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by R.J. Carter Published: January 15, 2007
Creator Mike Mackey makes no bones about his series, Liberality For All as being propoganda for conservatives. It's a peek into an alternate history and future where political liberalism is taken to its ideological extremes. It's a series that has struck nerves on both sides of the political aisle, evoking reactions from liberals and conservatives alike. With the mini-series half completed, The-Trades spoke with Mackey regarding the direction of the story, plans for the future, and the somewhat frightening reactions of some readers. Let's recap the basic premise of Liberality For All. It sort of kicks off with a "What If...?" scenario in which the hotly contested 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore saw the pendulum swing the other way -- that is, with a Gore victory. The pendulum swung the other way because of the death of Ralph Nader, whom I kill by having him drive into the back of a Corvair. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and Ralph Nader pretty much single-handedly killed that model of car with his publication of Unsafe at Any Speed. My father was a Corvair owner, so that's the reason I did that little tribute to my old man. Pretty much what happens is -- because Ralph Nader wasn't around for the 2000 election -- the 90-some thousand votes in Florida didn't go to Nader. The majority of them went to Gore and Bush loses the election. Of course, at that point, it becomes totally fictionalized. I encode something called "The Coulter Laws", which is a modified version of "The Fairness Doctroine". That kind of cascades and makes things even worse. From there, conservatives are pretty much totally silenced, and I show what can happen if any side gained total control on the media. It's not just the media conservatives that are silenced and outlawed. I don't see any political conservatives either -- whither be Bush and Gingrich and the rest? They're purposely absent. There's absolutely no George Bush. He wouldn't exist, he'd be commissioner of baseball or something. But purposely I don't have any of them, they've been totally silenced. The United Nations has taken over -- the liberal government has gone the way of John Kerry comments about "passing a global test" and "getting permission from the United Nations".
Yeah, Matt dies. Rush dies. I blew Rush up in the second issue. Somebody asked me about why I killed off Rush. One of the concepts of the series was that it was a conservative nightmare while it was a liberal utopia. And it could never be a liberal utopia with a living Rush Limbaugh out there. In the story, you have liberals drawn to look almost sinister, particularly Alan Colmes, while Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy are presented as more sympathetic, aesthetically. Of course, that has to be on purpose as part of the message of the title? There's little that wasn't intentional. I got numerous emails from people that said, "Hannity would be this old, Liddy would be this old," and it was all aimed at my artist (Donny Lin). He takes direction from me, and he comes up with a lot of ideas, but yeah, everything is kind of chosen to be the way it is. There are some exceptions. For example, Chelsea Clinton. Chelsea's not a "bad guy" in the series. She's in her thirties, and I asked that she be drawn as attractive looking, because I'm not making fun of her. But as far as Hannity goes -- Hannity, Liddy, not yet North (you don't see that until the fourth issue) -- are younger because of the fictional comic book nanites in their blood that reduces their age. People like Alan Colmes are aged normally. For the mechanics of my story, the heroes are younger. Liddy is 75 right now, and still a badass -- but I thought maybe 91 would be pushing it for an action hero. Liberality For All satirizes liberals, but it's a parody of conservatives. Liddy is 75 now and showing no signs of stopping, so he's immortal in the series. I've got a robot in the series called Annie, and it's clearly meant to be Anne Coulter. We'll see the Coulter-bot in issue #5. I did notice that you were pulling punches with the character of President Chelsea Clinton (but not so much with Vice President Michael Moore), and I didn't know if that was because her character was being presented as less of a liberal, or because she was a "victim of legacy"; but certainly she hasn't done anything in the real arena of politics worthy of lampooning, so that was a decent decision on your part. Well, the thing about Chelsea's character... Jack London wrote a short story, "To Build a Fire", about a guy lost in the woods, and he's got to build this fire or die. In that book, he's the protagonist, and there is no antagonist other than the weather. So London uses the oppressive cold environment as his bad guy. So throughout the story, I use a lot of character metaphors like that. People are representative of things beyond themselves. Chelsea is a person who is stuck in this situation, and I can't go into too much detail for the sake of the storyline. But for example, take Oliver North's blindness. Oliver North is old in the series, and we see in issue four he'll become more of a superhero character. But I've got him as a blind character, because it's a symbol. Here's a patriotic guy -- a marine, a multiple Purple Heart winner, a hero -- and in the world where it's this ultra-liberal situation gone haywire, I wanted his blindness to be a symbol of how he doesn't want to see things as they are. He'd rather be blind than have to look at the way society has degenerated. The conservative talk show hosts that are running the underground resistance movement form one plot, but you also have this parallel plot that's following the life of a character named Reagan McGee, who serves as the narrator of the story. Reagan is story's main protagonist. It's about him, and the changes in his character. He symbolizes the real conservative. He's grown up in an ultra-liberal world, but no matter what, he's got his opinions about what's not right in the world. He fights through years of liberal indoctrination and becomes this real conservative person on his own. And he symbolizes more than just one person, but a group of individuals out there who would be doing the same thing. I guess in a way he's also the child of all of the Sean Hannities, Rush Limbaughs -- Rush calls them "Rush Babies", which are the generation of people who have grown up listening to him, and their opinions have been formed by listening to the guiding principles of the conservative leaders.
