librarypunk - 095 - Justice Warriors with Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

We have the wonderful Ben and Matt on to talk about their new comic Justice Warriors, but also about the role of satire, book bans, cops in libraries (e.g. Winnipeg), and cuts to the social safety net in favor of cops where libraries become the service point of last resort.  https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Justice-Warriors/Matt-Bors/9781952090226  https://twitter.com/benclarkson https://twitter.com/MattBors  Media mentioned https://thenib.com/  https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/ https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/3-mc/index.html  https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/2-rc/index.html

Yeah, just have fun, keep a casual. It's not super serious. We're not making our money off of this. But we're actively losing money. Yeah. Great. Great to hear. Okay.

Yeah, we're going to expand our user base, and then we're going to charge like a ton of money for the API. I'm the Library Punk API. And you'll be able to build sick apps where you can auto-generate compliments about cats. This is the model now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just thought of a really depressing.

conversation I had at work about the evilest companies in the world. I'm Justin. I'm a Scalcom librarian. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Citi. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music librarian. My pronouns are he, him. My shoulders just popped really loud. I don't know if the mic picked it up. Gross. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Yeah, I'm Ben Clarkson. I'm a cartoonist and I'm a he-him. And I'm also, uh, a he-him cartoonist and edit the nib and draw justice warriors or write just a nameless person I didn't say my name Matt you're just here your your name is everything yeah it cannot be uttered

no one will know who you are it's it's so strange uh Ben that emailed me and uh and I was like oh that's weird I'm going to ignore that's probably spam and then that's my first instance And we've had people on the show who have, like, created TV shows, comics and stuff. And I'm like, we got the guy from the reply gif of the guy in the well. It's so insane, the shit that I'm impressed by. But I was like, I had a real starstruck moment. I'm like, every annoying person on the internet has used your drawing and conversation. Like, that's really, how does, how does, like, have to know how that feels?

Is it powerful? I don't know. I mean, I go, I kind of go, I have peaks in valleys about how I feel about it, you know? sometimes it's annoying because if I log into Twitter, there's always somebody tagging me with it. And then people get mad at people overusing it or you used it wrong or whatever and people have all these opinions about it. So that gets annoying. But then sometimes it's cool. And it's like, you know, I made something that at least encapsulated a certain kind of online argumentation. And it's known primarily, I think, is like the Matt Boers cartoon or something. So I get like a name

recognition lift off it. So you get a boost. People probably know that meme than like know my actual work outside of that one panel. So I don't know. It doesn't really result in any. You don't get royalties off. I don't. Yeah. It doesn't no monetary gain. I don't know that it's opened any any doors for me at all. But I don't know. People know about it and that's, I guess, in this world, you know, that's its own reward. But through repetition and preservation, this will make you like the Ian Nassier of our age.

People will know about you from this glyph that is left behind. Thousands and thousands of complaints written in digital tablets. Yeah, I've been working on Matt Boers Menher for a Fortnite. I love the way the internet will just take shit out of context because, like, there's that comic, but there's also the I guess and the sickos that are like, I guess. And it's like, or the, I want this because of. reasons. It's like out of all of the panels of those comics, these are the ones you decided to meme. Okay. Yeah. Hey, I don't know. It's called a meme and it's like, that's weird to me because it's a four panel comic that I made. And then it's called a meme now. And I don't know. I keep

waiting for everyone to stop using it, but they don't. No, it's it's going to outlive you, Matt. Yeah, great. I can't wait to learn what my legacy is going to be. Yeah. I hope it's something equally useful in online arguments. Just like a voice clip of me. It could just be a rant. Yeah, you never know. I didn't. I did that comic and it was just, I mean, I did like have done hundreds and thousands of comics and did them every week for years. And I didn't think twice about that comic. And it didn't blow up right away. And then all the sudden, not all the sudden, actually. It's what I, people started using it more and more. And then it's like, oh, I guess this is a thing I'm known for now, some random drawing I made at my. drawing table in 2016 and I didn't think twice about and then now we were talking about it. Yeah, I'm sorry to dero right off the top. I just had to get that joke out. It was just like, I'm like, this is what I'm going to start the show with. I have to. It's, it's, it's, I get it. It's okay. I'm still flabbergasted at who we get on this podcast. I'm like, how do we do

this? Yeah. Well, no, I didn't know I didn't know who Ben was. And so to verify, I looked up his Twitter. I'm like, oh, Mitchell Zimbel follows him. Okay, he must be cool. So that was how I, That's how I tell my mom that all the time. Yeah, friends with Mitchell Zimmel. Yeah. I mean, like, it's a good credit to have. He's a cool guy. No, we're here to talk about your new comic Justice Warriors.

