It’s arguable who started this trend, but we’ll chalk it up to Shephard Fairey, the designer behind the iconic André the Giant street campaign, who was one of the first people to launch Obama’s visage into graphic-design notoriety with his now-infamous “Progress”/“Hope” propaganda.

Obama as the Batman to Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden's Robin. With Obama-signal in full-force. [Paul Richmond Studio (via Newsarama)]

As The Matrix's chosen one, Thomas "Neo" Anderson. [About.com]

Playing the part of Spider-Man opposite Republican opponent John McCain's Dark Knight. [EW]

Comics great Alex Ross (Kingdom Come) wistfully imagines the senator as Superman in this limited-edition poster. [eBay]

Getting his good-guy on as a patriotic, garden-variety superhero with arguable steroid-use problem. Go team America! [YourSuperhero.net]

This red-white-and-blue silkscreen finds him donning a Green Hornet-esque bat-mask. [brevortasset]

His visage as stylin', geek-kissed propaganda ornamenting the concrete jungle. [probationboy]

A talking bobblehead, which purports to be the "Official Barack Obama Superhero Toy." [ImagineGate]

(Photo of Obama with Superman courtesy of the Obama senate site)

Pick any candidate you want, even their spouses are available. I gotta admit, though — tiny Cindy McCain looks hilarious and Michelle Obama is vicious with her big hammer/pick axe.

I actually assume that this is how Biden is preparing for tonight at this very moment.

Palin's secret weapon is a big fat gun, which she uses an unfair amount of times. Go play now at Kung Fu Election.
[Atom]

Palin is being shown as a Hockey Mom out to return to the infamous McCarthyist censorship of the 1950s (The cover refers to an editorial by the daughter of Crypt creator, William Gaines, where she refers to the rumors of Palin's interest in book-banning; well, it is Banned Books Week, after all).

Meanwhile, fan-favorite artist Alex Ross has already portrayed Barack Obama as Superman in a painting that premiered at this summer's San Diego Comic-Con, and Image Comics' superhero The Savage Dragon spent his most recent cover endorsing Obama as well (A move that has led to the series' most successful issue in years, saleswise). Some feel that such bias isn't contained to op-ed pieces like those, however; Conservative comic critic Augie DeBlieck Jr. was unimpressed with IDW's two presidential biographies in their Presidential Materials series:

In the end, the "Obama" comic is a nice piece of campaign literature for the Democrat candidate. The "McCain" comic is an indictment, something to be cherished by the Obama fans... I'm not screaming media bias here, by any means. I just think they had two different writers create two different comics. They didn't attempt to make sure the stories were "fair and balanced." They just wanted general biographies that could be fact-checked appropriately. McCain's is so much longer and so much more storied (both good and bad) that his biographer had more to pick and choose from. Obama's biographer could just follow the same short and sweet message that we've been hearing about through the candidate's two books. It makes for a simpler message to convey. None of it is factually inaccurate. It's all in the presentation of those facts, and which ones are used and which ones are omitted. Emphasis is everything.

So, is it just that the comic industry - like, if certain political figures are to be believed every other facet of the media - is just naturally biased towards Obama? We asked DeBlieck whether he thought that this was a case of genuine passion, or a cynical attempt to ride the political zeitgeist and seem relevant:

It's a bit of both. The comics industry can't help itself. It is, from a creator and publisher level, predominately liberal. That's well established. The fact that they have a Democratic candidate as media friendly as Senator Obama just means they can try to leverage it. It's a bandwagon they're all too happy to jump on. (See, for another example, presidential candidate Bill Clinton showing up at Superman's funeral in 1992.) Let's put it this way: If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead tomorrow and cured cancer, you wouldn't see him glorified on a "Tales from the Crypt" comic cover.

Writer Sarah Grace McCandless disagrees. She's one of the people behind the creation of Comics Industry for Obama. The organization - which aims to raise funds for Barack Obama's campaign as well as becoming a network of comic creators supporting the Democratic Party's candidate - is by far the highest profile example so far of the industry not only politicizing itself but also trying to mobilize its audience into doing the same thing, but that has more to do with personal beliefs than any attempt to be cool, she says:

I can tell you off the bat that my personal support for Obama has zero to do with bandwagon motivations, nor does it have anything to with whether or not the comics industry as a whole is predominately liberal. I'm not aware of any research or polls that have been conducted to measure the political preferences of the comics industry, but I would guess that there are artists, writers, editors, publishers, retailers, fans and the like on both ends of the spectrum.

(In an interview with Newsarama, McCandless explained that the organization was inspired by similar efforts like Artists for Hope and the Manifest Hope auctions.)

One attempt to include voices from both sides of that spectrum has been DC Comics' topical series DC Universe: Decisions, which attempts to be fair and balanced by putting together the liberal Judd Winick and the conservative Bill Willingham to co-write a story in which your favorite superheroes start endorsing (fictional) politicians in order to save the world, or something. The resulting comic is fun enough, but ultimately too bland to entertain enough that it wipes away the feeling of pandering to a (possibly fictional) new political potential audience.

