Paul Pope is a world-renowned comic book writer and artist, fast becoming a pop culture icon. Indeed, in 2002 GEAR Magazine put Pope at # 11 in their annual TOP 100 list of "the most exciting people, places, and things on the planet," calling him "one of the most consistently inventive comics artists of his generation." In France he's been called "the Jim Morrison of comics."

He's a leader in the growing effort to push comics forward as an art form as worthy of respect as music, film, novels and poetry. As Pope says: "The art form of comics itself, like all others, is elastic, open-ended, and expansive. The comics medium has the power to contain and express all human thought, feeling, and experience."

Publisher's Weekly has noted that Pope is "the rare comics artist who can move between the opposing worlds of self-published, underground comix and mainstream, commercial comics, always producing personal works of imagination with extraordinary graphic skill."

Pope has put his own unmistakable spin on such classic comic book characters as Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Captain America. He has also self-published his own critically-acclaimed comics including the surrealist/science-fiction series, THB. Pope's graphic novel Heavy Liquid, a science fiction noir tale, made the Publisher's Weekly list of the Top 100 Books Of 2001.

And how about this for libertarian coolness? In 1998 Pope wrote and drew a remarkable "what if?" story in "The Batman Chronicles" comic book. Pope created "the Berlin Batman" (by day Baruch Wane, wealthy Jewish artist in 1930s Berlin). This German anti-Nazi version of the Caped Crusader speaks admiringly of... the great libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises! The Berlin Batman attempts to stop the confiscation of Mises' papers by the Nazis (a real-life tragedy). Batman says this about Mises: "I once met him, and I've read his work. He's a brave man to oppose the party in these barren times." And at the end of the story, Robin writes: "Ludwig von Mises escaped to the United States when the Nazis ransacked his apartment in 1938...Von Mises was working on a new book which challenged Nazi social and economic policies. They slowed him down, but they couldn't stop him. He continued work on a book which was eventually published in '49, called 'Human Action', now considered one of the great libertarian works of our times… Von Mises' anti-authoritarian ideas were first a threat to the Nazis, then the Soviets, and to all increasingly regulatory governments in our own times. He was against socialism in all its many forms. He was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking..."

Surely one of the great libertarian moments in comics history!

-- James Harris (from the Liberator Online, Vol. 9 No. 11, June 2004)

Quotable

In a 1995 interview for the online comics site The Podium, Pope stated his political views in no uncertain terms: "I'm against all anti-liberal, autocratic, authoritarian forms of government, including fascism and socialism, all of which are essentially the same thing in the end -- slavery and death.

"I'm a libertarian, or 'classical liberal,' and that means I'm in favor of freedom of speech and of the press. I believe in private property and it's necessity for a prosperous and safe economy, and I'm against censorship, taxation, public schools, welfare (another form of taxation), military aggression, and all tax-subsidized institutions and organizations…. I'm not a right-winger and I'm not a left-winger. I consider the right and left both to represent the same thing -- government control."

In a 2002 interview on www.dccomics.com, Pope explained why he incorporates libertarian themes into his work. "As a person who is alarmed by the way government tends to expand further into the realm of the private, I think a little libertarian trumpet blaring isn't uncalled for," he said. "We have a hell of a lot to be anxious about, if you ask me."

Books & Tapes

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