Obama & McCain comics

Today IDW released an Obama biography comic book and a McCain biography comic (there's also a flip book that has both under one binding).

Except for the covers (and your milage may differ on that depending on whether you like cover artist, J Scott Campbell's new too much like bad caricature art style), both of these comics are good primers of both of the 2008 Presidential candidates.

The Obama comic is written by Jeff Mariotte and drawn by Tom Morgan. I thought the art was fine, but I wish someone like Paul Gulacy would have been available or interested. I hadn't read Obama's two books so wasn't real familiar with his background other than what I'd read about him and his mother (an interesting person, sadly she died in 1995) in Time magazine. As any even semi- regular reader of my blog knows, I was already going to vote for Obama, but reading this comic about Obama's history would have sold me if my mind wasn't already made up.

The McCain comic was written by Andy Helfer and drawn by Stephen Thompson. The art here is fine, more photo-realistic than the art in the Obama comic, except sometimes it comes across as too static (whereas the art in the Obama comic is sometimes too cartoony). I'd already known quite a bit about McCain (mostly from a Biography show on The History Channel), but this comic serves as a good overview of how McCain got to where he is today (although if I was going to nitpick, even though I think a lot of McCain's life has been admirable and fascinating, sometimes it was a chore to read this comic because there was too many text captions per page). Anyway, I think McCain has led an interesting life (and obviously an especially difficult five years when he was tortured as a POW in Vietnam in the late 1960's), but I still don't think that makes him qualified to be President of the U.S.