Local illustrator pens comics on society’s downfall

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This article was published 12/10/2024 (696 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An illustrator born in Winnipeg has collaborated with a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist to produce Justice Warriors, a top-selling graphic novel series that satirizes the profound instability of global democracy as we know it.

In the latest issue, Vote Harder, Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors, founder of the influential comics magazine The Nib, return to Bubble City, “the first perfect city, a shining metropolis nestled amid a sea of crime … governed by a visionary pop-star mayor, The Prince.”

Two police officers — Schitt and Swamp Cop — patrol the city’s perimeter, taking on rogue homeowners’ associations and delinquent renters to “keep crime low and property value high” ahead of the city’s first-ever democratic election – certain to go off without a hitch.

Whether inspired by reality or demoralized by its dissolution into a sludgy morass, Clarkson and Bors’ series has found audiences on either side of the political aisle, both repulsed and impressed by the co-writers’ ability to cut through the crap in a painfully relatable fashion.

“Justice Warriors is funny, but in a way that hurts,” the leftist, labour-centric American magazine Jacobin declared.

Clarkson and Bors are more than happy to deliver that pang.

Their collaboration began when Clarkson, an illustrator who moved to Montreal from Winnipeg a decade ago, pitched Bors on the idea of producing Justice Warriors as a cartoon series.

“Honestly, my joke that I always tell is that I cyber-harassed Matt until he quit his job and made a comic book with me,” says Clarkson.

“It was one of the best outcomes of online harassment I’ve ever had,” says Bors, connecting on a three-way Zoom call. “Top three, at least.”

Bors, who in addition to co-founding The Nib was the progenitor of a beloved internet meme (We Should Improve Society Somewhat), was intrigued by Clarkson’s narrative ideas based on a short animated trailer he’d produced.

“I loved it. It was my kind of humour and esthetics. And when Ben and I talked, we saw we shared a lot of influences politically, culture-wise, artistically and everything,” Bors said.

Bors suggested the idea would be better suited to a serial comic, and Clarkson wasn’t in any position to disagree with Bors, whose work during the Donald Trump administration blended the president’s bloated sense of self with the apocalyptic, barren biosphere of Mad Max.

“Typically, I’d never want to work with a fan of my work – huge red flag — but that animated trailer contained the essence of Justice Warriors, a sort of Verhoeven-like satire that takes its politics seriously but doesn’t take itself too seriously,” says Bors, who used to live in Portland, Ore., and now lives in Owen Sound, Ont.

The idea for a longform treatment of the comic, with multiple story arcs and several volumes, took shape. Soon, the artists found a publisher in Ahoy, a six-year-old publishing house based in Syracuse, N.Y. which had developed a reputation for being anything but risk-averse.

“They published my friend Mark Russell’s book, Second Coming (which depicted Jesus Christ as the roommate of Earth’s mightiest superhero). They’re kind of perfectly oriented around satire,” Bors says.

Clarkson got a taste for political humour as a burgeoning artist in Winnipeg, where he was a member of the DIY arts collective Places For Peanuts while studying art at the University of Manitoba.

“What I loved about the Winnipeg art scene is there’s an attitude that everything can become an art-making opportunity. You couldn’t have a social event without some sort of creative product coming out of it. Every hangout became an art party,” he says.

While completing his undergraduate degree, he was the graphics editor at The Manitoban. It’s difficult to work for a newspaper and not see a narrative developing in advance.

“I was a part of the music and art scene when I was in Winnipeg, but as is a constant story in the city, eventually, everyone tries their hand in either Montreal or Toronto if they’ve done ‘well enough,’ and so I followed my compatriots east,” he says.

The real reason?

“I started making out with someone at a party and now she’s my wife,” he says, beaming.

But before he could board the Metro or stand clear of the closing doors of the Toronto Transit Commission, Clarkson started writing, inspired by an essay assignment for AceArt’s periodical.

“I started writing a novel about if they had relocated Winnipeg to a domed city on the moon, and I was sort of half-fictionalizing my life surrounded by the mutated wastes of the dejects of Winnipeg society, but it was mostly just stories about riding the bus. Over a decade that short story turned into Justice Warriors, which was first a pitch for an animated series and then, eventually, a best-selling comic.”

That process was sped up through collaboration with Bors, who helped Clarkson establish the flexible parameters of the Justice Warriors world.

“Technically, we don’t even establish that this is Earth. There are human beings, but like, did World War Two happen? We don’t bother getting into that stuff, and I don’t think we will. It takes place in the far future, and in my mind, after all sorts of societal collapses where basically our history is unknown or very rarely known,” says Bors.

The universe they’ve created is an endless slum,with wealthy property owners banding together to create a bubble at its heart, separated by a transparently present boundary between itself and the have-nots, says Bors.

It’s a political thriller in a buddy-cop uniform set in the hairy middle ground between highbrow and lowbrow.

“The fun of Justice Warriors is not in the warning, it’s in the realization that, ‘Oh, this is us. Yes, this is actually what our society is. We’re already here,’” Bors says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com