Of course, Decisions is just following in the footsteps of the highly successful but equally-politically-confused Civil War from Marvel, keeping alive a grand tradition of naive political lip-service from four-color funnies that's seen Superman help JFK make America a fitter place and Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw. Perhaps this latest burst of political activism from the comic industry is simply taking that proud history one step further — going from subtext to text, commentary to endorsement — due less to a desire to sell out to an increasingly dynamic political landscape filled with characters who have captured the public's attention than the simple, laudable desire to engage with it.

Or perhaps someone's just trying to tell you that Sarah Palin really does just like to hunt witches from the 1950s.

Tales From The Crypt Vs. Sarah Palin [Blog@Newsarama], Comics Industry for Obama [MySpace]

Don't think that it's any blogger-come-lately behind this comparison; it's actually the Director of Liberal Arts at The Juilliard School, Mitchell Aboulafia, (who was possibly the first person to draw the McCain/Saul Tigh comparison) who's putting forward the very logical argument for why we should all be looking for Barack's pointed ears:

Consider Spock and Obama: cool, logical, trustworthy, a great deal of presence of mind, etc. Further, Leonard Nimoy, the actor who plays Spock, is Jewish. Obama went to Harvard Law and taught at the University of Chicago Law School, which makes him an honorary Jew. (Being Jewish, I can say this.) And what have we heard about Obama’s blood pressure, 90/60; not that of an ordinary mortal, just like Spock.

Admit it: You're convinced already, aren't you? But wait - It gets better:

Star Trek was a collective experience mediated by a visual medium. It also expressed utopian ideals at a time when young people felt impotent about changing the course of a war and the world. (Star Trek began before the full impact of demonstrations against the war became apparent.) Obama and his people have harnessed the Internet to allow people to feel that they are not mere bystanders but full participants. They have a provided a sense of “ownership” (although I am not crazy about the term). Most importantly, and here the analogy begins to break down, Obama and his team are providing not only a fantasy utopian moment, but the possibility of actually changing things. Live Long and Prosper.

As if that's not enough, he invites you to look at their physical similarities:

Before you complain of political bias on this here blog, however, it's not all bad for Republicans looking for a reason to support their guy; Wanted creator and Marvel Comics' Civil War writer Mark Millar has come out for McCain:

I know, I know. I'm comics biggest liberal, but like Ultimate Cap I like integrity and McCain just has it in spades. I read a hatchet job in yesterday's Observer by Paul Harris and try as he might I still love the guy. for the first time in living memory, America has a choice between two excellent candidates. Whoever wins, America is going to be alright.

Such a decision from "comics' biggest liberal" seems... illogical. Perhaps Mr. Barock should pay Mark a visit soon.

[Obama, Spock and the New Star Trek Nation]

No conservative scifi geek's bookshelf would be complete without Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a novel about a dystopian future America full of nasty anti-capitalists who want to feed the poor and crush innovation. Slowly, our industrial capitalist main character realizes that other "atlases" of industry — the rich elites whose businesses make the world go round — are disappearing. It all has to do with this giant motor that turns "atmospheric static electricity" into "kinetic energy." And a secret underground world where all the planet's innovators and capitalists have hidden themselves in order to create a perfect utopia of innovation and individualism. The novel has been a favorite allegory for generations of free market libertarians, and even inspired the videogame Bioshock.

A much more radically conservative scifi novel is The Turner Diaries, written by "Andrew Macdonald," a fictional account from a foot soldier who fought in the white-power revolution in the United States. This is the novel where we first see the term ZOG, for "Zionist occupational government," which is what the revolutionaries in the book call the U.S. government, which is full of blacks and Jews and other terrible people. Written in the 1970s in gritty, disturbingly-engaging prose, the novel tells the story of how a rag-tag cell of soldiers works together with other bands to take over the U.S. government and murder blacks and Jews across the nation to create a white utopia. This is the novel that has inspired many Christian Identity groups and white-power militias in the United States, and a copy was found in the car of Timothy McVeigh, one of the men involved in the 1991 Oklahoma City bombing.

The bestselling Left Behind series, which has also been made into a movie, is science fiction for the Christian right. It's the simple tale of what happens when the Jews and Arabs finally make peace, and then the truly God-loving Christians are raptured up to heaven. Those who are left behind to face Armageddon must find their way toward heaven, or get ready for hell! There's a reason why these books are bestsellers: they're action-packed and intense, and they make an effort to translate present-day politics into a Biblical framework.

Of course there are plenty of right-wing science fiction classics to be found on video too. 1980s cold war paranoia flick Red Dawn tops the list, with its tale of what happens when the Soviets invade a small Colorado town. Unfortunately the Russkies didn't bargain on high school teacher Patrick Swayze and the whole high school football team becoming super-ninjas who can easily defeat them! It was a rah-rah Reagan moment of near-future scifi that might be one of the only examples of right-wing camp.

Then there's the strange Christopher Lambert movie Fortress, about a future where the United States is run by cruel abortionists and environmentalists, who won't let couples have more than one baby. Our hero is trying to flee to Mexico in order to have his second child with his wife. Like Atlas Shrugged, this conservative scifi shows us a liberal dystopia which rugged individuals must escape to be free.

Are these science fiction scenarios really any less compelling than liberal ones? Or are all politically-minded scifi scenarios doomed from the start to be bad fiction because they are attempts to shoehorn plot into philosophy rather than teasing many ideas out of a strong plot?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.