The inaugural issue of Bill Prendergast’s illustrated history of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s political career in comic book format, titled False Witness! The Michele Bachmann Story, has been released.

According to the author, False Witness! “is the first in-print political biography of Michele Bachmann, chronicling all the craziness that the Minnesota media has kept out of the local press for nearly ten years.”

The first issue, written and drawn by Prendergast and inked by various Minnesota artists, has 24 pages, a color cover (by Ken Avidor), and a black and white interior.

Copies may be ordered at biasedliberalmedia.com for $4.95 (which includes shipping and handling within the continental United States).

Following is a book review by Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo.

The Bachmann Comic: Our Review

Book review by Eric Kleefeld
Talking Points Memo
June 23, 2009 

We’ve received our review copy of “False Witness: The Michele Bachmann Story,” the new comic book from our friends at the Dump Bachmann Web site, documenting the rise and extreme statements of our favorite House GOP backbencher, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). It’s now in print in Minnesota, and anybody can order it online. So how is it?

As both a comic book fan and a Bachmann fan, I quite enjoyed it, but my hope is that the first issue was really laying a foundation for more to come. This comic introduces us to Bachmann, but then doesn’t so much focus on her as it does on the important information we need to truly understand her political prominence — the nature of extreme right-wing culture that has bequeathed a politician such as her to our national dialogue.

Right from the cover, which has a wacky cartoonish feeling as if it were somehow pencilled by Sergio Aragones and inked by R. Crumb, you know we’re dealing with a special politician:

Click on image to enlarge

And sure enough, the first page introduces us to Bachmann herself, and her call for revolution against the Marxist tyranny of President Obama:

Click on image to enlarge

From there, much of the focus is on the religious right and talk-radio culture. A specific grievance is that the hard religious right doesn’t honestly call itself what it is — a theocratic movement — but conceals its intentions under the label of “social conservative,” with the media’s complicity:

Click on image to enlarge

As for Bachmann’s own rise, we get to see how she’s mobilized the hard-right activists in her area to take control of the local Republican Party. And here’s this creepy eyewitness story of when Bachmann warned an intra-GOP rival with the repeated refrain, “You will pay, you will pay…”:

Click on image to enlarge

[Read it from the horse's mouth: "Bachmann's mean streak"]

And now that she’s risen up, Bachmann is a hero to the right-wing fringe not just in her own distict, but across her state — with a following that’s spread across the country:

Click on image to enlarge

Which brings us to the next-issue teaser — hinting that we’ll get more into all the details of Bachmann’s own career, such as when she talked to God about running for office (and God talked back!), how she kissed then-President George W. Bush and wouldn’t let go of him, and other fun events:

Click on image to enlarge

All in all, it’s a fun first effort, from some folks who have been monitoring her career and mobilizing against her online since way back when she was just a puny state Senator. Let’s see what the next issue holds.

——

RELATED REPORTS

Close reading of Ken Avidor cover

The Comics Reporter
June 18, 2009

There’s a series of comic books out there featuring women in and sort of in politics that has received an inexplicable amount of attention for how clumsily they’re done. A similar comic PR-wise with almost nothing in common with those comics content-wise is False Witness, a comic about Congresswoman Michele Bachmann by Bill Prendergast and a number of other Minnesota cartoonists. It has a bit of an edge about it concept-wise as well, as in underground comix tradition Prendergast asserts that the book is a corrective to local media coverage.
Here’s one of those editorials-as-promo pieces, where Prendergast dissects an astounding-looking cover by Ken Avidor.

——

Lots of interest in Bachmann comic book “False Witness”

By Ken Avidor
Dump Bachmann
May 29, 2009

Wednesday [May 27], I put up a post about Bill Prendergast’s comic previewed in the City Pages this week. Wonkette posted a link to the False Witness website (and us).

Eric Kleefeld at TPMDC has a preview of the cover and so does Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Independent.

The comic blogs also took notice … Kevin Melrose at Robot 6 and Heidi MacDonald at the Publishers Weekly comic blog The Beat.

Bill Prendergast posted info about “False Witness” on his Daily Kos diary.

——

A Michele Bachmann comic misadventure

City Pages
May 26, 2009

Preview: PAGE 1, PAGE 2, PAGE 3, PAGE 4, PAGE 5.
Click on image at page 1 and 2 links to enlarge

——

6/29/09 Update

Bachmann’s very visual universe: “False Witness” comic #1 sketches the political phenom (Dan Feidt, Politics in Minnesota, June 29, 2009)