Acclaimed creators Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson step into the Yeti Cave to chat with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, about the second installment of their Ahoy Comics title, Justice Warriors.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Matt and Ben - welcome to the Yeti Cave! We’re glad to have you here today to discuss Justice Warriors: Vote Harder. I’m writing this in the Vancouver airport on my way down to Portland, Oregon, so I’ve ventured onto your turf. Any thoughts on how things are going in the US and Canada at the moment?
BEN CLARKSON: If you love inflation and the degradation of your wages, the environment, infrastructure and the very information you consume, then things are going very well indeed.
MATT BORS: I used to fly the Vancouver to Portland connection all the time when I lived in Portland. I hope you have had a nice flight. Are you raw dogging it? That’s the only way to take to the skies these days. I hope you’re not reading or making conversation or anything mentally healthy like that.
CBY: Ha! I almost made it through eight movies instead of sleeping on the way across the Pacific, which is about as mentally healthy as I can manage. For those unfamiliar with this title, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder is a sequel to your first six-issue run, collected in a consolidated volume last year after starting the run in June 2022. The satirization of the political climate of the day is readily evident, but can you both share a bit about how you two met and this project originated? Matt, I know you’re no stranger to political commentary in your comic work, and Ben, I don’t know French Canadian politics particularly well, but what led you two to team up on this title?
BC: French Canadian politics are heavily focused on FRENCH, if you can believe it. I basically cold-called Matt on twitter DMs and now we’re best buds. Cyber harassment works!Justice Warriors was this “thing” that I had been pecking away at for over a decade at that point. It started as a novella about homeless mutants on the moon and warped and changed as I bolted new ideas to it. It was in development for a long long time as an animated series. I pitched it to Matt as something he could be a producer and a writer on because I loved his work. We became good friends, and we shared a lot of influences and vibes. We really compliment each other and Matt suggested we make the thing as a comic because it’d be easier to get off the ground
MB: Our tastes and influences overlap a lot and we quickly developed about ten years worth of Justice Warriors stories. I’m not joking. We plan to make this a long-running series that touches on every aspect of our steadily unraveling world.
CBY: Glad to hear things are just getting going with this comic! Justice Warriors draws upon well-explored turf in examining the archetype of the class-stratified city-on-the-hill dystopia (only in this alternate reality, the city is in a bubble). What dystopian literature and media most readily influenced the development of your world, from a narrative standpoint?
BC: I did, basically, a decade of research going into making Justice Warriors. Thematically there’s Thomas Moore’s Utopia, The Iron Heel by Jack London, Caves of Steel by Asimov, Plato’s Republic, The Handmaid's Tale and the whole MaddAddam series by Atwood but I wanted it to be aesthetically on the level of Beavis and Butthead do The Wire. I also mainlined Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Verhoeven movies as a youth, so it also has this garish late-20th century sci-fi element. I have watched a lot of Star Trek, so the approach of trying to tell stories divorced from their immediate context is baked onto the surface of my brain. Bubble City is Deep Space Nine for people with a twitter addiction.
MB: Same. Which is why we are so mind-melded. I had a lot more comic book influences than Ben, but in the same dystopian action vein: Judge Dredd, X-Men, Ninja Turtles, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and I’d include Mad Magazine. You know, the future is grim but let’s not take things too seriously and be dour. Draw a big robot with a katana fighting a cyber-cop (see the first volume of Justice Warriors for details).
CBY: You’ve created a range of unique characters, with a multitude of mutant designs and futuristic fashion choices. What were the biggest visual reference points you both drew upon as you discussed the aesthetic of this comic? I definitely thought of some of the 1980’s Troma releases like The Toxic Avenger or Verhoeven’s Robocop, but I figure I’d just ask instead of speculating further. What does this comic pay homage to most heavily based around the shared direction you’ve decided to take things?
