Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson Explore Their Dystopian Comedy, Justice Warriors

In 2021, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and political cartoonist Matt Bors announced his retirement from political cartooning. But comics still seem to be at the forefront of his mind as he prepares to release his first monthly comic book. Together with filmmaker and artist Ben Clarkson and Ahoy Comics, Bors will be releasing Justice Warriors #1 on Wednesday, June 8.

Co-written by Bors and Clarkson, and drawn by Clarkson, the first issue of the six-issue limited series follows officers Swamp Cop and Schitt as they patrol the metropolitan Bubble City and the neighboring "Uninhabited Zone," where mutants live in desperate poverty. But the death of Swamp Cop's partner at the hands of an automated bus makes it hard for him to focus on his already difficult job. CBR recently spoke with Bors and Clarkson about the origins of their comic and their approach to blending dark comedy, social criticism, and science fiction. They also shared an exclusive look at Bors' back matter for the debut issue.

CBR: How did you two begin working together?

Ben Clarkson: I harassed Matt online until he quit his job and agreed to make a comic with me.

Matt Bors: Yes, Ben slid in my DMs in August 2020, I think? A very chaotic time in the world, but he presented me with the concepts around Justice Warriors, the Bubble, and the Uninhabited Zone and asked me to write for it. I immediately saw so much potential in it all, and we got along like a house on fire due to increasingly frequent wildfires.

What was your writing process like? How did the two of you collaborate to build the world of the Justice Warriors?

Clarkson: The writing process for us really starts with conversations. We try to grab onto ideas that keep us chatting or make us laugh. It's really a stimulating experience. From those conversations, we piece together outlines, and Matt goes away and comes back with a script. We'll then go back and forth on drafts, punching up jokes, changing whole pages. I once almost convinced him to tear out the funniest part of issue two, and through it, we've really crafted the soul of Justice Warriors.

Bors: Yeah, we build off each other in a great way. It's a true collaborative comic with us both throwing in at various steps of the process. We're always adding and building. Just look at all the small details Ben throws into each panel, the posters on the wall, signs, and graffiti. That's all him. We have a lot of world-building in this comic -- the city itself is a character -- and ideas for many years of future volumes.

How have both of your previous creative careers informed your work on this series?

Bors: I am coming off an 18-year career as a political cartoonist, so writing satire is not new to me but being able to spread out [and] tell a story with action and character-building -- that's a relief and creatively rejuvenating. And during the last few years of political cartooning, I was leaning heavily into genre stuff -- wasteland, mutants, futuristic scenarios -- because I was itching to do more long-form work like we're doing in Justice Warriors.

Clarkson: As a filmmaker, I am approaching it as a storyboard for a mega-budget anime. My career and work as an animator have given me a lot of ideas for fun ways to indicate movement in comics. These are all related fields the drawing, composition, storytelling of cinema, animation, and comics all overlap.

The challenge with comics is the page, which is a weird formal constraint that has so much possibility. I often pace the hallway, trying to figure out more interesting layouts. An old joke from film is, "A good movie has 3 great scenes and no bad ones." I've been trying to get two or three great pages per issue and no bad ones.

Was it difficult adjusting to the format of a monthly comic?

Bors: I don't think so because, for me, a comic book is the storytelling unit I have the most familiarity with -- to an embarrassing degree, really. I have read thousands and thousands of them. So this is the first time I'm doing a regular 22-page comic, but the beats necessary to make that structure work feel baked into my brain, and I hope that comes across to the reader.

Clarkson: When I produce animation, I usually have a final "crunch" week before a project comes due; my wife understands and runs interference for me during that last work-heavy week to keep my clients singing my praises. I have been in a crunch for something like four months, trying to keep the gloss of Justice Warriors at a maximum. My wife is not impressed. Comics are hard. My hat goes off to the incredible artists who do monthly work unendingly.

Justice Warriors features some really inventive character designs. You have poop-people, humans with flowers for heads, and all manner of mutants. How did you two go about creating these characters?