And I've been reading, it's a lot longer than I thought. And I've been, I swear I've been going at it. But it just keeps going on. I'm never going to, I'm not going to finish it all in time. I'm like, I binged it today. 80% done. Yeah. It's a dense text.

To be clear, though, for readers, it is, or listeners. rather. It's not like a cerebus or something that's like, you know, 300 issues long. It's just a six issue trade paperback. It's 168 pages. It's very good. It's packed to the brim with content in, in my opinion. Memes. Well, that's how I would describe it as dense with memes, references, and jokes. I guess my first question about it is, is this a Jojo reference? I get that a lot. It's sort of a jojo. There's Jojo in there. Specifically, there's a character

named the Prince who likes to Vogue and dress in magnificent clothing. Relatable. The prince is sort of a Jojo reference, but he's also like a Louis XIV the 14th reference. He's a reference a little bit to the

there's a bunch of animated characters that went into him. The Venture Brothers, the monarch went into him. The warden from super jail went into him. Just like the rest of Justice Warriors, he's a pastiche of a lot of these cultural references that have been floating around and have been lionized by the internet and then sort of went through a blender of our brains and got turned into this cop, buddy cop story that we made.

Yeah. Well, I guess the main question is like how to get started and like what's the back? story. Internet harassment is key to this. I basically, I've been working on Justice Warriors as a concept for a TV show for a decade on and off. And I really just hit that point where I was like, oh, I'm insane and I'm only going to pursue the things that I've been scribbling in crazy person books, like sketchbooks. And so I just started telling people about this idea I had, Justice Warriors, and I started to try to kickstart it as a TV show, a completely independent TV show,

and then I just started harassing Matt online because I liked Matt's work. And I kept DMing him and saying, hey, write for this, right for this thing that has no money and probably won't be made, right for this. And then Matt looked at it. Yeah. And yeah, so Ben was deembing me about it. And then I did look at a reel he made. It was like a two-minute, I think, sort of animated trailer.

And I was like, oh, this is actually great. This is the type of stuff. We share a lot of influences and politics. Justice Warriors is the type of comic I wanted to make. I was actually, at the time, this is summer of 2020, where there was a lot going on at the time, you might remember. And I was pretty exhausted with political cartooning for a variety of reasons. I was doing it like 18 years.

And also the end of the Trump years and the pandemic, everything was just so hard and everything was terrible and being online was terrible. And I just got exhausted. with that creative output of just having like a small cartoon where I couldn't, you know, tell a story or do much more than just make political points. And I was kind of, I was looking for something like Justice Warriors to work on that. So I was like, oh, this is, this is perfect. And once we started talking, it was like, you know, we were batting around ideas.

The world is sort of a jumping off point for just a ton of possibilities and stories. We definitely intend to do multiple volumes of Justice Warriors. But how we got started was he messaged me and then I convinced him, I think, to do it as a comic book series instead of animation because you need someone to finance animation and you have to hire those factors and do a lot of other stuff. Whereas comics me and Ben could just do it ourselves. We still needed paid. We did, we pitched it to publishers and we got a good publisher, a Hoy, a small independent publisher that's been really great. we're not making as much money as if we would have sold it to a streaming service. But, you know, that's more of a, that's a more, that's a longer shot than just being able to make a comic book.

And that's my first medium. You know, that's like my medium of choice, even though I wouldn't mind, uh, writing for a streaming service because of the paycheck. But, I mean, I prefer to make comics. Yeah. Well, Ben, will you always set on animation or was to switch to comics, like, just normal for you? Uh, I, like, I, I am an animator. Uh, I figured I could figure it. I figured I could figure out how to make a comic book.

I read a couple books on how to make a comic book, and I was in. I wasn't as confident with- Did you get those books from the library? I did. I did get those books from the library. He's lying. He ordered them all from Amazon. He said, I like to own every book I have.

No. Public, the library lending system. You will lie. That's what he said. No, I didn't. I'm screenchats. I didn't. No, no, no.

I got the Scott McLeod books from my local library, and I read them. And the Scott McLeod books for comic heads are like Scott McLeod wrote some really great books, like understanding comics, making comics, where he breaks out in a very structural and formal way in a nonfiction comic. It's a comic book itself, how to make comics. And I use those as a guide to just sort of teach myself the basics of the medium. and then sort of floundered through it with Matt sort of helping me out. And now I feel like I can make comics now.

It was... Glenn's being slightly modest, by the way. If you haven't seen this book or read it, I mean, he's pretty damn good. Yeah, he was a pretty good illustrator, like for his, you know, first comic book. This is not amateur. It looks great. The book looks great, people. So this really is your first comic.

