Broaching a difficult subject online

If you want to teach and/or preach about a complex topic, there’s no more striking way to do so than in the easy-to-read medium of comics. Just pick up one of the legendary “Chick Tracts” for evidence, if you can stop laughing long enough to take the message seriously.

Is Libertarianism an easier sell thanthe Tracts' version of fire-and-brimstone Christianity, or are novelist L. Neil Smith and artist Scott Bieser simply more talented than Jack Chick? Their collaboration, The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel, a comic adaptation of Smith’s 1979 novel of the same name, is a Libertarian manifesto couched in a thrilling, suspenseful sci-fi noir mystery, with equal parts politics and action.

Win Bear is a police detective in the drab “future” Denver of 1987, where an energy crisis means most people ride bikes and a federal Homeland Security (wow, how's that for prescient?) police force serves and protects. While investigating the murder of a physicist with connections to the Libertarian—I mean, Propertarian--Party, Bear gets blasted sideways in time to an alternate world where “Propertarianism” flourished.

The result? Their world is a paradise, where the government just barely exists, science is centuries ahead of where it is in our dimension, everyone wears at least one weapon and hovercrafts drive on roads paved with grass. Bear allies himself with that universe’s version of himself to unravel a “Hamiltonian” conspiracy from our world trying to take over Libertarian-land. The story’s treatment of both history and science are fascinating, and it’s probably the most compelling argument for Libertarianism I’ve ever read. I guess it's true what they saw about spoonfulls of sugar and medicine.

It's a hard-to-find small press book, but Bieser is making it much, much easier to read, by posting it online at his site. The current plan is to put the first 47 pages up, and then the remaining 140 or so in serialized, five-page bites. By all means, click to bigheadpress.com and check out the first few pages to see if it's something you can get into or not, but I'd reccomend foregoing reading online and investing in the graphic novel. It's a fascinating read, no matter what your personal p