No matter how apolitical a work of art can be, all art is inherently political. Matt Bors, founder of political cartoon publication The Nib, leaned hard into this idea when he created his famous online journal in 2013. Now, nearly a decade later, Bors is retiring from his two decades of political cartooning for the new world of monthly comics with the new series Justice Warriors from Ahoy Comics. With Adult Swim filmmaker Ben Clarkson, the two combine dark comedy with the political commentary that put The Nib on the map.
We chat with Bors and Clarkson about the premise of the series, their inspirations, and their thoughts on the current state of political cartooning. And after the interview, we have a look at the first five pages of Justice Warriors, available at your comic shop and digitally on Wednesday, June 8th.
What’s the premise of Justice Warriors?
Bors: Justice Warriors is the tale of a perfect city where everyone has their needs met and there’s no crime at all. The catch is that it’s located inside a domed bubble and surrounded by an endless slum inhabited by impoverished mutants who do the labor required to uphold the Bubble. The police of this world attempt to ensure order and that’s where our story takes off.
Clarkson: It follows two recently partnered cops, Swamp Cop and Schitt through a story of economic collapse, central bank schemes, surveillance, AI, speculative assets, baby formula, firefights, killer public transit, ghosts, and the idea of liberty itself.
Matt, what inspired you to create this series? What kind of current events inspired you to create this world?
Bors: This is really Ben Clarkson’s creation before I came along. He made the main characters and the city dynamic between the Bubble and Uninhabited Zone before we met up. But we’re full-on creative and business partners now, as our similar influences and politics led to us hitting it off and coming up with all kinds of story ideas for this world. I guess the most obvious current events we reference would be police shootings and protests, which do feature in the series, though we’re not talking about any one news event. Justice Warriors is a world of economic calamity, violence, drastic inequality, celebrity, and extremely online mutants. So a lot like our own world, but the way the world has been for a long time and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s just also a world with cyborg rat advisors and living poop police men.
Matt, you have some experience with sequential storytelling as your cartoons at The Nib have a sense of storytelling structure to them, rather than just commenting on a current event. What made you want to jump to long-form storytelling?
Bors: I had been growing tired of political cartoons and their limitations for many years before I quit in 2021. While I’m known for my work in that field, I’ve had just as much interest in graphic novels and comic books for my whole life. I did the graphic novel War Is Boring with David Axe many years ago and have written some short nonfiction comics over the years, but never anything in this episodic 22-page format. Though I feel like with my reading habits I have been training for this my entire life.
Do you ever wonder just how much your art imitates life and if that causes humor to fall flat or receive an interpretation that was unintentional? I’m reading this issue during the height of the U.S. baby formula shortage, so the sequence featuring an arrest over a heist of baby formula hits closer to home than it may have been intended.
Bors: That scene was written in 2020, early on in my partnership with Ben, and that 8-page sequence was our pitch to publishers. It serves as a cold open where you’re dropped into the world of Justice Warriors and immediately thrown into an over-the-top violent action scene. For me, 2020 began with the birth of my second child, who wasn’t gaining weight or thriving for weeks on end. We eventually discovered it was a milk protein allergy and we had to get him on a special kind of (expensive, locked in glass cases) formula so he wouldn’t die. The pandemic started a few weeks later.
So the inclusion of formula (slogan: “keep your baby alive!”) as a story element comes from my experience with it during the most stressful period of my life to date. Yet, in the comic, it’s all treated humorously and how things like this affect real people in our world isn’t delved into. That’s not really the world of Justice Warriors, which is a place where a mutant elk possessed by a parasitic starfish robs a food ration depot. But it was key to us in establishing some of the rules of the world and how property relations govern our lives and undergird the law.
Clarkson: If someone can’t joke darkly about the basic economic conditions of our lives, forced on us by companies doing stock buybacks and environmental mega-destruction, we really have nothing left.
There are a couple of jokes in issue two that will come true this summer with the heat waves and the commodity crunch, and people will ask us this same question again. Same with issue 3. You really can’t avoid an uncomfortable farce if you want to address the realities of our economic system.
