Following the real-world passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971, which lowered the minimum vote age to 18 nationwide, an amendment is passed allowing teenagers to also be elected to public office. Teenage Prez Rickard – named by his mother with the dream of him someday becoming president – takes the initiative of fixing the clocks in his town of Steadfast to run on time, making him a local hero. Shady businessman Boss Smiley recruits him to run for the Senate, thinking that he can manipulate the boy. However, inspired after encountering Eagle Free, a young Native American, Prez campaigns on his own terms, and is instead elected president. He selects his mother to be vice president, makes his sister his secretary, and appoints Eagle Free director of the FBI. As president, Prez fights a legless vampire and his werewolf henchman, a right-wingmilitia led by the great-great-great-great-great-grandnephew of George Washington, evil chess players, and Boss Smiley. He is attacked for his stance on gun control and survives an assassination attempt during that controversy.
Publication history
The series was abruptly cancelled after four issues. Several years later, issue #5 was included in Cancelled Comic Cavalcade #2. Prez also appeared in Supergirl #10. Although the first issue of Prez specified that the series was an imaginary story, this story by Cary Bates implies that Prez is president of the U.S. on Earth-One of the DC Multiverse. In the story, Supergirl saves Prez from two hoaxed assassination attempts, only to be entrapped into a third by a politician working with a witch. In this story, Prez's repair of clocks is presented as a personal hobby.
Other versions
In 1993, Neil Gaiman featured the character in issue #54 of his Sandman series, in a story called "", wherein appear revised versions of real-life events from years that followed that in which the story is set, and the assassination attempt on Prez's life takes the life of his fiancée, which Prez forgives when he learns that the assassin is mentally unbalanced. Eventually, he is killed, and Boss Smiley confronts him with a day of reckoning. At this point, The Sandman's protagonist Dream offers him passage to various alternate Americas as a travelling philanthropist.
Prez was the indirect subject and appears briefly in the 1995one-shot issue Vertigo Visions: Prez - Smells Like Teen President, by Ed Brubaker and Eric Shanower. In this story, a Generation X teenager seeks out the vanished former president, whom he believes to be his father. The cause of Prez's death is here reported to be brain cancer, apparently caused by a metaphorical cancer growing in the collective soul of the country during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
In The New 52 DC Multiverse, Prez is mentioned as having been a past president on Earth-23. Another version of Prez is also mentioned as being the current, immortal president of Earth-47. In that capacity, he funds the Love Syndicate of Dreamworld, Earth-47's core metahuman team.
A new version of the character appears in a six-issue miniseries published in 2015, written by Mark Russell and drawn by Ben Caldwell. She is a teenage girl named Beth Ross who is elected president via Twitter in the year 2036. The original Prez, here named "Preston Rickard", becomes her vice president to help her through the dangers of politics.
In other media
In the episode "Triumvirate of Terror!", Prez makes a cameo appearance. He is president of the United States 50 years in the future and is shown opening a time capsule in which Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman had put a keepsake for future generations.
In the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode "Pawn of Shadows," Prez appears on a poster on the wall of H.P. Hatecraft's study.
