[dramatic upbeat music] [dramatic upbeat music continues] [dramatic upbeat music continues] - Hello and welcome to "Comic Culture."

I'm Terrence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is cartoonist Matt Bors.

Matt, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Hey, thanks for having me.

- Now, Matt, you are, your resume is incredible.

You have been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes.

You have won an Eisner Award and now you are writing for what is considered one of the great schlock characters of all time, "The Toxic Avenger."

So how do you go from being perhaps best known for an editorial cartoonist to writing, you know, "The Toxic Avenger"?

- Yeah, they're not handing out any Pulitzers for Troma work, I can tell you that.

I've always had an interest in this stuff.

I mean, I was into "Toxic Avenger" and MAD Magazine and "Tales from the Crypt" and all sorts of other stuff when I was a little kid.

I had some luck when I was about 18 or 19, I started doing political cartoons and had a lot of luck with them.

And then that became my career for 18 years.

In some ways, I'm just going back to the original plan, which is doing genre comics and, you know, I kind of, I mean, I have a penchant for political satire and mutants and everything.

So "Toxic Avenger" was always in my mind as something that was really cool.

And in the last two years or so, I actually started thinking that I have an idea for it and nobody seems to be doing anything with this character anymore.

And you know, I just, I went after it one day and it was kind of surprisingly easy to pull together and it all worked out.

- The Toxic Avenger is one of those characters going back to the '80s and it's fun when you look at how people use science fiction and horror to reflect their era.

And I'm just wondering, you know, as you are, I guess, updating "The Toxic Avenger" for modern audiences, are you sort of leaning into contemporary issues, the same way that Troma might've been doing back in the '80s?

- You know, "The Toxic Avenger" is just sort of this fun, schlocky movie.

I mean, it's not incredibly political or anything, but it is channeling some of the environmental anxieties of the era, which, you know, at that time was like, nuclear meltdowns and endless toxic rivers and toxic dumping, I guess, and stuff like that.

And then today it's, I think, you know, we've cleaned up a little bit.

Like we've picked up the cigarette butts on the side of the highway, but we still have, we have major, major problems.

So I'm sticking with the toxic waste as the origin of the Toxic Avenger.

And so that's still in there.

But I do update it quite a bit.

So like one of the main things you'll find reading the first issue is that it is a toxic train spill in Tromaville, New Jersey, the real city that we all know and love.

But obviously, it's sort of riffing off of the toxic train spill in my home state of Ohio last year.

And so the town is put under quarantine by a corporation called Biohazard Solutions.

They're part of the cleanup and also seem to nefariously have something to do with it.

And we kind of go from there.

I include a lot of social media aspects to it in the sort of, there's sort of conspiracies that develop around the spill, some of them real, some of them not.

And the bullying aspect of it.

So like Melvin Junko, the nerd who becomes the Toxic Avenger, is bullied in all sort of incarnations of the character.

So I stick with that, but, you know, update it to 2024, but basically.

- We look at some characters as sort of being, you know, frozen in amber and to contemporize them and put them into the modern world can be a bit tricky.

But it's fascinating to look at current events, and especially I guess corporate media, and corporations as sort of the bad guy as your main focus.

It's gotta be, again, a rich ground because there's so much to pull from.

But how do you sort of draw that fine line between the entertaining aspect of it and the kind of real life depressing aspect of a toxic train spill?

- I tend toward dark humor and, you know, violence, it's a violent comic, which shouldn't surprise anyone who knows about "The Toxic Avenger."

The same thing with my creator owned series I do at Ahoy.

They're the publisher for "The Toxic Avenger" comic.

And I do a series called "Justice Warriors," which is like a dystopian cop series with all sorts of mutants.

And I just gravitate towards dark humor and ultra violent satire stuff.

It's like in my DNA as, I don't know, I guess it's a way to process the world.

You know, some people don't like dark humor, but that's how I do, you know, it's like, I guess also came out around the time of "Toxic Avenger," but like "RoboCop," you know, that like Verhoeven satire, over the top, violent, but like playing it straight, you know, that's what I do in a lot of my comics.

- It's gotta be a bit of a switch for you to go from editorial cartoons where you are the writer and the artist to writing something for an artistic partner.

So when you are collaborating with somebody, how do you sort of connect what you envision on the page with what they're going to bring to it and how do you work with what they're bringing to change and maybe make what you're doing a little stronger?

- Yeah, good question.

I'm working with Fred Harper on "Toxic Avenger."

He's really great.

I mean, his style works perfectly for this on a lot of levels.

He's got a kind of grittiness to his line that works well with gross stuff and mutants.

I mean, I don't know, I like collaborating.

I guess I like drawing my own stuff too, but I like collaborating.

I guess my rule is you have to be better than me at the drawing to collaborate with me, which is not the highest bar on earth, but it's also not the lowest bar on earth.

If not better than me, then I should just draw the comic myself.

Drawing comics is time intensive, as any cartoonist will tell you.

So, you can kind of only do one project at a time if you're drawing.

And as I've been kind of getting more into monthly comics, I like writing, I like being able to put it in the hands of someone who, like I said, is better than me really, especially certain genres.

If I wrote a superheroes book, I'm probably not the best guy to draw it.

I'm fine with working with someone better that's gonna enhance it.

But I like to have a direct relationship with the artists I work with.

