You know, if you ever want to make a comic that's designed to annoy the everliving shit out of me, it's dead simple: have me try to have any sort of sympathy or interest in the adventures of a bunch of rich white fuckers who go and shit on anyone who can't meet their minimum income rule. This is, of course, the central conceit of Joe Simon and Jerry Grandenetti's 1975 masterpiece of neoconservative wank fiction, The Green Team, as appearing in the second issue of First Issue Special. How much do I hate this comic? The Batman Versus The Mummy Hostess Pie Ad (coincidentally, the first in the now-popularized-by-the-internet series) is the only bit of sequential art in this issue I didn't want to see tossed in a gasoline salad and set aflame.
So, The Green Team themselves are a bunch of young white millionaires looking for special projects and adventures that they can throw a million dollars into. The Commodore is a shipping Tycoon who buys a small Oregon town just to blow it up with his toy boat that happens to fire missles. J.P. Houston is an oil magnate - George W Bush as young adventurer, basically, which made me want to rip his head right off to save our country from the morass we've found ourselves in. Finally, the last of the original three members of The Green Team is Hollywood magnate Cecil Sunbeam, who's in the middle of directing or producing or whatevering an "urban" version of The Merchant Of Venice, for which we are supposed to laugh at him. Hey, Simon and Grandenetti - Baz Luhrmann is mocking you two from his bed that is stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. He really doesn't care that one of you co-created Captain America and the other drew a ton of pretty decent war comics, and with comics like this to show off your collaboration with, I don't blame him.
You see that kid there? He looks like a decent sort, doesn't he? Guess what - the Green Team doesn't want jack shit to do with him because he's poor (read: not a fellow rich white brat,) but they'll let him shine their shoes at their meetings. Thankfully, Abdul's bank makes a fateful mistake and he soon qualifies for their billionaire boy's club, and boy, he Uncle Toms so fast, I swear that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr were both about to claw out of their respective graves and get on flights to New York City. If my financial institution went and made an error like that after that trio of rich white assholes had told me I was only fit to be their Rochester, I'd hire three pipe-wielding fuckers to meet them on the helipad and then score some coke to hoover off Marilyn Lange's (Playmate of the Year, 1975) chest.The "plot" of this comic is that the Green Team is looking for a new project to finance and some crazy-ass fucker's come up with The Great American Pleasure Machine, which is a seven-day psychedelic fantasia experience that is going to blow every other form of entertainment out of the water. This, of course, causes entertainment icons like John Wayne and Superman (seriously) to riot, led by the terribly-monikered Broadway producer David D. Merritt. (Get it...David D. Merritt - Demerit? The fuck? They paid Simon for this shit and still cancelled all the Fourth World titles?)
Now, Merritt's going to stop all the hate if the Green Team hands him over $50,000 (A paltry sum, says me. I'd have those fuckers shaking out their couch cushions, given the chance.) There's some general faffing about that's the sort of stuff that makes Escape To Witch Mountain and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes look like the first two Godfather films while they're avoiding DDM's hordes, generally by tossing large sums of money out of the window. Eventually, they manage to strap Merritt into the Great American Pleasure Machine and he goes insane from the sheer amount of awesomeness that has been dumped into his cerebral cortex.
So, what do we, the modern comics readers, learn from this piece of tripe?
- Rich white guys only like to hang out other rich white guys.
- All young black men who work hard want to grow up to be a rich white guy.
- If you can't pay them off, drive them crazy. This seems to be how the Bush administration is handling people who aren't completely entranced by their talking points, actually.
