Toxic Avenger Comics #9 is out in comic shops today and Doctor Planet has something to say—relevant to the fictional and satirical story inside!

This is Part 4 of “Toxie Goes to Washington” and, as we have been doing all along, the issue kicks off with a full page of the narrator having sex. In this case, we are talking about the Smogulan who is secretly married to the new President of the United States, Shannon Karns, who is set to execute Toxie on the White House lawn to help pass an environmental bill.

Oh, you’re above it? I modeled the alien narration throughout the issue on C. Wright Mills’ classic 1956 exploration of America’s interlocking realms of military, corporate, and political power in The Power Elite. So it’s intellectual.

There are some major reveals and consequences in this issue—ones I have been seeding since I started writing Toxic Avenger a few years ago. I appreciate this review over at AIPT Comics that gets what we are going for and praises Fred Harper’s high-intensity artwork.

Last Call: That One Matt Bors Comic

The Kickstarter for the book about my “Mr. Gotcha” comic is in its final week, but we are not fully funded. I’m hoping it can happen, personally, and not just because I stand to make money on signed prints and original artwork associated with the campaign.

This would be the first ever book about single panel of a comic. How To Ready Nancy focused on an extravagant three panels, but this is just the one with the peasant and the well guy, featuring many of the remixes with analysis from the editor, Glenn Fleishman, a substantive interview with me and—what I view as the main draw—new writing and comics from people like KC Green, Mattie Lubchansky, Laura Hudson, Parker Malloy, Ben Passmore, Tom Tomorrow, Ryan North and more, all examining the comic as an object of internet discourse about politics, consumerism, hypocrisy, memes, and any other angle they can come up with.

This project needs some support if it is going to happen, so head on over to Kickstarter and back it now if you’d like this book to exist.

TCAF

I am at TCAF in Toronto this weekend. That’s June 6-7 at the Mattamy Athletic Centre. I’ll have comics, of course, and some original art with me. It is FREE so if you are in the area please come by and say hi. There’s more info at their website if you need it.

Toxic Crusaders Collected

The collected edition of Toxic Crusaders comes out next month, on July 14, featuring our five issue series from Ahoy. I’m real proud of the work we did on this book and think the artist, Tristan Wright, is a powerhouse. Mutants and him get along well. This is our reinvention of the Crusaders as something stranger, funnier, and more violent than the 1991 cartoon show—featuring our new character Fungirl, who I am pretty sure everyone loves.

You can pre-order that now from any online outlet, like Bookshop in the US, or check out where your local comic shop is through this website and order through them.

It is a good week over here. I have a new story out today, the Kickstarter is humming along, and this morning I started work on a major creative project that I have been working toward for years. I’ll be able to tell you all about it once the powers that be deem it time to announce.

For now, I have some new comics and illustrations for you. First, here’s a picture of my beautiful mutant boys: Bog Being, Swamp, Schitt, and Gorm.

The Forgotten Divine

I drew a variant cover for an upcoming comic by Mark Russell and Russ Braun for Ahoy called THE FORGOTTEN DIVINE, which you can see below. The story deals with a homeless veteran who is dogged by strange dreams of an alien landscape. As others begin to report experiencing the same visions, they form a support group, and then something else entirely.

I’ve been friends with the writer, Mark Russell, since before he was an acclaimed comics writer and have enjoyed watching him rise in comics. This might be my favorite thing he’s ever done—an exploration of cults and forming meaning out of the world. There is a large alien eyeball in this story and there’s nothing I like thinking about more than a large eyeball hovering above you while you sleep. It’s just how I relax. The Forgotten Divine is launching on Kickstarter shortly and you can sign up to be notified on the pre-launch page. Obviously, get this cover.

Type M for Murder

My latest story for EC Comics is out this week in Catacombs of Torment #11. “Type M for Murder” is a chatbot psychosis thriller written by me with art by Fabiana Mascolo. I won't say much more or show much, lest we start spoiling your pure reading experience so I’ll leave you with the introductory panel with the Horror Host, The Tormentor.

I do enjoy working on these EC Comics and I have some more in the works.

