It was meant to be a warning.
The anthology comic Stop Project 2025 was intended to be a call to arms, a way to rally the troops about the dire consequences of Donald Trump being re-elected president of the United States.
Project 2025 (or its official title, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise) is a publication of the Heritage Foundation that outlines plans to advance conservative causes when Republicans win back the White House. It’s a brick of a book — a 30-chapter conservative fever dream that includes cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, legal prosecution of those who seek abortions and those who provide them, the removal of protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and plans for arrest and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. It was published in 2023, and for a time it reeked of the hubris of the Red Skull boasting of his evil scheme while Captain America was in some heinous death trap. “Surrender, Captain,” it seemed to say, “Or I’ll break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration!”
When Project 2025 was brought to the attention of the public, in part spurred by Taraji P. Henson’s mention of it during the 2024 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards, there was a wide backlash. The more people knew about the plan, it seemed, the less they liked it. So much so, in fact, that Trump disavowed the project in July, calling it the product of the “severe right,” and claiming he didn’t know anything about it.
And so begins the secret origin of Stop Project 2025. Comic book editor Scott Dunbier, who had recently edited the Eisner Award–winning anthology Comics for Ukraine, began considering a new challenge. “I started thinking about Project 2025, and what an incredibly gigantic document it is, and it’s really almost impossible to get through it,” says Dunbier over Zoom to the Voice. “I started thinking that maybe there could be a pared-down version of it. Something that was easily accessible to people, but still accurate in what it portrays.
“Comics are a great storytelling medium, for both fiction and nonfiction. You can easily get an idea across,” Dunbier adds. “Not just political ideas, but any ideas.”
In conversations with other comic creators, he saw that there was an appetite for the idea. “Everyone wanted to do something to try to get the word out on what was being planned,” says Dunbier. All in all, there were probably about 50 people involved — writers, artists, colorists, letterers, editors, and more, all working for free to sound the alarm. Contributors included a mix of established mainstream comics pros, experienced independent comics creators, and talented up-and-comers who’ve broken into the industry in the past several years. Most are listed in the credits at the back of the book; others preferred to contribute anonymously.
The book itself is an anthology of largely two- to four-page strips explaining a variety of topics, with straightforward titles like “Abortion,” “Anti-Trans Discrimination,” “Extreme Weather,” “Health Care,” “Immigration,” and “War on the Working Class.” It’s available to read on the Stop Project 2025 Comic website, with direct links to each topic; the whole thing is also downloadable as a pdf.
“It’s such a horrific piece of work that you don’t need to exaggerate it.”
Some chapters, such as those on abortion or the Environmental Protection Agency, draw their information mostly from one specific section of Mandate for Leadership. Others make their argument by synthesizing material from several sections at once, compiling the relevant portions of a variety of chapters about a single topic.
For instance, Lucy, the character who hosts the section on anti-trans discrimination, explains that under Project 2025, pornography would be outlawed. That’s bad enough, First Amendment–wise … but then add the fact that the personal story of any trans person would be considered pornography by the new regime — a one-two punch criminalizing a whole class of people. That’s on top of another intended change, to no longer prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. And another initiative, in a different section, would eliminate federal funding from medical facilities that offer trans healthcare. The story illustrates how the hits keep on coming, from every direction.
Throughout, the comic cites pages of the Project 2025 tome, connecting numerous dots across a sprawling document. Another chapter does the same thing for elements of Project 2025 that will affect children — everything from eliminating Head Start programs to evicting more families to relaxing child labor laws — all drawn in stark black, white, and red.
In other chapters, various news stories are cited alongside the relevant pages of Mandate for Leadership. The comic gets the crucial information across, and gives the reader a chance to verify it for themselves.
“It was important for us to be accurate,” says Dunbier. “The last thing that we wanted was for people to say, ‘Oh, they’re making stuff up.’ I had seen some things on social media where Project 2025 was exaggerated. None of us wanted to do that. It’s such a horrific piece of work that you don’t need to exaggerate it. It’s all there.”
The art styles vary throughout Stop Project 2025. Some sections, like those on immigration and libraries, are presented with clear, representational art, emphasizing empathy for the people the new rules would affect — with realistic shots of workers in fields, put-upon librarians, or humanistic POV shots where doctors explain new health care restrictions to the reader. Others are more satirical (though no less rigorously documented), often with a buffoonishly sinister Trump figure at the center of the action. The most extreme version of this approach is a section on cronyism, depicting the potential enablers of the Project 2025 priorities as trading cards, similar to the Garbage Pail Kids, with characters like Anti-Vax Max and Handmaid’s Taylor. As grossly caricatured as the subjects are — Anti-Vax Max, for instance, is modeled on RFK Jr., ’roided-up and wearing a diaper on a bear-skin rug, with a worm in a little MAGA hat popping out of his forehead; Handmaid’s Taylor is a woman in a Handmaid’s Tale red cloak and habit turning a crank on a machine labeled “Health Clinic,” where pregnant women walk in and Handmaids walk out — this is also the section with the densest level of citations.
And that information, ultimately, is where the lasting value of this collection lies. The comics’ initial goal, of persuading voters to mobilize for the 2024 election, has passed. A new Trump presidency is now on the horizon, but these comics have a renewed purpose, forewarning us of the plans the Trump administration will try to enact in the days to come.
And those days are coming. Whatever lip service Trump paid to disavowing Project 2025 over the summer is all in the past. Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author, has been tapped to return as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Trump has said he intends to make Tom Homan, another Project 2025 contributor, his “border czar.” The author of Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC, Brendan Carr, has been named to chair that commission. And so on.
Going forward, this comic can be more than an artifact of the election. It can serve as a concise roadmap of the dangers of Project 2025, contextualizing each element as laws and regulations are put into place in service to the larger plan.
“People hopefully can make the most of it, to find out what they’re in store for,” explains Dunbier.
In the comics, discovering a nefarious plot is the key to foiling it … and even then, it can take every ounce of fortitude and determination to circumvent the worst of it. Has Captain America met his match? Find out next issue. ❖
Rob Staeger writes largely about comics and entertainment and the way they affect our lives. Follow him at @robstaeger.bsky.social.
∼ ∼ ∼ This article is part of a series—At 250, Who Will America Be?—reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026. ∼ ∼ ∼
