I ended up scheduling my Zoom interview with Matt Bors on election day, mostly just because it worked out schedule-wise for us but also because it seemed like an interesting day to talk with someone who used to be one of the preeminent political cartoonists in America. As an icebreaker (but also out of genuine interest), I asked him how this election day made him feel, and he said he follows day-to-day political news much less closely than before. I asked if part of him misses being in the thick of political news, and he said not at all. I asked what he thinks about the legacy of his now-ended political comics magazine The Nib, and he said it’s not really something he thinks about.
“I don’t know if I do,” Bors said. “I’m always moving forward and working on my next thing. That’s how I’ve always been with my comics. I did, I don’t know, like 1,600 political cartoons. For the first five years, it was three a week. It was like, always onto the next one. I had to generate another one. So I’ve always been in that mode and not really looking back on things much. I’m really proud of the work that I did at The Nib. And it was my dream for a long time to run a publication, especially a print magazine. But I feel like it’s for other people to assess.”
Bors is ready to move on, and the direction he’s picked is not in niche magazine publishing but through the direct market, where he’s creating fun, absurdist comics with a unique political bent that eschews a strong connection to daily headlines.
Bors, 41, founded and ran The Nib, a serialized political cartoon anthology, for about 10 years, between 2013 and 2023. In that time, the magazine published the likes of Ben Passmore, Erika Moen, Box Brown, Nate Powell and Whit Taylor. Some of his own cartoons have gotten a lot of attention. (If the name Matt Bors doesn’t ring a bell, there’s still a good chance you’ve seen his infinitely-memed comic “Mr. Gotcha.”) In a Substack post detailing The Nib’s closure, Bors wrote, “I am choosing to give it a death with dignity rather than make painful cuts and have it operate as a shadow of itself for a few more years.”
Now, Bors currently writes the comics Justice Warriors, an over-the-top action-satire reminiscent of comics such as Transmetropolitan and Judge Dredd, and a revamp of the cult classic The Toxic Avenger for the publisher Ahoy Comics, a small, progressive-slanted direct market publisher perhaps most known for its multiple series written by Mark Russell such as Second Coming and Billionaire Island.
In the later years of his political cartooning career, Bors said he found himself injecting elements of genre comics into his cartoons to make it fun.
“I didn’t always love political cartooning and in fact got pretty tired of it a long time ago,” Bors said. “I think really, in the run-up to Trump even being elected. And then, part of me doing all these wasteland comics I would do, with mutants and post-apocalyptic stuff, was really to keep myself interested in political cartooning. Because I got bored with it, and it wasn’t containing my creativity.”
Figuring out what to do after political cartooning didn’t prove difficult for Bors.
“I’ve been wanting to do direct market comics, genre comics, mainstream comics, since I was like three. I kind of got distracted for 18 years doing political cartoons. I was motivated to do them in the run-up to the Iraq War, and then I just had some success with them, and then I had a career,” Bors said. “So, for people that came to me through that, I’ve obviously done a big career pivot, but to me it was something I was always going to get around to and would have gotten around to earlier if The Nib didn’t happen or one thing or another happened.”
His first project, Justice Warriors, follows a city that lives in a literal bubble run by a flamboyant celebrity mayor named The Prince. Socially undesirable mutants live outside that bubble, and oafish cops attempt to keep the peace. The satire runs the gamut. There’s something thematically layered into this comic about the blindspots of American liberals, but at the same time, one of the cops is literally made of poop.
The idea for Justice Warriors came after illustrator and animator Ben Clarkson approached him with the idea. Originally, Clarkson envisioned it as a cartoon and tapped Bors to help write it. Eventually, Bors convinced Clarkson it would be better to do it as a comic, co-written by the two of them and drawn by Clarkson, largely because it would be easier to get it done and greenlit.
“I had read comics. I had intellectually come to the decision that I needed to learn about comics because I wanted to have some sort of political or social valence to the art that I produced. So I had read many books on making comics,” Clarkson said. He especially enjoyed reading Comics and Sequential Art from Will Eisner. He adds, “[Eisner] has some examples of his own acting work, like his own character acting work in framing and layouts, at the end of the book, and that always really impressed me. Like, 'Wow, this guy can draw. This isn’t faking.' ... I’m a real stickler for good drawing.”
Justice Warriors makes it clear that Clarkson can draw as well. His pages ooze with style and detail. He doesn’t skimp on the backgrounds and can convincingly translate movement from page to page in addition to providing snazzy splash pages. Each page’s layout seems intentional in how it dynamically changes to fit whatever’s happening in the story. In their shared scripts, the two map out each page panel-by-panel, Clarkson said. Often, they go through several drafts in order to create the correct mood and most effectively arrange the text with the images.
“When you tell the story with the medium, that’s when an audience has an emotional response, because a lay-audience doesn’t have the way to articulate the way the medium is affecting them,” Clarkson said. “The brain is like – this is my theory anyways – the brain short-circuits and gives you an emotion.”