That One Matt Bors Comic

The Kickstarter campaign for THAT ONE MATT BORS COMIC is more than 60% funded, so we are well our way to getting this book made. Thank you to everyone who has backed it so far.

There are signed prints of the comic for the first time ever and I'm offering art commissions, also for the first time ever. Any character you like—with some halftone laid down too! As of this writing there are only 3 of 15 spots left. Once those three go, I won't open up again until sometime next year.

It’s strange pushing a book named after me about a comic I can’t seem to escape! But I have become very interested in what the end the result will be. Glenn Fleishman, the editor and publisher, is already talking about adding a few more contributors—check the list of people who have already agreed to contribute writing and comics, if you need convincing. Glenn also added international shipping to the campaign for anyone outside of the US or Canada. Go back it and grab a book!

Cloture!!

The Toxic Avenger is slated for public execution on the White House lawn as an evil plot to pass a comprehensive reconciliation bill through the United States Senate comes to fruition. Our political conspiracy saga reaches a boiling point in Toxic Avenger Comics #9 with some major turns I don’t expect readers will have seen coming.

That issue hits shelves June 3. You can read a five page preview over at Graphic Policy.

Have a great day and do NOT think about a giant eyeball watching you while you sleep tonight.

It has been nearly a decade since I created the “Mister Gotcha” comic, which introduced the phrase “we should improve society somewhat” and gave birth to a thousand remixes. While I have moved on from political cartooning as my main creative outlet, the staying power of the comic as a reaction meme has endured through multiple presidential administrations and various social media epochs.

My work becoming a recognizable meme—one so closely associated with my own name—has been in turns frustrating, flattering, cool, and baffling. You lose control of the work, but gain a kind of cultural cachet you can’t quite figure out how or if to leverage—Matt Bors Comic Consulting? Participate in plushies?

Recently, writer and editor Glenn Fleishman pitched me on an idea that I liked. He wanted to make an entire book examining the comic as an object of internet discourse—to pull it apart, celebrate it, criticize it, and examine it from all angles.

And so today, with my involvement, Glenn has launched That One Matt Bors Comic on Kickstarter. The book will feature the comic’s history and showcase the various remixes made over the years, along with new essays and cartoons by people who think about memes, society, cultural conflicts, economics, and politics. It will also feature an interview with me about about the strip’s memeification, my ambivalence about its uses, and the politics of gotcha-ism that dominates online spaces.

You can pre-order a copy here and even get a signed print of the comic, which I’m offering for the first time ever.

One of the big draws for me on this project was getting other people contributing real writing and cartoons about the subjects at play in the comic and its cultural perch. These are the confirmed contributors, with more to follow: Anna Merlan, Box Brown, Laura Hudson, Shay Mirk, Parker Molloy, Greg Pak, Gemma Correll, K.C. Green, Mattie Lubchansky, James Kochalka, Tom Tomorrow, and Ben Passmore.

I’ve known Glenn Fleishman for years. He commissioned illustrations from me when back he ran The Magazine and has helmed a number of impressive projects like How Comics Are Made, a visual history of print production techniques for process freaks like me. I trust him to make a great book here.

As mentioned above, I’m heavily involved in this project. While Glenn is the editor and publisher, I am being paid well (if it funds!) for my main contributions to the book: cover art, licensing, writing an introduction, and new production art. I am also getting the lion’s share of any signed prints and original art sold through the campaign, which includes a very lush giclée print of the last panel. Grab one on the Kickstarter page!

There are signed special editions of the book at a higher tier and I’m offering art commissions for the first time ever. That is, if you want an original ink drawing of pretty much any character—my own or the big intellectual property you adore most—I’m taking a limited number through this campaign and not opening anything up again until next year.

Being the creator of such a celebrated comic has honestly been strange. If I have to be associated with it forever then a project like this is how I’d like to do that. I have much more to say about it all, but I’m saving it for the book!

• Libra Gang

• Depopulation

• Doctor Planet

• EC Comics

It looks like more people are crashing out online lately.

