Last year, political cartoonist Matt Bors — founder of The Nib and creator of thousands of comic strips you’ve almost definitely seen online at some point across his 18-year career — shocked the cartooning world by announcing his retirement from the realm of political comics. But now, Bors is ready to return to the medium, for a wild new tale in a very different format for him.
io9 can exclusively reveal that Bors’ next project, in collaboration with cartoonist Ben Clarkson (whose animation work has been seen on the likes of Adult Swim), is a new six-part comic miniseries at Ahoy Comics, Justice Warriors.
Inspired by Clarkson’s own animated work on the concept, Justice Warriors — the first monthly comic series either cartoonist has ever been involved in — follows two police officers, Swamp Cop and Schitt, whose beat is inside the protective shell of Bubble City: the first “perfect” city in the world. In a society where everyone is equal and equally prosperous, and there’s no crime at all, you might think Swamp Cop and Schitt’s life as officers of the law is pretty quiet — if it weren’t for the Uninhabited Zone just outside of Bubble City, a slum town where the actual bulk of a now-mutated humanity lives.
A satirical series, Justice Warriors follows Swamp Cop and Schitt — Swamp Cop’s new partner, who replaces one killed by a Bubble City self-driving bus — as the former slowly becomes traumatized by having witnessed the closest thing to a crime Bubble City has. Swamp Cop finds himself facing two choices: arrest the bus that killed his old partner, or drag his new one out into the Uninhabited Zone to enact a very loose sense of justice outside of Bubble City’s walls. With everything from white collar crime to a cyberpunk gang using social media to go to war against Bubble City’s pop star mayor, suffice to say the duo’s policing career is about to get busy.
“Since quitting political cartooning I’ve been pouring all my creative energy into this comic. It’s exactly the kind of over-the-top genre work I have wanted to make for years and we’re painting a lot of targets,” Bors told Gizmodo in a statement provided over email. “I am really lucky to collaborate with Ben Clarkson on this. You won’t believe this is his first comic book. He’s bringing this weird world to life with jaw-dropping detail, strange mutants, and a sprawling, otherworldly city that is like its own character in the series.”
“Justice Warriors is a violent mashup of The Wire, Robocop, and ‘The Itchy and Scratchy Show,’” Clarkson added in his own email. “It loops through every level of its dysfunctional city, from the foot soldiers in the war on crime to the adrena-foam parties of the rich and augmented. Bubble City and the UZ is a rich, wild and fully realised vision of a world that could only come to life as a comic.”
Justice Warriors begins its six-issue run on June 8, 2022.