It's a lot, and it's, like I said, it's really dense. It's really impressive for the first one. Yeah. I'm very happy with it. We're very proud of the book. We like to tell people about it. I too also bought How to Draw Manga from the Barnes & Noble when I was 10. So I feel like we both have had like a similar life experience here. What was Scott? What was the second book like that Scott McLeod did? He did. Understanding comics and there's understanding comics and there's one making comics, which is much more a practical guide. I don't remember specifically much about.

I think there's one that's about web comics. And I remember reading that when I was in college and it just sort of, that one actually blew my mind more than understanding comics because it was all about the potential of the format and especially online. And a lot of the stuff he wrote about them didn't come to pass. But it was a real shame, actually. Filled my brain with a lot of ideas. Man, I really want to take us off on a tangent about web comics.

I have been a huge web comics fan for so long. And yet, sort of the demise of the personal website has been. And both that and long-form blogging, just like Tumblr kind of going away, there's so many artists who just left Tumblr and never did anything else. And they were, you know, back when they were all like my age. And then I look back and I'm like, oh, here's this like 22-year-old person that I haven't heard from in a decade. And all these cool stories that I used to find so relatable. And now that's just, you know, they've gone something else. Yeah.

I mean, I remember I've basically been living online and publishing my work online since I started. with, you know, professionally, which was like 20 years ago. And, I mean, back then, I built my own website on Dreamweaver, if you remember that software. So, you know, and I've been through all of the different, like, I don't know what you call them, periods of the web of trying to figure out how to make money as a creative and social media taking off and all this. And I started the nib, which was kind of, you know, a short version is trying to pull together all these disparate political cartoonists

that didn't really have a home online that used to largely worked in like alternative press in the papers, which was collapsing. And trying to make a publication out of it, which, you know, works for writers or has worked for, you know, writers devoted to publications devoted to writers. But you didn't see as much with cartooning

because everybody was just doing it on their own. The nib is, if you don't know, closing in August after 10 years. So that would be long to get into, but basically, you know, it's hard to keep an independent publication going. So it's shutting down, which sucks. And also, it's at this time of sort of more disruption online. I think, you know, social media had a hold of everyone for 10 years. And now things are sort of dissipating. People hate Facebook, rightfully so. And Twitter sucks. And trying to figure out how to make money online as a creator is very difficult. And I'm still trying to figure it out. Part of it.

is creating print books and selling them to people where you can actually get paid for them. Yeah, so I say making money on the internet is hard, which is I refuse to do it. I'm refusing on principle, not lack of ability. It's a, I'm, whereas I appear to be failing, you know, the nib, I have to shut the nib down and say, I'm sorry, I couldn't make it work. You rather are succeeding. A virtuous beacon. We are enlightened. No, I should have, I should have, I should have stuck with that from the beginning.

I'd be in a better position, at least rhetorically. You could always retool as a librarian and do it in your, actually, I would love, it's such a shame that illustration is such a difficult feel to keep going, because actually one of the things that I love personally is like long form comics and educational comics. We've got a friend who's a librarian who is really into medical literature and comics because you need to illustrate things. things like human body, but also medical illustration in general is not very diverse. And so I would love to work on projects. I work with like open textbooks and stuff. I would love to fund projects where we could hire someone to draw all of these things that don't get drawn and don't get funded. And, you know, the odds are by the time you've got the money around, it's like, oh, that person's given up on drawing for a living or something like that. And you're like, God, Jesus.

But yeah, it's, it's, it's hard to make a book that you don't sell for any money. That's the other thing about doing open education stuff is you have to sell it again like print copies subscriptions grant funding like this all reverse economics of it all commodities for free is a hell of a game yeah yeah yeah sometimes it happens um usually it requires uh free money for about 10 years and then at the moment interest rates go up everyone uh turns off their website so good for good for uh reddit anybody on reddit any school shooters in the house i never got into i never got in into Reddit. I skipped right. Yeah. Yeah, I did too. You went straight to Twitter. Yeah. Which, uh, if your Siz, get the fuck out on Twitter, it's a slur now. I don't know if you all heard

that today. Oh, is that true? Oh, no. Yeah, Elon tweeted that if you, um, if you call someone cis or cisgender, that's a slur. Yeah, that's our word. Yeah, that's a slur now. Um, so, uh, you, uh, you can't call people that. You could still call people all sorts of other slurs that just and won't get mad at me if I say. But you can't call, you know, you can't get the down with his bus to like come and. Is this a no slurs podcast? Well, there goes 15 minutes of my material. I know.