MB: I’m actually writing a new Toxic Avenger comic out this fall. It’s an all-mutant slate for me. I’ve always been drawn to the grotesque-but-appealing mutantcy and slick-but-degrading cyperpunk aesthetic. I think Justice Warriors captures both quite well. It’s as if the world of Ghost in the Shell were inhabited by four million mutants and governed by a pop star.
BC: I always try to approach the book as Moebius and Robert Crumb drawing Akira. Aesthetically it’s chaos but there’s a lot of structure and effort that goes into giving it some order on the page. The series is thematically about order vs. chaos, what is allowed versus what isn’t, the in and the out, the weird and the normal. That stuff plays out in every panel.
CBY: Glad to hear you're handling The Toxic Avenger, Matt - it's hard to think of a more appropriate pairing. As mentioned, you’re releasing the second volume of Justice Warriors. I’m jumping on, having yet to read Vol. 1, and I found it highly entertaining - what should existing readers expect to see change from the previous story, and what do you think new readers should know if they’re hopping on for the new releases? Any catching up that needs to take place, or have you designed the narrative arcs to stand alone?
MB: If you’re just coming on board, the story works as a standalone and the world is intuitive to understand, as chaotic as it is. In this series, Swamp and Schitt are separated and assigned to different missions related to the election, which puts their partner dynamic at odds. In volume one, they meet fresh with Schitt as Swamp’s new rookie partner. Here we test the relationship like nothing else.
BC: You’re missing out. #1 is fantastic. I’d order it today, if I were you. Every Justice Warriors story will be self contained. That’s good storytelling. A callback, which is an element of storytelling, only works if it has been carefully set up. Justice Warriors aspires to be, beyond being funny or poignant, genuinely enjoyable as a genre story. We take structure, and the reader’s experience, very seriously. I have a “no lore” policy.
CBY: I'll try to backtrack and cover volume #1 when I've got my other interviews sorted, for sure. With that in mind, you mentioned 10 years of stories, so how do you plan on continuing with the title beyond this run if the response remains positive and the audience continues to grow? There’s no shortage of real-life political shenanigans to lampoon, so have you already prepared any other plot lines to follow the ongoing story, or will the news of the day provide inspiration for any future material?
BC: We have about eight more volumes planned out, at this point. We have a treatment for a motion picture and a whitepaper for an open world game. Justice Warriors is here to stay. The markets have spoken!
MB: You’ll see more Justice Warriors before too long. Trust me.
CBY: Given both of you have never shied away from political subject matter, can you tell me a bit about the response you get to your work? When conversing and comparing how the Justice Warriors material has been received to you previous endeavors, how might it differ from both your other work and the work of peers?
MB: My work in political cartoons was very straightforward. You try to be entertaining, of course, but you want to get our point across clearly and never be misinterpreted. In fiction, you can loosen up a bit. I think readers can enjoy it as a straight genre story, but there are the obvious political metaphors and satire, and under that I think you can find even more quote-unquote serious analysis of society.
I don’t shy away from the political, but I do like that we leave things a little open to the reader. It’s bleak, it’s a riot, it’s full of action. There aren’t easy answers presented.
BC: People love Justice Warriors and everyone is glad we are busting these mutants down to size. It’s been a blast to dream this thing for a quarter of my life and release it into the wild. Matt and I are like patients zero of the brain worm that is Justice Warriors and it fills my heart to see it spread.
Matt and I have talked about how Bubble City is a machine for producing stories. I think people can smell that on it, and they are excited to see what we can do with it. Our job is to rise to the promise that Bubble City makes to the reader. You want to see us talk about “injustice and inequality?” Strap in.
CBY: Consider our readers on notice. I'd mentioned your peers - you’ve been releasing Justice Warriors through AHOY Comics. How did that publishing arrangement come into being, and what led to choosing to work with AHOY over any of the other creator-owned comic publishers out there?
BC: They drove a truck of money to my house, so I signed the contract.
MB: Did the truck to my house lose the address? First time I’m hearing of those. Otherwise they have been great to work with. We submitted this book to a lot of small publishers and a handful made offers—AHOY came out on top!