Jim Carrey is a clone. Michael Jordan is a child molester. They’re eating babies. Billy Corgan claims the CIA dialed down rock music in the 90s. Perhaps the aimless war with Iran is putting everyone on edge, but it seems like the confluence of social media context collapse, AI slop, and algorithmic clip culture is pushing people to form increasingly unhinged fixations on everything from One Battle After Another to whatever is going on in Lindy West’s marriage.

Even during solidly legit outrages, like ICE murdering people on the streets of Minneapolis, the internet becomes a pressure cooker for mental illness-inducing unreality. If you spent any time on Facebook or X during those weeks, you may have noticed that AI-generated crowds of protestors and video clips with random things circled were the new coin of the posting realm, and doing real numbers. Today people across the entire political spectrum post like Alex Jones in 2005. There is little to do but log off. Post and go, is my strategy. Unless it’s sit and watch, observe the culture as it is, I tell myself, and gather material.

What once seemed like Covid-related mental breakdowns has extended into just the way things are going to be online for 2020s. This is the era of the Clavicular, who initiated us to “jestermogging” and “looksmaxxing” for the livestream, and Taylor Lorenz, the always-online journalist who boasts of 16.5 hours of screen time a day; “If I could put the screen inside my brain, I would.” Oh, I’m sure they’re working on it.

These are people who can crash out and rally back to posting at volume before you can close out your first dissociated scroll of the day. Your cortisol spikes might look alarming to an offline human, but zoom out on that chart and check the Y Axis the elite players are operating on. The online world is shaped more than ever by the high screen-time adult, whose deranged posts get pushed to you in order to provoke and punish your sanity. You can try to compete, to elbow your way through the scrum and get some eyeballs, but you can’t come out unscathed. Just open Threads and—you know, honestly, I couldn’t tell you what the fuck is going on over there, but it feels like it is going to produce a cozy romance author taking hostages to bump pre-orders for their book launch (look, I get it).

Crashing out over conspiracies is now completely mainstream, with new ones being adopted and discarded by the week—faster than anyone can keep up and catalogue. It’s practically suspicious these days to admit you simply believe a mentally unwell person grabbed a gun and acted on their beliefs rather than the event being part of some sophisticated stage-managed assassination theater to distract us from the Epstein Files. You need to have brain fry and be completely spiraling to be part of the emergent discourse.

It all reminds me of Libra Gang, the militant mutant movement Ben Clarkson and I envisioned in the first volume of Justice Warriors who, it turned out, were being purposefully driven to psychosis by an AI.

The Libra Gang was a confluence of radical politics, conspiracies, and therapy speak centered around Zodiac ideology, venerating Libras above all other star signs. It was like if people who watched Reels for six hours a day picked up machine guns and launched a violent insurgency around the three-point plan of securing healthcare, freeing the real Jim Carrey, and paying reparations to 90s rock bands toppled in the CIA rap coup. A little good, a lot of bad, and the system was indicted further because of their existence.

Another group of blinkered radicals I’ve written is the Garden State Co-Op in Toxic Avenger Comics #2. Led by the zealous Auk, the paramilitary group dons the masks and monikers of extinct species and seeks drastic and immediate depopulation to atone for humanity’s sins—using Fungirl’s spore powers to, their theory states, create a fungal bomb that will wipe out the town of Tromaville.

I came across this comment on League of Geeks about the issue:

I’m pointing this out because it tracks with something a friend of mine asked me more directly: Why not have good environmental terrorists? The short answer is that’s no fun. Other people would be mad about that! In other issues of the series, I write villains as eugenicist billionaires, mutant incels, and pollution aliens, but I like to spread my targets around. The very real depopulation and Human Extinction Movement (!) do not map neatly onto a left/right binary at all. There is no singular belief system under “environmentalism” and as that crisis deepens, I’m less certain we see the crew from How To Blow Up a Pipeline show up than we will the guys from Bugonia.

The Garden State Co-Op, much like the Symbionese Liberation Army it is partially based on, is not made of disciplined organizers carrying out some radical, but much-needed agenda. It’s a bunch of self-righteous kooks totally pilled by a violent charismatic dumbass. Many such cases.