I thought for a while we could get by without marking the podcast explicit. And then I eventually had to give up around like episode 20. And I was like, okay. I did catch a little bit about the Elon thing. But yeah, I mean, I use it a little bit less than I used to, and it was terrible to begin with. So I wouldn't mind it imploding, but it was a useful platform in a lot of ways for finding readers. Yeah. It's something I've been thinking a lot of kind of bringing on people to talk about digital deaths.

And like, we build our lives in these little online communities, and then they die and they go away. And how do we feel about that? Like, do we talk about the fact that these connections go away, these memories go away? Then I made our last guest cry when I brought that up. So I'm not going to delve into it too much. How many guess have we made cry bringing things up, Justin? I think it's like three. We're up to like three or four now.

Three or four, yeah. I got too much self-respect to cry about Twitter. But it has been, you know, it has been critical to my career. And I've made friends. Ben harassed me on Twitter and we've made justice warriors. I mean. Now our families are interested. intertwined everything, our lives.

Yeah, I see next in the agenda is talking about my relationship with my mother. Well, I was got, did you two get married? What? Did we miss a step? Did I? Yeah. No, no, it's just we're close, we're close part. We're close business partners, Matt and not.

We're very close. We're very close. I don't talk to anyone as much as I talk to Matt, really. Even my own children. I just side-eye them. Yeah. It sounds like there's a lot of. subtext to this, but Ben's just

pulling your legs. As the resident homo of the podcast. I was like, are y'all family? Yeah, thanks for reminding me that I have notes that I've been ignoring so far because this has just won pretty well. But how's the reception been for the comic? I mean,

it's been out for a little bit. Oh, it's a hit. It's a certifiable hit. We got rave reviews for it. And we're actually going on to our second printing now. A. Which is wild to work on something for so long in complete seclusion and then open it up to the world. And people are like, numb, numb, give me more. I don't know if enough libraries have purchased a copy.

I don't think any libraries. We got to get the library circuit. Oh, my God. If we got the library. I could probably make a case for it because music is so heavily involved in it. Wow. There you go. The music angle.

Yeah, I'm a music librarian. and I control the money. I mean, you guys can put in purchase requests yourself at your local libraries. Especially if you're like, yo, I'm one of your patrons and I authored this book and it has good reviews. They will buy it. They will buy it. They will buy it. Comics are very popular in libraries.

Yes, especially graphic novels or like comics where it's a single bound volume. You don't have to worry about like volume or issue like three being checked out or lost and the rest of them being there. My psychotic business brain is just going off now of like how many phone numbers of libraries can I find. I'm a patron. I'm a patron of your library. I live in the city, of course. I mean, it's a, it's usually like an online form. So just go hog wild.

I don't see why not. Yeah, the form might be better because I do get a lot of emails where I'm just like, nah, I almost did that with Ben's email and that wasn't even related to work. So I just have an anti-email person. How many libraries? are in North America. Oh, I answered this on Quora one time. Hold up, I can pull it up.

Yeah. I used to have a lot of time on the desk. In North America. You can't work on real projects when you're on the desk because if a patron comes up and interrupts you, and we all have ADHD, so that that's just not going to fly. So you find other ways to entertain yourself when you're doing reference or circulation. I usually play Sudoku. It's good for the mind.

Yeah. It's good for the brain. It gives you sharp. Yeah. Anyway, I think the library should carry it more. Yeah. We're with a small publisher. I don't think they just routinely order everything that O'Hoy Comics releases.

But it has a good appeal. You know, people who have connected with it, it's kind of a hyper-political comic in a lot of ways. And it's also a fun, ultra-violent cartoon. Throwback to 80s and 90s action films. It's like, what if Ghost in the Shell was a buddy-caught movie? Yeah. Is the vibe I got from it. The show is kind of a buddy-cut movie, but in a different way.

It is a little bit. So he's her buddy. Isn't it crazy that Beto has a boat? He does. And he's like, there are buddies because Batot is who she has to bounce off her ideas of like, oh, I want to become a different being and ascend to a different plane. And he's like, are you sure about that?

And she's like, yeah, it would be cool if I merged with the super intelligence. And then my fear of changing into something different is actually what's holding me back from doing this. And he's like, I support you. Yeah, that's the problem. that's where it's not a buddy cop because there has to be it's uh the form of a buddy cop is a thesis and antithesis and then finally the synthesis allows them to do violence against criminals yeah just the his you know immortal science of material dialectics well the new buddy is the pubbit master

and then they merge so it's about oh i think i'm you could i guess you're working off the top of my head here trying to make it work yeah you got a master's thesis in there somewhere but yeah there's a lot of Ghost in the Shell in Justice Warriors. There's even entire panels that we've lifted from the first volume of Ghost in the Shell that we just dump. I just copy it directly line by line into the book. A lot of jokes from anyone who suffered through Ghost in the Shell volume two, there's jokes in there with all of the footnotes that happen in that book. We do that on one page where we just have a bunch of obscure footnotes that explain most of the plot. Matt and I share a lot of the same influences which go into the book.