Reagan is born on 9/11, and his father survives the attacks, but the rest of his co-workers don't. Reagan's father is also in the National Guard, and we later find out that he dies as the result of a poorly funded war. The ironic thing is, I go into talking about how the troops don't have the supplies to fight the war they're trying to fight, and they're doing all these military withdrawals all over the world. Reagan's father is killed during a cut-and-run. Reagan being born on 9/11 is significant, too, because the entire story is about Ambassador Usama Bin Laden coming over to apologize for the "misunderstanding" of 9/11, which plays further into his role of this entire generation of people who were changed by that day. And, of course, he's actually over here to enact an evil plot: he's got a small nuke in his unsearchable diplomatic briefcase. You've designed Liberality For All as a limited series. Is there a definite end to the story, or will things be left open for more adventures? I know exactly where this is ending. I don't know any creator out there who ends a series and makes it where there is no coming back. So I do leave it opened up to do a follow up. Ultimately, I think I could do a follow up series that would tie it all together the way I'd like it to be. What's been the reception to the story so far, from both sides of the ideological fence? I've gotten two death threats early on in the series from, I can only imagine, the people who are traditionally supposedly fighting for everyone's freedom of speech. You would not believe some of the emails I have gotten from people who are supposedly fighting against such oppression. When we put the book out there early on, it really had a unique marketing niche. No one had really tried anything overtly conservative that was "in your face". This isn't a documentary I'm writing, like "Fahrenheit 9/11" that's called a documentary and is actually a piece of propaganda. This is a piece of propoganda that's supposed to be fun, and I'm putting it out there as it is, and there's no gray area about that. But as far as the reception on the right, it's been fantastic, because there's been nothing else out there. We've sold more directly through our website than we have through comic book stores. I would have assumed there would have been a greater sales at the stores due to the press we got early on. The Comic Buyers' Guide gave us some good press, but there's been otherwise no mention in the industry magazines like Wizard, the big go-to magazine that collectors rely on for values of comics. I look at it like... if somebody put out some golf club that did a special something, and it was being written up in all the mainstream press, and the people who weren't talking about it were the golf magazines, it would make you wonder what was going on with the golf magazines. I don't know any other comic series in the 21st century that has had more mainstream media stories about it than this one. We just had another article in the L.A. Times -- I haven't even updated our website on it yet. There's another one in an English magazine published over in the Middle East. A lot of small press publishers have their nightmare tales to tell about distribution. How have things been going on that front for Liberality For All? Diamond has been fantastic about it. They saw the potential out there for it because of the numbers I was giving them -- "I'm going to be on this radio show," or "I'm going to be on this tv show." They gave it a spotlight early on as a notice to retailers that it was something worth looking at. Our early sales were really good. We sold over 3000 issues through Diamond on the first issue, while we sold 8000 directly -- which is just unheard of that you'd sell that many more through your website, with people having to go through the extra effort. Are any real-world current events -- the troop surge in Iraq, the Democrats taking the majority in Congress -- fueling any subplots that you might stick into this series? I think the liberals are reading my comic book and trying to turn my fiction into reality. Some of it is really scary. I guess the reason is that I really try to adhere to the fundamentals of what I thought traditionally happens between the parties, and I'm seeing that in the comic book. I joke about the "Coulter Laws" being these oppressive laws that try to exterminate the conservative speech. Well, we have Democrats in charge of Congress, and they're talking again about the "Fairness Doctrine", and... it's totally devoted to removing the conservative voice out there. There's nobody talking about the "Fairness Doctrine" in relation to the New York Times articles being too liberal, there's nobody who wants to go to ABC News and say, "Hey, you need a few more conservative stories here." I told Hannity about it, and he said, "Yeah, let them and they'll write it for you." But there's nothing that's changing about the book itself. It's already written and I know where it's going. But you'll see things in there that are... One of the early, early violent complaints I got was that I had Usama Bin Laden as Ambassador Bin Laden, and the left was embracing him. And what we have heard now is "negotiations"; and maybe it's not Bin Laden that we're negotiating with, but when Hamas was invading Israel, they were talking about negotiations with Hamas, and that was coming from the left. We had people that were actually suggesting negotiations with a terrorist group. Is your partner, Donny Lin, with you ideologically as well as creatively on this project? He's from Indonesia. His situation is entirely different over there, as far as politically and religiously. I can't really speak for him from an ideological standpoint. But I think he's put passion into it, and he's done the best that he could do.
I'm sending it over to my editor this week, and it takes about five weeks -- March 2007. We had delays on it, because we lost a lot of art and time because of the earthquakes in Indonesia, right in the providence where Donny is. A mile and a half from his house, villages were flattened, and he and his family slept three days outside of his house, not knowing whether another earthquake was going to hit. I'm hoping to finish it out by the end of the year. And we're going into the elections, right around the corner at that time. I foresee that to be a good time for the series, especially with the responses I've been hearing from the media. Whenever the political season heats up, they're looking for things like this. What about the other projects we're seeing on your Website, like Outcast? I've moved Outcast to the back burner until I can finish up this. I am doing something else, though. Starting with the third issue of Liberality For All, I'm putting in a few pages each issue of Libarro World. It's been a lot of fun, and I've got all the art back except the last five pages. I'm going to put that out as a one-shot issue after Liberality For All is done, but I'm going to include five pages of it in each issue of Liberality from now on. It's a parady of the Superman Bizarro storyline. And since Bizarro is a parody of Superman, this is a parody of a parody. |
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