Clarkson said he believes working with Bors made the project whole in a way he couldn’t do on his own.
“There are jokes layered on top of it, but you still have to do Akira. You can do Akira with poop jokes, but you still have to do Akira. Matt brought in a way of navigating that contradiction that I would never have been able to do myself,” Clarkson said. “And just the level of quips, his tuned comic writing and cartoon writing and gag writing is something that I really love, and that’s what I saw originally when I wanted to reach out to him.”
Justice Warriors has two volumes so far – the first came out in individual issues whereas the second came out as a graphic novel split into chapters. It does well for Ahoy, Bors said, but sells much better in graphic novel format than in single issues, so Ahoy suggested they get out a second graphic novel (titled “Vote Harder”) in time for the election instead of going through the diminishing returns of the individual issues. At the time of these interviews, Bors and Clarkson were in the process of pitching volume three.
“It’s exactly the type of comic I want to be doing, so I’m glad that people are into it,” Bors said.
Bors is also a few issues into a reboot of The Toxic Avenger for Ahoy. He coordinated Ahoy’s acquisition of the rights to the property himself. In San Diego, he approached Lloyd Kaufman, co-director of the original B-movie cult classic, about doing a comic.
“I was up for an Eisner,” Bors said. “I figured it was time to shoot my shot, and I can use whatever bonafides I have to try to convince him I’m a serious guy and not just some rando.”
The result is what Bors describes as a merging of the original '80s film with the odd, short-lived '90s cartoon series. There’s some social commentary and satire brewing – it’s beginning to say something about the pandemic, something about social media, and something about queer identity and othering.
Bors writes it alongside artist Fred Harper, whose career in comics goes back to decades-old DC and Marvel work, such as drawing the final ten issues or so of the original Vertigo Comics Animal Man series. Harper also had a long career in illustration but has been spending much of his time recently working such on Ahoy series as Hashtag: Danger, Snelson and Highball. For The Toxic Avenger, Lee Loughridge provides colors and Rob Steen does the letters.
Harper met Bors for the first time at the most recent New York Comic-Con. Bors put Harper on the guest list to attend the Harvey Awards. Bors and Harper both arrived late, which Harper said he took as a good sign for their relationship.
“We got a table way in the back,” Harper said. “We’re both starving, we hadn’t eaten all day, we’d been at the convention running around. We were just nabbing people as they came out from behind the curtain that had all the hors d'oeuvres. So as soon as they’d walk out, we’d be like, ‘Hey, excuse me.’ We were just robbing, probably eating two or three of them each before they made it to the rest of the floor. So if nobody got food at the Harveys, it was our fault.”
As they drank red wine and “bullshitted” with each other, Harper said he knew the two would get along great.
Harper’s artwork in The Toxic Avenger has that excellent, instantly-recognizable Vertigo Comics-style of detailed and dynamic linework with a sheen of modern coloring. Harper said he rewatched the original film a few times to get a feel for its visual aesthetic and then decided to lean more into a gritty, grindhouse style. Bors writes a detailed full-script, which Harper said he appreciates as opposed to the more open Marvel-style of scripting.
“It gives me a starting point,” Harper said. “Matt doesn’t mind if I change things. He’s like, ‘I want this.’ As long as it satisfies the point he wants to make on the page. He’s like, ‘However we get there, there’s many paths. You take that one, that’s great, it looks good.’”
Harper and Clarkson draw the bulk of Bors’ comics, but Bors does draw small backups at the end.
“I like writing. I think I have more ideas than I can get out myself, and I like collaborating with people,” Bors said. “I don’t have to draw everything myself. In fact, I think, a lot of times, including the comics I’m working on now, the people I’m working with are better suited to draw this stuff.”
He plans to continue these series for Ahoy but also has more conventional aspirations in the mainstream comics scene. Launching a successful Image Comics is “the dream,” he said. He would also love to write for DC and Marvel.
“I have X-Men ideas out the ass. I actually have documents where I’ve written out ideas. So, I mean, I’ve got pitches almost ready to go for stuff like X-Men and Batman, even Spawn. I’m known as a little bit of a Spawn-head. I’d love to write Spawn. I’ve got no qualms about wanting to only wanting to write stuff that I own or stuff that is considered highbrow, man. Put me on Spawn. I can write 24 issues like that.
“I felt like my career has always gone where opportunity presented itself. The Nib didn’t only exist because I wanted to make a comics publication. That is the main reason, but it is because there was a 2010s media bubble with a ton of money put into it, and I got some of it. And that’s really how it was successful. It wouldn’t have worked the same way otherwise. It wouldn’t have worked as a DIY, bootstraps project. So like, if that didn’t happen, I could have seen myself quitting political cartooning a lot earlier and doing other things. Maybe getting into graphic novels like a lot of my peers have done. But right now, I feel like I’m moving hard into direct market and creator-owned stuff.”
The post Matt Bors on leaving political cartooning for <i>Justice Warriors</i> and <i>Toxic Avenger</i> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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