It's sort of like an Easter egg hunt a little bit to try to find all the references we put in. I went through my Quora and I apparently made two spreadsheets. One of all the countries with the most libraries per capita and most libraries in the world and also U.S. states. But apparently I deleted both of these spreadsheets. So I can just tell you India has the most libraries in the world. And after that, I have no more information. So fucking Google it. All right.

Don't bother me with this shit. We're not the librarians from desks that we don't just like have this knowledge off the top of our heads. I'm memorized. It should like, it's great reference interview skills right there. Yeah. Yeah. Five minutes later.

You should Google. Five minutes of discussing Ghost in the Shell. All right. Listen, I BK, I wanted to become a cataloging librarian because of experience I had while writing a paper and undergrad on Ghost of the Shell. So, like, me being a librarian is partly because of Ghost in the Shell. I own more copies of it than any other movie. And Rocky Horror is my favorite movie, but I own more copies of Ghost in the Shell. Wow.

Yeah. I love it. I'm here for it. I don't know if I've told that story on the podcast. Yeah, about as many times as you have copies of ghosts in the show. Okay, cool. I wonder what you've done more. I'm really mean today.

I'm sorry. You are. I'm cranky because I'm sober. How does fucking satire work? That's the next question. How does satire work? I'm really killing it today. No, no.

When we've had other people on to talk about, like, how they use their art to talk about issues in society, I mean, you're using, you're using a comic to talk about. policing, which is like pretty tough to, a tough nut to crack in like American political discourse, do you feel like it's, you know, what's the role in satire and like actually changing things? How do you feel about its impact in the world? I really firmly believe it has no impact on the world. I think that's a lot of cope for artists. There's a Vonnegut quote. Voltaire found dead. Yeah. There's a Vonnegut quote of like, if art changed anything, we were all laser focused on the Vietnam War and it didn't change a moot. It didn't change a moda dust.

I think satire exists. I say this all the time. I think about this all the time. Satire exists to tell you that you're not alone, that you're not a human being trapped in a cage and there's no other intelligence out there. Satire is there so that you can realize someone else has thought about these things, thought them through and has left a breadcrumb of jokes for you to to enjoy. It's a celebration of intelligence. It's a celebration of understanding. And that's enough. Yeah, I think it's, I got to ask this

question for many years because I was doing political cartoons. And it's like, yeah, it doesn't change anything in and of itself, but nothing really does. I mean, talking about the Vietnam War, is, you know, books or burning draft cards or people being super serious and giving speeches, did any of those one things end the Vietnam War? I mean, nothing in and of itself is going to do that. I think satire, though, is a way to reach people that is a little disarming, and it allows you to make points that aren't like logical proofs built for a debate stage or things that are wrapped up and bound by theory. And you can actually get people to see a different side of things that they wouldn't if you were talking to them in a different way or trying to get them to read a book or whatever. So, I mean, that's what I think the value of satire is, I suppose.

Yeah, even just in doing our little digital book tour, we've talked to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds. Like the comic scene isn't as political as Matt and I are. And when we talk to comics people about it, they're really disarmes. by the politics in the book, but they celebrate it because it's done in a way that isn't preaching to them how they should vote for a Democrat in the next election. It's complementing their intelligence and their knowledge,

their cultural understanding, and their moral understanding of what's happening in front of them. Yeah, something we talk about on here a lot is, like, one of the, there's a librarian and scholar who, like, her main focus is, like, book bands and challenges, right? And, like, her sort of part of her, thesis as to why book bands happen is that like people believe that reading is so powerful that it can change you and that we don't trust certain groups to change the way we want them to. And I actually find it quite refreshing when you say like, no, it's not just this one thing. Like reading this comic book isn't going to suddenly like do whatever. Like people are way more complicated than that. Ideas are way more complicated than that. And I feel like sometimes in librarianship we get very precious about, about, about books and about how important and powerful they are.

Because they are, but like, I don't know. There is a bigger world that is your position. I mean, we do throw them in dumpsters. Yeah. So, you know, it's okay. Like, that's the, it's just text on a page. Like, the ideas live on beyond the destruction of the book, right? So it's refreshing to hear people be like, yeah, like, this is part of maybe what is informing someone.

but this is not going to change the world, you know. Yeah, it's this idea that you can get rid of the idea by getting rid of the material, the precipitate of the idea. Yeah. I got a ban going of justice warriors so I can get all these librarians to buy it. That's what I got to get going on. That's all I want is to be banned in most states. We got to get some cops protesting it.

