“Officer Bubbles” of YouTube cartoon fame is making a comeback as the illustrated character “McBubbles” in Toronto’s newest free commuter magazine.

The Mosaik Project, a bimonthly graphic novel launched this month, advertises the series with the tagline: “You will be arrested.”

Toronto Police Const. Adam Josephs was nicknamed “Officer Bubbles” after a video of the officer threatening to arrest a G20 protester for blowing bubbles went viral last summer.

Carlton Branch, editor in chief of the Mosaik Project, is tight-lipped about what readers can expect from McBubbles in the April issue, which will be distributed in transit hubs at Gateway Newstands and certain branches of the Toronto Public Library.

“It’s too soon,” he says.

However, the Mosaik Project teases the illustrated series in its current issue: “When protests turn into chaos and your megacity is under mega-siege, there’s only one cop, nay, one hero, who can bring order out of anarchy.”

The first 56-page magazine features a two-part comic titled 9toOmega, which follows an aging superhero in a futuristic Toronto on his commute to work at a children’s videogame company. Branch says the April issue will continue the 9toOmega storyline and introduce new, shorter comic strips.

The magazine also publishes interviews with local animation and visual arts professionals. Complete podcasts of the interviews are posted on the Mosaik Project blog.

The project is supported by a small collective of Toronto animators, Ex Machina 7 Productions, who invested in the magazine to help build local comic readership, Branch says.

“If you give Canadian artists a platform to do work that they care about — to do independent work — the work will be very good,” Branch says. “I believe that if you present the audience with quality material and original material and different material, you can build an audience that way.”

The magazine tries to move beyond the “extremely muscular and at times hyper-sexualized men and hyper-sexualized women” present in mainstream comics to draw in a wider audience than the traditional demographic of males aged 15 to 35, Branch says.

George Zotti, the manager of Queen St. comic book store the Silver Snail, says the idea of a commuter comic is not novel — “It’s certainly something that’s been done in Japan” — but that it is unique in Toronto. Though Zotti has not yet seen the Mosaik Project, he says it could give general public a “taste” of the variety of comics available.

“If more people are turned on to the medium and not view it as a childish thing, then that’s great,” Zotti says.