What drew you to working with Ahoy for this particular project over other publishers, or even self-publishing the comic?
Bors: AHOY has a knack for satire with titles like Billionaire Island. That fit with the kind of thing we’re going for, so they were one of the main places we wanted to pitch, and luckily they were interested. As for self-publishing, Ben and I both have small children, and we needed a publisher to foot the bill so we could both keep buying expensive baby formula!
Clarkson: AHOY is a great partner and staffed with wonderful people who I genuinely like. They got the comic and, minus cutting one joke (my best joke ever), they have fully trusted our vision and scope for Justice Warriors. I respect them taking a risk on our vision.
Ben, what inspired the artwork for Justice Warriors? I definitely see the Adult Swim and Liquid Television influences through your work, but I am wondering what else helped you build this world.
Clarkson: I have a lot of influences. I struggle with style and how to approach drawing. I honestly try not to think about it in the hope that I can forget about the question of “how should I draw this” and focus on “how will I draw this” if that makes any sense. I turned a corner a few years back when demand for my work reached a point where I am literally too busy to think about how I draw.
More and more detail has crept into the series as I continued. I guess how I am approaching the book is a cross between Masamune Shirow, Robert Crumb, and Moebius.
What were your favorite comics/stories/characters to read growing up? Who are creators we should not want to miss these days?
Bors: Growing up I was into the usual kind of comics for a boy my age: X-Men, Image comics, and eventually finding indie creators like Dan Clowes whose humor and attention to craft I felt drawn to. As for work today I like, I’ll name a few. Ben Passmore did a variant cover for issue 1 and I love all his work, but his recent Sports Is Hell book was truly special. Another cop-related comic is Beef Bros Behind Bars by Aubrey Sitterson and Tyrell Cannon which comes at it from the other side by focusing on two himbo bodybuilders who tag team corporate villains. I’ve recently read Mattie Lubchansky’s debut graphic novel coming out next year, which could be described as transgender horror, and loved seeing them spread out in a larger format and wrestle with these issues in an effective way.
Clarkson: As a youth, I was into The Far Side pretty exclusively. I was obsessed. That and some webcomics which in retrospect are all incredibly bad.
To be honest I only really started reading comics like five years ago. I really enjoyed Charles Burns work, Daniel Clowes is great, his new one Patience especially, and I love Robert Crumb because I am a total sicko. Jamie Hernandez is a genius who made me fall in love with all of his characters, some of whom appear in the backgrounds in Justice Warriors. Matt got me into Paul Pope, who is also heartbreakingly good. Moebius and Druillet are a riot. I literally keep the Incal and Ghost in the Shell open on my desk as reference.
As for creators we are sleeping on, I have no idea. I am just trying to get caught up on the classics.
Do you think we’re in a renaissance of political cartooning these days? Where do you see the medium of political cartoons heading next?
Bors: I think political cartooning is holding on by a thread these days. There’s some great work out there today, and I like to think I publish some of it at The Nib, but I can’t lie and say there is a renaissance right now. The print newspaper market imploded, there wasn’t a lot of replacement of cartooning in online media, and reading habits seem to have shifted. That’s good for graphic novels and comic books though and that seems to be what most cartoonists coming up want to create nowadays. The dream of becoming a political cartoonist for an outlet is completely dead and over.
Clarkson: Cartooning is basically always political, and always has been. Memes are political cartoons. I would say that the Simpsons started out as a political cartoon, but has been slowly strangled into a nearly generic corporate product.
Political speech is intrinsic to the form of cartoons, I think. You draw your teacher with a butt for a face as a child, and poop coming out, and you’ve plugged into millennia old cosmic spirit of trying to take down the powerful with a well drawn line. Goya’s Caprichos were political cartoons long before Windsor McKay threw sludge for Hearst, and the urge to make a point with a drawing of a pig labeled “the deficit” will persist. What is up for grabs is a business model.
What is the one message you want readers to take from Justice Warriors?
Bors: That it’s okay to devote oneself to an unrepentant life of crime.
Clarkson: And you can’t change the world without crime.
You can check out the first five pages of Justice Warriors below, which debuts on June 8th from AHOY Comics.