You know, you say that. I don't think you really want that. No, I don't because, well, one of the things I was going to bring up here is that, you know, I know a lot of the cartoonists who are facing these book bands like Amaya Cobabe and stuff. And I've worked with them at the nib and like a ton of people that have done especially queer cartoonists. And yeah, it's not great. I mean, a lot of them are getting personal harassment or are super worried about it or they're just like constant. Their names are constantly coming up in news articles and people are contacting them around the country. weird. And it also, unfortunately, I guess, doesn't seem to result in a ton of book sales, at least

anecdotally from some people I talked to. So, you know, maybe my plan wouldn't work. Got to rethink it. No, the book, like, it only works if you're like a right wing figure who then, like, gets banned from speaking at a library, but that's part of the plot. Like, that was part of your plan. And then, but even then no one buys them but the right wing. Right. Well, even then, I think it's all a bit of moving money around. A lot of the right-wing, you know, thinkers are funded by think tanks and stuff.

And they all get on the bestseller list by going on buying 3,000 copies of their books at the, you know, the certain stores that help boost that in New York Times bestseller thing. I don't think they're genuinely selling a ton of copies either, you know. Yeah. But they're making a better living. Yeah. I can get myself thrown out of a library, too. Like, it's not fucking hard. But the, no, we did a whole episode on Moms for Liberty, which is the front group.

It's basically just a front group for Florida Republicans. Ron DeSantis screwed up his paperwork so he can't spend the money on his presidential campaign. So he's funneling all this money into Moms for Liberty, right? I went real fucking deep on this, because I'm from Florida. It just drove me crazy, right? And so their whole thing is just, they're like, we make money from T-shirt sales. It's like, that's, you don't make money off T-shirt sales. What are you a web cartoonist?

You got to be selling a $40 t-shirt to make any money off of a t-shirt sale. That's an argument. That's a 2004 web cartoonist model right there. Actually, you just reel him in and then you sell him the t-shirt. Put it on a shirt. Yeah, exactly. I imagine because of these book bands tend to be focusing on particularly like black representation for like children's media, like particularly in the form of comics or books and queer. comics and books, but I, um, there is like another side of this with public libraries because

they're controlled by cities, right? And cities spend most of their money on cops. And cops love to mill around and do nothing in a library. Yeah, they look, I mean, cops love libraries because every cop I've had to work with on a night shift on library loves leaning against the desk and sit there until another fucking cop spawns in from nowhere, like in a video game. It's fucking insane. Like, they just keep showing up. And I'm like, get the fuck out. You got to raise the light level. And then they stop spawning. Scatter like cockroaches. Yeah, I got to turn on ray tracing.

Yeah. In the library. There's, I threw in a thing about the Winnipeg public library and obviously in Canada, but they put like airport style security in the public library. Yeah. So it's a really jarring thing to see. This, uh, this is a story that's actually very close to my heart because that was my library. That's, that's, that's the millennium library.

I lived, uh, three blocks from it. It has a beautiful giant mural by one of my mentors from art school, Cliff Eland, who passed away during COVID. And he made like 10,000 paintings on library cards and installed it in this giant atrium. It's a beautiful library. And what happened is they've introduced airport security twice at this library. One time, because the library, especially in Canada, I focused more on the Canadian side of this when I was doing research, is that it ends up being the catch-all. for all social services. That as the conditions in the city degrade,

the library is where people go because that's where they can take a shit and go on the internet. And as things get worse and worse, especially in Winnipeg, I think Winnipeg is the canary and the coal mine, especially in Canada, because it has been precipitous in its decline

for a hundred years. Ever since the Panama Canal opened, Winnipeg has been made completely irrelevant to the North American economy. And its social services have just been gouged. There's no shelters. Public housing is ripped to shreds. It's a hell city.

It's horrible. And what happened in Winnipeg is that there was literally a homicide in the atrium of the library where 14s stabbed another person and killed them. And then the library was closed for six weeks. And when it opened again, it had the airport. style metal detectors and a troop of cops, and it cost $10,000 a week to keep it running, coming from the library budget. And so now the library has to start cutting services. It's no longer open on the weekends.

