Ben Clarkson, who now lives in Montreal but was born and raised in Winnipeg, fondly recalls nights spent at the Manitoban office working on layouts for weekly issues where he served as graphics editor.
Matt Bors, originally from the United States, now living in Ontario, spent many years as a political cartoonist but he found himself “chomping at the bit” to do long-term storytelling.
After Clarkson reached out to Bors online, the two began collaborating on Justice Warriors. Intended to explore how society and politics work in a comedic way without scaring off or shutting down readers, the first volume was released in 2023 with great success.
Clarkson and Bors released a sequel, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder, in September 2024. In Bors’ words, the novel is “a political thriller for a deranged online era.”
Centered on mutant police officers Swamp Cop and Schitt, who return from the previous instalment, Vote Harder sees the seemingly utopic setting of Bubble City experiencing their first mayoral election. While dealing with the election and its conflicts, Swamp Cop and Schitt must also protect Bubble City from corrupt mutants living in a wasteland outside the city, where much of the story takes place.
Vote Harder is heavily inspired by recent internet discourse, with the media and internet addiction playing a major role throughout the election. Bors and Clarkson drew inspiration from current events. A large portion of Vote Harder is based on real-life scandals involving law enforcement officers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Clarkson stated that he and Bors ensure that Swamp Cop and Schitt never do anything that a police officer has not been reported doing in the line of duty.
Less than a month after its release, Vote Harder has already received commercial and critical success. The Jacobin’s Ryan Zickgraf described it as “genuinely subversive satire,” while IGN’s Jesse Schedeen dubbed it “the perfect superhero satire for 2024.” It has ranked #1 on Amazon U.S. in both humour/mystery graphic novels and in new releases.
Clarkson is both thrilled and humbled by the positive response to their work in the United States. But while it would be easy to see Vote Harder as primarily a satire of American politics, he said that it is a satire of the global political system and problems affecting the world in general, rather than any specific country. Bors agreed that “nothing is explicitly about the U.S. […] we’re trying to do a higher-level satire that’s applicable to Canada and anywhere else in the world.”
When it comes to the future of the series, Clarkson and Bors have expressed that they plan to continue writing Justice Warriors for as long as they possibly can, and already have ideas for future instalments, focusing on different aspects of society in each one.
Clarkson remarked, “there’s other forces taking place during an election […] that affect the outcome of the transition of power besides just the population voting. That, for me, is one of the main themes of Vote Harder.”
Bors added, “Justice Warriors has a bit of the lowbrow and a bit of the highbrow. Great jokes, great action and [it] leaves you with something to think about.”
Justice Warriors: Vote Harder is available through AHOY Comics and Simon & Schuster