The current overriding characteristic of mass shootings and political assassination in America seems to be ideologically incoherent meme psychosis. It’s not going to get better any time soon, but it does dovetail nicely with my longstanding interest in whacked-out dogma, cults, and political violence.

The other cult I’ve written into Toxic Avenger, The People’s Hive, is only going to get stranger over future volumes as the alien invasion plot builds to a crescendo…

Love and Blight

The latest collection of Toxic Avenger is out, titled “Love and Blight,” it collects Toxic Avenger Comics #1-5, featuring a rotating casts of artists doing genre stories ranging from Horror to Crime to Romance. I realize most people aren’t going to comic shops weekly, so this is your opportunity to pick it up online or in bookstores everywhere.

While you’re doing that, grab Justice Warriors and Justice Warriors: Vote Harder to get all caught up on 16 hours of screen time dystopias.

Felipe Sobreiro drew the Garden State Co-Op issue and is also our colorist on Justice Warriors. He and I are working on something else coming out of all this…

Doctor Planet Time

Part III of our “Toxie Goes to Washington” arc explodes across the capital in Toxic Avenger Comics # 8, which is out this week. As we arrive more than halfway through our story, comic outlets are starting to take notice of what we are going for.

“Toxic Avenger Comics #8 presents extra sharp, doubly human satire that’ll melt you like a fusion reactor,” writes AIPT. Comic Book Addicts says, “This chapter is a definitive statement on the absurdity of our age.” “Bors and Harper swing for the fences,” writes Geek Vibes Nation. “Loud, messy, politically charged, and gloriously absurd.” Gotta share it when I get it!

Each issue in this storyline has a different narrator and in this one it is Doctor Planet, the Secretary of Energy under the new president. All is not well with the environmentally-positioned superhero. He speaks in earnest quips like Captain Planet, but his inner monologue is that of a more tortured and resigned Dr. Manhattan. You’ll find out more as the story goes on—here’s a splash page by Fred Harper.

Chatbot Psychosis Thriller

Speaking of cortisol spiking on AI, My next story for EC Comics is a chatbot psychosis thriller titled “Type M for Murder.” I wrote it, Fabiana Mascolo drew it, and it will be in Catacomb of Torment #11 hitting shelves May 20. You can pre-order it with comic shops now.

May you have a becalmed day.

Steel!

Created by Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove as a superhero riff on John Henry, the steel-driving rail worker who faced off against the new steam-powered rock drill. I could think of a few things I could do with him in a story these days.

Ink and screen tones on 9x12 bristol. This was the most complex cut job I’ve done so far with screen tones.

Nuke!

Created by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. This pill-chomping super soldier created under Project: Homegrown can be found gunning down people in the Republic of Terra Verde or US citizens in their own cities. I don’t know why I thought of him. The drawing is digital.

Two commissions came in recently for Toxic Avenger Comics #1 sketch covers. One person wanted Toxie as Judge Dredd, the other requested Toxie as Savage Dragon. Well, twist my fucking arm!

Here’s some Toxie fan art from dumbcat on Bluesky. Down with goons. Abolish goons. Do a backside goon flip down a set of stairs.

New Comics

Toxic Avenger Comics #7: Our second installment of “Toxie Goes to Washington” is out this week. Toxie has been framed for the murder the President and the VP is sworn in, granting sweeping powers to the Planet Teens to clean up the United States from mutant terrorism. We even venture back to World World 2 and Operation Paperclip to introduce a new villain. There’s a review at AIPT raving about the direction this story is taking.

Toxie Team Up: A new collection of all five issues of Toxie Team Up came out this week. This book contains the Justice Warriors crossover with the Toxic Avenger by myself and Ben Clarkson, in addition to Mark Russell and Richard Pace’s popular character, Jesus Christ.

Cruel Kingdom: The new collection of comics from the EC revival is out, collecting all their fantasy stories. I wrote a comic for this called “Just Desserts” about a royal chef doing everything she can to impress the King, illustrated by Valeria Burzo. Recommended for anyone who likes The Borrowers or Arrietty.

Reminder: I will be signing at the Canadian Comic Bin in Stayer, Ontario, this Saturday at noon!