Donald Trump may not have entirely killed satire, but he’s helped sunder it into two countervailing forces, neither of which are very funny.

The liberals used to be the class clowns. But while the counterculture of the 1960s spawned Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, and the stand-up-comedy-industrial complex, its political heirs are now the pious, self-serious ones. Modern-day liberal satirists like Stephen Colbert get uncomfortable when audiences laugh at his straight-faced assertion that CNN is an objective news source. Their role is ever more a therapeutic one, intended to flatter and reassure Democrats that they are sane and upstanding.

Meanwhile, the pro-Trump “Barstool conservatives” are now playing at the role of provocateur. Much of today’s very online right seemingly wants to Make America the Aughts again, crawling back into the gutter to retrieve the anti-intellectual and sexist “bro culture” of that era, where the slurs of yore and tired jokes about pronouns stand in for true wit.

In this climate, our comedy options feel constrained by two extremes: the limply virtuous feel-good comedy of Ted Lasso or crass blow-job jokes in the key of Hawk Tuah. “We’ve lost the third way,” once observed Armando Iannucci, the legendary showrunner whose Veep was arguably America’s last great political comedy. The closest thing we’ve had since then is Amazon’s The Boys, which lost its verve in recent seasons and has settled for being an anti-Trump superhero satire for the hashtag Resistance.

But it’s not all bad news. The indie comic Justice Warriors: Vote Harder by Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors is a heartening sign that genuinely subversive satire remains possible on the margins of culture. Clarkson is a filmmaker and illustrator, while Bors was the editor of The Nib, a now-defunct leftist comic magazine that deftly toed the line between political satire and nonfiction storytelling. Bors is perhaps most renowned for a very meme-able comic panel in which a medieval peasant says, “We should improve society somewhat” while a man named “Mr Gotcha” emerges from a well to reply: “Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent.”

In the world of the comic book’s first volume, Justice Warriors, society has definitely not been improved somewhat. It’s a work of dystopian science fiction set in Bubble City, a sparkling clean metropolis literally inside a massive bubble designed to keep the social classes separate, with the wealthy denizens protected from the poor mutants of the so-called Uninhabited Zone by ruthless policing and omnipresent surveillance designed “to keep crime low and property values high.”

If a story about a duo of corrupt cops murdering marginalized mutants in hyperviolent ways sounds rather grim and off-putting, well, it kind of is. But Justice Warriors is still an absurdist comedy at heart. It’s Robocop for the age of Rick & Morty. Case in point, these bad cop characters aren’t just two regular Joes but Swamp Cop and Schitt — a bog monster and a poop emoji come to life.

Part of what makes Justice Warriors feel fresh is that it finds new ways to depict totalitarian regimes. Instead of the predictable censorship-focused Big Brother of the endless 1984 knockoffs, everyone in Bubble City is free to speak their mind online — but the algorithm is tweaked to favor the rich and powerful and ads promoting conspicuous consumption. Plus the Prince’s regime isn’t a particularly conservative one; the powers-that-be speak in the corporatized faux-radical language of diversity, personal identity, and self-care while inflicting its atrocities. Those who are arrested are eligible for a free cancer screening.

As the title of the second volume implies, the plot of Vote Harder centers on a mayoral election — the first one in Bubble City’s recent memory. The candidates represent archetypes familiar from our political reality. The incumbent, the narcissistic nepo baby known as the Prince, is Trump on steroids. He presides over his hypercapitalist kingdom as if it’s just one big background for his personal Instagram, and it’s never good enough. Indeed, one of the dizzying number of plot points in Vote Harder is the Prince attempting to get his grotesque visage lasered onto the surface of the sun.

His female electoral opponent, Vippix, is portrayed as a moderate, austerity-minded technocrat who offers just enough modest reform to stave off the barbarians at the bubble’s gate. Justice Warriors even saves some barbs for leftists in the form of Flauf Tanko, an insurgent populist candidate who is, inexplicably, a talking cat whose body has been fused with a tank in an explosion.

Flauf and her supporters are arguably the protagonists of Vote Harder. Still, they’re plagued by internal division and counterproductive anarchist tendencies. They call for tearing down the bubble with little clear conception of what they want to build after it falls. Flauf simply lays out an agenda of “good jobs, demonetized video games, and breeding licenses” and calls it a day. It’s incisive stuff, though perhaps unlikely to land well with all leftists, some of whom struggle to take even friendly criticism in stride.

If anything, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder hits a little too close to home at times. In the 1980s, the first Robocop movie and Judge Dredd popularized satires of modern society through cyberpunk-themed dystopias. Since then, society has evolved to resemble such a dystopia.

AI deepfakes and bots are accelerating mistrust in all information, and the panopticon of tech surveillance keeps slowly creeping into our own everyday lives, cheered on by both Republicans and Democrats depending on what’s being monitored. The streets of our cities’ downtowns are becoming fuller with the tents of undocumented migrants and homeless drug addicts as driverless taxis carrying tech workers watching TikTok speed by. Aside from a small but fierce labor movement, the closest thing we have to a changing relationship to capital is office workers refusing to go to a physical office in favor of eating weed gummies in bed with their laptops. Even our presidential election, pitting collectors of official digital Trump trading cards against purveyors of “Kamala is BRAT” memes, feels like a future Adam Curtis documentary in the making.

Justice Warriors is funny, but in a way that hurts.