Clarkson: In the book, the UZ, the uninhabited zone, is a place that balks at domination; it is a place of creativity, anarchy, and fluidity. I take great efforts to depict it as chaos in contrast to the Bubble. I wanted to make a world where anything was possible. That meant dissolving a lot of the common cartoon stylistic rules that were out there. Roger Rabbit, Robert Crumb, and certain organic compounds didn't hurt the development either.

Bors: Ben created all these designs himself, though look out for a popular comic-turned-meme that I made, showing up in Issue #3 as an inhabitant of the UZ. Given the anything-goes nature of this world, where you can be a mutant, cyborg, or walking animation character, I will assign a cop to have a blobfish head and watch Ben go to work.

What can you tell readers about Officers Swamp Cop and Schitt?

Bors: The core of Justice Warriors is really a buddy cop flick where a grizzled, disturbed veteran is paired off with a dangerously naive and dumb newbie. They are not exactly the type of characters you turn to in order to Feel Seen, though the harsh fact is there may be something for us all to relate to in them.

Clarkson: Swamp Cop is very messed up. It turns out manipulating people, perpetrating unaccountable violence, and managing your stress with drugs doesn't lead to [being] a healthy person. We take great joy in dumping more and more garbage on him. Schitt is just a regular joe, literally spineless and full of shit. He's the best character.

This is obviously a politically charged series that tackles everything from police brutality and economic inequality to social media. What appeals to you about approaching these topics with humor?

Clarkson: I am trying to joke about this stuff since voting and protesting didn't work.

Bors: I think I've been coping with humor for a very long time. We could just write down our beliefs on a piece of paper and hand them out on the street, but you would be deemed crazy for that (and then perhaps shot by the police). No, I think comics is the safe route.

How important is it to you for you both to make Justice Warriors feel topical?

Clarkson: We definitely didn't approach it to be topical. I didn't anyways. We found a story that fit in with a bunch of things we had been thinking about and discussing and reality caught up to us. There's a joke in the first issue about a gang making a raid on a cache of baby formula. Since we wrote that, the news has plagiarized us multiple times. I am always amazed at how what we put together is ahead of the curve -- Ursula K Le Guin Lathe of Heaven, type stuff. We just need to imagine the worst possible, dumbest possible future events, and we'll look like we were prophets.

Bors: Yeah, I don't know that immediate topicality was the goal, per se. We're dealing with overarching issues of economics, violence, and how society is arranged. So I think it's relevant now and relevant in ten years… Unfortunately. That is the goal though, and I strived to avoid the thinking I used in political cartoons to be so of the moment. There are police shootings and ultra-online characters obsessed with what's happening on their phones, but that is less tied to any news story than it is to our last two decades of ongoing daily life.

What other dystopian satires did you look to for inspiration while working on Justice Warriors?

Clarkson: I have been obsessed with dystopian fiction for a very long time, which has really sculpted Justice Warriors. I played Fallout 2 when I was 13, and it mutated my cortex. The thing about dystopias is that they are usually a utopia for someone. They are often interchangeable. Often they revel in a bit of nostalgia for the present since I think we're all resigned [to the fact] that the world is getting worse. I read a pile of the classics, The Iron Heel by [Jack] London, [George Orwell's]1984, a bunch of [Margaret] Atwood, [Aldous] Huxley. Justice Warriors is really a mix of Brave New World and Frank Miller's Dark Knight stuff with a hefty injection of SuperJail!

Bors: Like Ben, I have been reading this stuff in one form or another my whole life, from 1984 to the dystopian future plotlines of X-Men to Ghost in the Shell and Terminator. This stuff has pervaded popular culture because I think there's an underlying fear that the comforts of civilization may not last, and we have already passed over into an era of decline that could lead to something dreadful.

Whether it's A.I. or climate change or economic oppression, we seem culturally obsessed with modeling a future where we fail as a species. That can be grim, but I think that it is easy to imagine because, truthfully, that might be the way it goes. There's value in being optimistic, in showing futures where humanity achieves a Star Trek-like world of abundance and functionality, but I think it's worth ideating on the negative outcomes until and unless we avoid them.