CBY: It's good to know they gave you a fair shake. Now, I appreciated the depiction of Swamp Cop and Schitt, the mutant police partners you’ve fashioned as the leads of this title. I know I mentioned Robocop earlier, but what sort of guidelines or principles do you adhere to when depicting law enforcement? Matt, I know the Portland Police Bureau has had a very visibly contentious relationship with a lot of the citizenry, particularly exacerbated by the George Floyd protests, and I’m not soliciting police reform advice, but what sort of consideration do you both put in to the social commentary on abuses of power and hope people take away in their lived experience dealing with law enforcement overreach and abuse of power?
BC: They can’t kill a dog and they especially can’t participate in sexual violence. That’s not funny. It happens. Cops do horrible things to people, but in fiction, sexual violence and animal abuse, is a way of showing someone is “bad.” You can shoot someone in the forehead in a story and people will cheer, but even a guy getting handsy in media is a no-go zone. For Justice Warriors to work it has to ride that line of genre conventions and good taste. To mess with the codes around sexual violence you have to be very careful. Paul Verhoeven made an entire masterpiece film, Elle, about this. I think there’s a way of commenting on this stuff, but people are very sensitive to it, and you have to be careful with what you say.
You still have to like Swamp and Schitt at the end of the day. We’re playing with the audience’s relationship to the image of the police. We want to avoid presenting images used to clearly demonize them. Them getting take-out dog is a very funny idea though.
MB: Ben covered that well. I’m aware we’re dealing with something that relates to very serious real-world issues. Using these absurd mutants and genre conventions is how we comment on and process our world. It might not be for everyone but I think it’s for a lot of people.
Really, we’re doing Bad Boys but showing they are, in fact, bad boys. Not simply demonizing them either. They are the protagonists, relatable in some ways, and narratively the “heroes” of the story. However, I think readers can pick up what we’re putting down about the nature of the system we live under.
CBY: I realize Justice Warriors is underway, but do either of you have any additional projects in the works worth mentioning? What else might you be able to share with our audience that you’ve got going on separately from this project?
MB: I have the Toxic Avenger series I mentioned, which is drawn by Fred Harper, and that hits comic shops in October. Other than that, I have been developing my wasteland characters from my editorial cartoons into a longer comic and I wouldn’t expect to wait too long for more Justice Warriors.
BC: I have some big stuff cooking but it’s not ready. I’ve been developing an animated series with Peter K. Chung (creator of Aeon Flux) as a producer. It’s wild, it’s like nothing else anyone has seen.
CBY: Whoa! That's incredibly exciting, given how groundbreaking Aeon Flux was upon its release. So before we close things off today, can you both share some of what’s been inspiring you across comics, music, film, literature, etc. that has nothing to do with Justice Warriors: Vote Harder? What should our readers make sure they give some attention after they check out your comic?
MB: I’m reading the obscure daily comic strip Big Ben Bolt, a boxing soap opera from the 1950s that is out of print, because I follow my interests down weird little rabbit holes. On the other end of things, I’ve finally got around to reading Guy DeBoard’s Society Of Spectacle, which is annoyingly pretentious in its writing style but intellectually stimulating… it’s about a lot of the themes in Justice Warriors, minus fun and machine guns.
BC: I honestly have just been watching old westerns and marking down some of the good ideas in a li'l notebook I keep for visual ideas. Vera Cruz from ‘54 has this incredible tracking shot of a Mexican militia standing up on rooftops, revealing their ambush, and I keep coming back to it. Stuff like that, pure visuals, camera moves, formal stuff, gets me really excited.
CBY: The recommendations are much appreciated! Matt, Ben - it’s been a pleasure having you visit the Yeti Cave. Please share any portfolio, publication, and social media links where our audience can further engage with you and your work, and we look forward to seeing what you come up with next!
MB: I’m easy to find: “mattbors” on whichever social media app you’re addicted to!
BC: You can find me @benclarkson on X, the everything app