It's cutting 11 staff to pay for two cops that are always on service in the library. So in a weird way, it's like this feedback loop of cops in libraries. that drain the resources from libraries, make them less safe, make them less accessible. But there's almost no other option that the community will permit because otherwise you need to reinvest in like social services and deal with the core of the problem. And now we're starting to see with, I think the library, once again, canary in the coal mine, is this site where all these social issues begin to actually manifest and they can't be shunted somewhere else. And many librarians have said that their jobs have gone from working with books

to being social workers. And one of the main forces pushing back against this is actually the Canadian Union, which represents librarians, that is saying like, oh, because of global neoliberal austerity, being a librarian is no longer a safe profession. More cops? More cops. Cops. Two behind the counter for the librarian. And then... Why not just have the cops be the librarians? You know, you don't need us. Teach the cops to read. Teach them.

Teach the cops, the Dewey Decimal System. Oh, God. That's way too many numbers. It takes longer than six months of training to be a library, and they can't do it. Actually, in some of these book ban cases, because, you know, so many things you can't call the cops for. Like, you know, you violate copyright. There's no copyright cops. And so everyone's like, you like copyright, night, light, great.

I'm like, no, I don't. It's, it's, it's, I've got a long story about why I don't like it, but just trust me. It's, it's, I understand why it works. I understand people's livelihoods. I got it. Cool. But, you know, conversation. Yeah.

We're probably on the same page about it. But yeah, it's, um, there's a lot to talk about there. But they actually had the removal of these books from the library and the cop was just sitting at the desk going like, looking for. pornography in here. They just had a cop sitting in the library going through the books one by one. He was going to find anything. I wish I got paid to look for porn all day. Do what you love. I'd turn some up real quick.

I found it. It's on the internet. Here we go. Like a pointer dog. Yeah, it's right there. Wow, the librarian was right. It is on Google. But I can't wait until they, the kind of forces of annoying reaction figure out, like, libraries can be anti-cop, too. And then throw that all into like a blender

and just see what, what shit officer comes out. Are there librarians in the Justice Warriors world in the bubble city? In bubble city for sure. Yeah, there's all sorts of Going cringe librarians in Mobile City I was saying. Yeah, they have At least one librarian died, right? I think I remember seeing that like

footnote or for the headline. What we're asking is, are you going to put us in Justice Warriors? Well, you know, can we be funny mutants in Justice Warriors? Yeah, for sure. It's actually a great question because what we

I promise. What Ben and I talk about all the time is how different systems function in the world of Bubble City in the uninhabited zone, which is the sprawling slum of mutants outside of Bubble City. So the idea for the series overall is that, like, in each volume, we will sort of tackle a different system. You know, we want to do sports.

We want to do elections. You know, and we just talk all the time. We're like, okay, what is the fire department like in this world? And I mean, we haven't discussed libraries, but, like, it's a great question, actually. Like, you know, we sort of view, I mean, obviously, we view just. for years as this sort of lens to take everything that's going on in our world and

like, you know, amp it up to a thousand. And so yeah, I don't know. Well, we have to figure out what the underfunded we'll have to get our short story where our two hero cops swamp and shit are placed on library duty. See what I mean. Because

in Bubble City it's probably a librarian lists like where it's like a completely people free library in Bubble City. Like, because there are some of those now, I think, where it's like a library, but they've no librarians at it. It's all done on like iPads and shit. Yeah, like rollerball. Just the cop at the door.

Yeah, just the cop at the door. If I was putting it together off top of my head, I would say inside Bubble City, there is no public library, but there are like streaming services that you subscribe to, which everybody can because they have money. So it's the idea of a public library doesn't enter the consciousness. And then outside in the uninhabited zone, they're just, you know, falling apart, neglected, you know, a few books on cobbed web shelves, overrun by societal problems. Yeah, and people are sent there. They're like, you've got to go to the housing office.

And it's like, the housing office is closed. Go see Library. Yeah. Look under H. And the H aisle. There's actually a family has just vacated their tent and there's some space. for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's like because I loved with the um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

astrology culture and like, like, just nucleared it. Like, it's like, it's, it's incredible. So I'm like, I, I would love to see what sort of like, um, ideology or cultural fad or something that would be attached to the librarians that would get like blown up to, to the eighth degree. Um, there's a lot of librarians who, like quirky, love cardigans, we love cats, right? Oh, sure. Except for Justin, they have bunnies. I'm trying to think of like what sort of like cultural trend.

What sort of cultural trend could get like blown up. Yeah, ferrets and long cardigans. For the like UZ librarians or something. I'm just listing things I like. Yeah. This isn't related to the comments. Tea. Instead of cardigans and cats, it's like dusters and bunnies.

like... I see someone draw cute ferret, yeah. I did go to library school with a guy who had ferrets, so that tracks. I'd have to... I'd have to do a real deep dive. I'd probably consult with you off pod

to figure out what the key issues are because with the Libra gang, I did, I'm not embarrassed to say, an intensive amount of research. I can tell. So that, like, I didn't just make it all up, so that I wanted a person who's like totally astrology,

pilled to read this and just be like, wow, I'm getting roasted and everything they say is 100% accurate to the, you know, zodiac and all the attributes that they, everyone signs supposedly entails. A lot of research goes in. Yeah. Yeah. Like this podcast. I read a whole comic book.

