After Kamala Harris’ disastrous loss, the popular social media account @TheWapplehouse posted, “sorry guys I’ll vote harder next time.”
It’s a sentiment that mocks what moved from pressure to cast a ballot for a deeply flawed candidate to a very real threat — to stop protesting, fall in line and go around telling everyone everywhere to vote for Democrats with more fervor, or else we would get a Republican in charge and it would be your fault.
The new graphic novel that I co-wrote with artist Ben Clarkson, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder, is a political thriller for our deranged online era that speaks directly to these sociopolitical dynamics. Our book isn’t about blue states and red states; it’s a far-future dystopia packed with mutants, cyberpunk hyper-inequality and sicko elites who tip the scales even further in their favor. So it rhymes with our present.
With disastrous debates, confounding registration forms for the poor and multiple assassination attempts, what can look like predicting the news is actually just studying the chaos of history, then adding weird mutants to the mix. Case in point: the main plot of Justice Warriors may seem ludicrous, but it’s based on Cointelpro operations to infiltrate and upend radical movements.
President-elect Donald Trump, who hawked expensive NFT collector cards of himself during the campaign, has appeared more unhinged than ever. In our book’s fictional Bubble City, the celebrity incumbent carves his face onto the sun with a space laser and sells people glasses so they can stare at it.
We’re not trying to give anyone ideas, but one role of a satirist is to stay a step ahead of reality. Another is to critique the absurdity of the sociopolitical landscapes in front of us, and it’s tough to think of many things more absurd right now than Democratic leaders thinking the only thing that went wrong in the 2024 election is that we didn’t … vote harder.
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