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Bogart, Craig – The Ineffables: Political Science

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The Ineffables: Political Science

I seem to have been wishy-washier than usual with my old reviews for these issues. Instead of blaming myself, I’ll just stick with the theory that Craig made a pretty big leap after the first couple of issues (neither of which are reprinted in this graphic novel), not that I was a dope who couldn’t recognize a good thing when he saw it. Granted, it is an odd concept for a comic. A team of heroes, comprised of a living work of art, a fringe journalist, a living totem with a giant head and Abe Lincoln (yes, THAT Abe Lincoln) team up to take on… concepts. Really, all the battles in here are against concepts. No big brawls, I’m not sure there was even a punch thrown in this one, except when Lincoln was fighting his giant mutant clone. It’s one of them there cerebral comics, meaning in this intellectually degraded time that you need to have a basic understanding of some of the core concepts of science and politics. The origin story here deals with an attempt by an advocate of intelligent design to mathematically prove that 0=1, which would destroy the working capacity of the world’s computers. The second issue, Patriot Act, has a conspiracy from the South that involves their decades-long secret plan to come up with the master Southern race, and boy could Craig have been a lot meaner with that concept than he was. Oh, and in that one we get to see Abe Lincoln, who fell into the fountain of youth many years ago after he faked his assassination. A couple of previously unpublished shorties are next, with Moon Tunnel dealing with a master plan of taking over the Earth with mallards (which ended in a hurry and didn’t do much for me as a whole, delightful initial concept notwithstanding), and the best 24 hour comic I’ve seen, at least artistically speaking. It seems that there is a sudden plague of zombies, who have come back for one thing: to fix all the fake science that has been coming out of the government. Again, if you’re slightly caught up on current events, it’s about time somebody tried to fix that. The book ends with Political Asylum, in which Abe Lincoln decides to run against the corrupt local mayor (who had apparently taken over the world in one of the issues not collected here) and learns all he needs to know about the current state of elections in this country. Oh, and he has to fight a giant clone of himself, which proves to be all the bad press needed to sink his campaign. If I had to bitch about something here, it’s the fact that this isn’t laid out in a linear fashion at all, but there is a handy timeline at the start to keep things in context. As a whole, it’s funny, smart and suspenseful, because while we all know how fist fights in comics are going to turn out, how is a fight against a concept going to settle itself? Well worth checking out, unless the whole concept of a super hero team is just too much for you, even one as odd as this… $14