Matt Bors’s “Justice Warriors: Vote Harder”
Mr Gotcha For President!
On September 24th, I’ll be speaking in person at the Boston Public Library!
There’s no political satirist working today quite like Matt “Mr Gotcha” Bors, whose 2023 masterpiece Justice Warriors just got a timely — and brutally funny — sequel, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder:
https://www.mattbors.com/store/p/justice-warriors-ffzgn
You’ve doubtless seen Matt Bors’s work, which has repeatedly attained viral liftoff, most notably with his Mr Gotcha strips, easily one of the most useful additions to online political debate in internet history:
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Last year, Bors, along with Ben Clarkson and Felipe Sobreiro, published Justice Warriors, a postapocalyptic cyberpunk graphic novel in the vein of Warren Ellis’s classic Transmetropolitan:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz
Justice Warriors is the tale of Bubble City, a domed enclave walled off from the teeming masses of the UZ (which stands for “Uninhabited Zone” — see what they did there?). Bubble City runs on vibes, therapy-speak, social media nonsense, memes and garbage hot-takes. And while there’s a lot of broad satire here, the thing that makes Justice Warriors stand out is how its creators do the relatively straightforward futuristic exercise of asking themselves, “What if deeply unserious nonsense was taken seriously?”
Others have done this before — Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, say — but Bors, Clarkson and Sobreiro attain a density of sight gags, trenchant wordplay, and outrageous cyberpunk imagery that is just next level. Think Al Jaffee meets William Gibson, with art direction by Vaughn Bode, who’s had one too many at the Mos Eisley Cantina. To that, mix in all kinds of MAD Magazine style fake ads and social media postings, layering joke on gag, all of it walking the fine line between “you gotta cry” and “you gotta laugh.”
Justice Warriors did big numbers, selling out three printings, and now the gang is back together for the sequel, Vote Harder, which drops just in time for the final, all consuming election-season media apocalypse.
Vote Harder sees Bubble City facing its first election in living memory, as the mayor — who inherited his position from his “powerful, strapping Papa” — loses a confidence vote by the city’s trustees. They’re upset with his plan to bankrupt the city in order to buy a laser powerful enough to carve his likeness into the sun as a viral stunt for the launch of his comeback album. The trustees are in no way mollified by the fact that he expects to make a lot of money selling special branded sunglasses that allow Bubble City (and the mutant hordes of the Uninhabited Zone) to safely look into the sun and see what their tax dollars bought.
So it’s time for an election, and the two candidates are going hard: there’s the incumbent Mayor Prince; there’s his half-sister and ex-girlfriend, Stufina Vipix XII, and there’s a dark-horse candidate Flauf Tanko, a mutant-tank cyborg that went rogue after a militant Home Owners Association disabled it and its owners abandoned it. Flauf-Tanko is determined to give the masses of the Uninhabited Zone the representation they’ve been denied for so long, despite the structural impediments to this (UZers need to complete a questionnaire, sub-forms, have three forms of ID, and present a rental contract, drivers license, work permit and breeding license. They also need to get their paperwork signed in person at a VERI-VOTE location, then wait 14 days to get their voter IDs by mail. Also, districts of 2 million or more mutants are allocated the equivalent of only 250,000 votes, but only if 51% of eligible voters show up to the polls; otherwise, their votes are parceled out to other candidates per the terms of the Undervoting and Apathy Allotment Act).
Despite the structural advantages afforded to Mayor Prince — like the fact that residents of District 12 on floors 120–145 of the Bubble each get 2048 votes, while District 1 (floors 1–7) only get a single vote — he’s not taking any chances. Officer Schitt (a humanoid poop emoji) and the lovelorn Officer Swamp (an anthropomorphic catfish) are each prowling the Uz . Swamp — suffering from a head injury and gripped by a delusion that a TV cowboy has sent him to infiltrate the Flauf Tanko campaign — is playing spy/provocateur, while Schitt hunts dangerous subversives.
What unfolds is a funny, bitter, superb piece of political satire that could not be better timed.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/11/uninhabited-zone/#eremption-season
