bully Pulpit is a 64-page romp through time and space, starring Teddy Roosevelt and the ghost of Thomas Edison. It starts when Teddy steals H.G. Wells' time machine:



Then he goes to find Edison. Only Edison's dead. But it's okay, because he's still around as a ghost and stuff. Then they team up and go into the future to save Mars from Hitler. Seriously.



Hitler (or more accurately, his descendant, half-Spanish and half-German and speaking in a gobbled mess of English, Spanish, and German... I guess it's Gerspanglish), built an escalator to Mars and has started to exterminate the blue Martians (he's teamed up with the green ones). So it's Roosevelt and Edison to the rescue!

We get a couple badass moments along the way from the former president:





Then they go and kick ass, with the help of several famous figures from the past (Hitler's brought his own along, too. It's a big ol' fight).

Like I said, this comic is awesome. MacDonald's got a great art style. The dialogue is witty, the situations are bizarre and hilarious, and there's quite a few moments where one feels the urge to thrust one's fist into the air and shout "@#$%& yeah!"



If you thought that was cool, you should see the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness reference.

So if you find it, buy it. Of course, there aren't any copies on eBay, and the mofo is going for eighty bucks on Amazon. It only cost seven bucks when it came out. This thing's probably as obscure as copies of Flex Mentallo. And that's a shame, because this comic is great.

Here are a couple cool articles on the book for you to read, courtesy of Newsarama:

A preliminary interview with Benito Cereno

Creator annotations! And sketches! Mighty awesome stuff.

They announced a sequel way back when. It never came out. But I demand it. Lo, Bill has spoken.

Bully!