No, more than that. 80% of a comic book. I read the whole thing. Yeah. Well, you got to get to the end because then you're going to see the ghost in the shell references. come out, all that stuff. Yeah, I think we've covered everything, but I'm obviously going to put all the links to all your stuff in the episode notes, but is there anything that you want people to go directly to right now, like, where to buy it? I'm sure that in the episode notes, there will be a

Simon & Schuster link, which directs to a series of sublinks to purchase the book. We are going to start a telephone campaign to every library. I have it on an authoritative Google that there are 50 libraries in North America. I'm sure that's a correct figure. And we're going to make 50 phone calls so you can go to your local library and get Justice Warriors. And if you can't, request it. We're going to canvas. We're going to like phone bank.

Yes. I love to phone bank. I would say buy it, but I would say call your library and request it for those that are more less fortunate and more publicly minded than you. and to order. I'm going to check on WorldCat right now and see how many libraries in the world own it. Yeah, I'll just send it to our selector for YA or whatever. It's like the price is right. Everyone pick a number and then Jay will call someone down to spin the wheel.

I'm going 50. Matt, what's your guess? What? I don't know. There's $25. There's 2,500 comic book shops in North America or something. So there's got to be like, I mean, God, I don't know, 11,000 libraries. Okay, Justin, your guess.

How many libraries or how many copies are of your book? Library. Libraries. 30,000. I want to say it was about 4,000. 4,000? Okay, so we got 30,000 with Matt, 4,000, Justin. I don't know.

Sadie, you're going high, you're going low. I'm going to go high at 5,000. How many copies or how many libraries there are? How many libraries? In North America, sort of. Canada and Harris. Who's coming down to spend the wheel, Jay? I want to play Placinco.

Let's say 11 now. 11,000 or just 11? Are you undercutting me? Come on. There's like at least small ones. There's one library. There's so much. The human library.

Listen, I like live adjacent to Boston and it's like you throw a rock and there's a library of some kind in Boston. Like are we including like historical societies? Are we including private libraries? Are we including? Yeah. How many? Give me a number.

I'm going to go 7,000. Okay. I'll Google it. And I posted the WorldCat link that shows how many libraries own at least one copy of Justice Warriors. Oh, really? Geez. Two of them are in my area, too. So like not the system I work at.

Run don't walk. Run don't walk. Yeah. Okay. Are we including Canada in this? North America. North America. North America.

Because I live in Canada now, so I'm very... And WorldCat is all of the world. Okay, so what were our guesses? I had one. I said 4,000. Justin said 4,000. Matt, you said 11,000. 11,000, yeah.

Sadie, 5,000. Jay, you're at 10,000? 7,000. 7,000. There are over 21,000 libraries in North America. How is it that I guess that's just public libraries? That's just public libraries? That's just public libraries.

So I was right with 30. Yeah. So, Matt, no, you went over. If you go over, you lose. That's why I pick one. You guys, it's almost as though you guys haven't watched an enormous amount of prices right. No, no, I was, no, I got baby set by my great grandparents.

I've seen tons of it. Exactly why I watched it too. Polish grandparents love to know what the value. of a dollar is. How many libraries do you think own a copy of your book if you have it already? I looked. You looked, yeah. 40.

It's a scant 17, I believe. Yeah, so listeners, fix that shit. Go request it for purchase at your library. I know, now I got a whole, I have a whole new marketing strategy. Yeah, seriously. Yeah, it'll get some orders. And then, of course, you got to factor in a library cost inflation. So if you're selling it to an academic library, make sure your publishers charging like at least $800 per copy.

You really got to ring us for our money. Yeah. And we're a little masochist and we won't say no. So we never push back. No problem. Yeah. I'm feeling very humbled by getting the whole number of libraries completely wrong. So apparently I looked into this very thoroughly at one point in my life and then just wiped the information from both my mind and my Google Drive.

And on that note, Ben Matt, it's been wonderful to have you on. This has been so much fun. Everything will be in the notes. Thank you so much for stopping by and spending your time and sending us your comics so we could take a look. And reaching out in the first place. Yeah. Yes. It's been a pleasure, guys.

Thank you for having us on and for the great work you do in libraries. Yeah, you're welcome. Good night.