I sometimes get asked where my anti-authoritarian, libertarian streak comes from, and I always have to answer, 'Well...lots of places.'
One early influence in that area had to be comics and cartoons. Bugs Bunny is about as anti-authoritarian as they get. Every politician portrayed in Bloom County was shown as corrupt and incompetent. Even Garfield had nothing but contempt for Jon, the only 'authority' figure in his life. One of my favorite comics when I was very young, was the Wizard of Id. The King in that strip was a lowlife. He was corrupt. His people despised him. The King is a fink! I found this book in a used bookstore a couple of weeks ago, it is the very first Wizard of Id collection, full of anti-authoritarian goodness:
Alongside that book I found this one from 1982:
Now, I've never really read
Broom-Hilda, but is was only $2.00 and skimming through it, I found I liked the art, and the gags were funny. I'm always on the lookout for good comic reference material.
Once I got it home and started reading it I was delighted to find a 6 day sequence about Broom-Hilda and her friends trying to '
End the Fed'. I love it when my interests and passions collide in weird ways.
Click images for Larger.
I love the not-subtle-at all name of Senator Bullbleep. We can all fill in the bleep, I'm sure... The message here is as relevant today as it was then...the Government can't and won't do anything about inflation, since it causes the problem in the first place with terrible monetary policy. Good stuff.
As I continued reading I found a couple more strips with Libertarian appeal:
I have no idea what politics the strip's creator,
Russell Myers holds, but these strips have really piqued my interest. The collection also had a series of strips about banks, one about solar energy, and several appearances by a group of Arabs and the power they wield with their oil money, all fairly political stuff in a strip about a witch, a troll, and a buzzard.
This book is out of print but is
available used. There don't seem to be any contemporary reprint collections of Broom-Hilda available either.
I enjoyed the strips, and am going to seek out additional Broom-Hilda collections from this era. I'd like to see if there are any more gems with a pro-liberty message like the ones presented here.
