Canadian writer Chip Zdarsky is the comic-book world’s very own Nostradamus | Canada Voices

Canadian comic-book writer and artist Chip Zdarsky has crafted stories for Earth’s mightiest heroes: Batman, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and of course the multiverse’s most supreme being, Howard the Duck. But now the Toronto-based author (real name: Steve Murray) is fixing his vision on an all-too-real conflict between global superpowers, albeit in a completely accidental fashion.

In his new comic White House Robot Romance, Zdarsky and illustrator Rachael Stott follow the genre-mashing tale of two kitchen-bound droids whose protocol-breaking love affair is set against the backdrop of a war between the United States and Canada. While the story’s geopolitical context might be all-too topical, it was also completely unintentional – Zdarsky wrote the first script for the series about eight months ago, long before any “51st state” talk spilled out into the world.

Ahead of White House Robot Romance’s debut issue, which is published by DSTLRY, an outlet for creator-owned comic books, Zdarsky spoke with The Globe and Mail about fighting for the future.

This series is very of the moment, but what was the origin point for you?

I started thinking about it more than a year ago. I had wanted to tell a story set in the near future, and I needed some sort of terrorism activity happening for the main story about these two robots – just any kind of international tension to act as a subplot. I thought it could be an ISIS-style story, but that had been done so much before. What was the next potential conflict? Years ago, talking with my friends in the futurism world, they’d always land on scenarios in which the U.S. didn’t have any more water. And where could they get it? Well, right next door. A Canada-U.S. war seemed plausible enough to act as the backdrop for this weird romcom sci-fi thing. But I had no idea it was going to be as prescient as it turned out to be.

Is it weird at all for you to take this series out into the world now? Or is it a kind of backwards boon for the project?

It’s only weird because it’s not the primary theme or motivator for the story. My concern is that people will read into it a bit too much, or see me as a hack as relying on current events. A similar thing happened a few years ago, when I was working on an Avengers series for Marvel. That was also set in the future, and my big culminating battle featured Red Skull and Nazis storming the U.S. Capitol, but I wrote that well before the Jan. 6 riots. My concern was that people would be like, “Oh, we see what you’re doing.” No! I’m just the Nostradamus of comics!

I feel like I should buy stock in whatever your next idea is. You’re like a human version of the sports almanac from Back to the Future.

That Avengers series also featured an Elon Musk style character. It was just too much. I wish it were not the case. But of course, when you write stories about the future, it’s always about something terrible happening. There’s never any “good” future story, you always have to have tension.

The robot idea is interesting, though, because it also plays around with current ideas about AI.

There are a bunch of things behind this. Over the past few years, I’d become fascinated with manga – my pandemic project was a podcast, Mangasplaining, which we’re now up to 117 episodes – and there are a lot of very sweet love stories in Japanese comics that you don’t see in the North American English market. I wanted to lean into that, but also tell a kind of gender-less romance. They’re robots – you don’t need to give one giant breasts and the other hulking muscles. But on the other side of it, there is the AI concept because one character is a human artist who is struggling to work because AI has taken all the jobs, so the story is about her struggle to support this robot romance even though she sees all the damage the technology is causing herself and her creative endeavours. But mostly, I just wanted to tell a love story.

We used to work together at the National Post – do you ever miss the newspaper game?

Always, because it was something different every day. With comics, I just sit down and type, every day. And I miss the camaraderie of the newsroom. But I don’t know if I’d feel worse or better working at a newspaper right now, with the state of the world.

This is a creator-owned comic, but you also work with Marvel and DC. How do you balance the independent world and those titans of the industry?

You have to, for a bunch of reasons. Creatively, it’s more challenging because you don’t have the emotional arcs of the characters already laid out for you. This is a bad example but it’ll look great in print: It would be easy to get an emotional reaction from a reader if you hit Spider-Man’s Aunt May with a bus. But it’d be a lot harder if I just created an old woman and hit her with a bus. You have to do a lot more work to build up the reader’s empathy for a new character than if you’re working for Marvel and inheriting the emotional resonance of a character and the world they live in. Readers have to care when that bus comes careening around the corner.

All roads lead to the bus …

The big nemesis in Spider-Man is always the bus! But the other thing is that I own or co-own with my co-creators all that stuff, like Sex Criminals or Public Domain. That’s important when comics creators today need to use GoFundMe to pay their hospital bills because they’re in their eighties and sick, even though they’ve created classic characters for huge companies. It turns out that the bus was Marvel and DC all along!

Speaking of Marvel, you were one of a number of writers and artists invited to visit the London set of the new Fantastic Four movie. What can you say about it?

Well, the first thing that they made me do was sign a NDA [non-disclosure agreement] as soon as I walked through the door. But I can say that, every time I turned a corner, I started laughing uncontrollably because of how delightful the new thing I was seeing was. It’s all practical sets and robots and machines. I don’t think I saw a single green screen the time I was there. You could tell that everyone working on it, even those who had done a lot of Marvel movies in the past, knew this one was special. And Pedro Pascal is my new best friend, so that was nice.

White House Robot Romance is now on sale from DSTLRY (dstlry.com).

This interview has been condensed and edited.