Matt Bors Draws AIDS Pill Guy, Argues with Him on Twitter, Gets $10,000, Will Debate Other Guy

Yeah, like so many Twitter discussions, it's complicated!

Portland's own Matt Bors, Our Nation's Greatest Millennial Practitioner of the Dying Art of Political Cartooning, has had quite a month.

A few weeks ago he was in Denmark, where he spoke to a union of fellow cartoonists under the protection of armed guards. (In Denmark, as in Texas, as in France, Islamists have been extremely violent in their attempts to suppress the speech of anyone not appropriately deferential to their personal religious beliefs.)

When he returned, Bors drew a strip about Martin Shkreli, the smug douchenozzle who jacked up the price of AIDS medicine to crazy heights just because he could. Sckreli recently unlocked his Twitter account, which went private after, as Bors puts it, "he came under fire for tweeting Eminem lyrics in defense of raising the price of a drug 5,000%."

"He was back at it—defending his good name—so I threw some snark at him," says Bors, "and he came back at me. From there it escalated to a pretty strange place fairly quickly."

You can read the long exchange here. But, basically, another dude' who Bors declines to name at this point, offered him $10,000 to debate drug prices on Twitter. Bors of course accepted. Bors says the money is already in his PayPal account.

"I don't know if he wants identified publicly yet, but I will say I looked into who made the donation and he is certainly the type of guy with ample means and a stake in this debate."

So that'll be happening. Good times.

Bors, a Pulitzer finalist in 2012, has been on fire lately. Why? Well, back in July, Bors left his job as an editor for Medium (a big-talking blog platform from the co-founder of Twitter) and has been able to focus on his own work for the first time in two years.

"I've had a little more time to think about my comics each week, get some freelance in the pipeline with places I've never worked with before, and, apparently, spend time on twitter fighting with rich dudes."

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