Talk to 'em, figure out what they like to draw, try to work some of their ideas in maybe, and I guess not be, I don't know, too strict about the end result.

'Cause like, yeah, if I want to control everything about it, then I should just do it myself.

So there's a collaborative aspect to it.

You can write something, you can write a page that's a splash page, and it just has a small paragraph of detail, but it could be a gigantic scene that takes them forever to draw.

Or you could be trying to plow through a bunch of plot details and say, "Okay, this page has 10 panels, it's people talking 'cause we have to have all this set up and all this."

And you know, they can come back to you and figure out other ways to have it work.

'Cause they're the ones who actually have to do the work of solving it on the page.

So every good comic artist helps improve the writer.

- I think there's that old joke about the comic writer saying, "Comics, you can do anything.

You could have a space epic with a cast of thousands" and then the artist just looks at him and says, "No!"

- Yeah.

- How do you kind of balance, because as somebody who's worked on your own work, you are aware of the time that goes into it.

Are you ever concerned that, you know, you're asking too much?

- No, I mean, I try not to overdo it.

[laughs] On "Justice Warriors," I co-write it with my collaborator Ben Clarkson.

And it's a crazy dense world with a ton of mutants and a densely populated city.

So it has a ton of stuff to draw and the city's kind of the scene, a character almost.

And he likes doing that stuff and he puts a ton of work into it and makes it look, brings it to life.

So in that case, it's a creator owned comic, he's putting the work in 'cause it's like our vision.

But, you know, if you're doing some mainstream work, especially if the pay is not great, you can't really be getting a script with every panel calling for tons of background characters and yeah, 100 aliens fighting on each page.

So yeah, there's a balance.

- Now you mentioned the city as a character, and this is one of those things that we don't think about when we're reading a book, but when you're creating your own world, how much of the weirdness or the signs or the concept of what this neighborhood might look like is coming from these conversations and how much of it is maybe what you're putting on the page or how much you're seeing on the page with your collaborators, you know, roughs?

- Yeah, it depends.

I mean, you gotta give room to the artist to have a little bit of fun.

If, you know, I mean, Alan Moore, who is one of the best comic writers of all time, which is not an unusual opinion that I'm expressing, but his scripts are sort of famously dense and laden with all this detail to an absurd degree.

And, I don't know, seems highly unnecessary even for what he's doing.

You have to give the artists like, you know, room to have a little bit more input.

They're people that are actually doing the, most of the work, I would say.

And you know, if you're not able to put in some background details or ask for, "Oh, can we make this two panels and can we break this one panel into two?

Or can we take these two and condense it into three?"

If you're not able to make those decisions as an artist, you know, I think it stops, takes the fun out of it real quick.

- It's funny because you've gone to Ahoy, which is a great indie publisher.

They do a lot of great comics.

I had the opportunity to speak with them at Baltimore a couple of years ago.

And as somebody who has a career, an established career, as an editorial cartoonist, how do you get approached or how do you approach a publisher like Ahoy with an idea that you have for a sequential book that is a little different from your regular, you know, reputation?

- Just write 'em an email.

I mean, more than an email.

I mean for "Justice Warriors," we put together a full, you know, pitch packet with an overview of the book and eight sample pages that were fully colored and lettered.

It was a lot of work.

But we submitted it to Ahoy and a couple other small publishers.

Nothing nonstandard about that, really.

Like when you're submitting to publishers, you know, that's really what you do.

And then after that, you know, I developed a relationship with them and I got the idea about "The Toxic Avenger."

And sort of somewhat unusual way, I as the writer sort of made it happen.

I pitched Troma on it and then I kind of brought Ahoy in and they handled the business and publishing side of it.

Oftentimes it's a publisher, an editor, or a publisher has an idea to bring in, you know, a license and then builds a team off it.

I had the idea for it and I went after, you know, I went with Ahoy 'cause I already had a relationship with them.

For them, it was the first time they've ever done anything licensed.

So it's new.

They mostly do creator owned work or entirely creator owned work.

But you know, the vibe kind of fits with them.

Ahoy builds themself as like Vertigo, but funny.

If you know what old Vertigo comics are, a lot of the people who worked there were actually editors at Vertigo back in the day.

But what that means is essentially that a lot of them are, you know, somewhat satirical or at least socially relevant in some way and genre comics.

And that's really what "Toxic Avenger" is.

- And you mentioned it's a licensed property and you're making some big changes to the origin of "The Toxic Avenger."

Is this something that Troma is just like, "Great, run with it," or are they giving you suggestions and ideas about how you have to maybe stick closer to their, you know, their brand, their marketing image?

- No, no.

They've been great to work with.

And you know, they loved my pitch and everything like that.

You know, if you think back, I don't know if you're aware of this at all, but there was a cartoon called "The Toxic Crusaders" in 1991.

You know, that was part of a wave of like taking a lot of adult material and making kids' cartoons out of it.

Even the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" comic is a very violent and quite awesome, I would add.

I loved discovering it as a kid.

So I guess the point is, is that, you know, they've been willing for a long time to make changes to "The Toxic Avenger," right?

That was a whole nother iteration for kids.

And in fact, what I'm doing is sort of taking, it'll be clear, a few issues in, that I'm taking a lot of elements from "The Toxic Crusaders" and updating them.

So we hope to do more of these.

We're gonna plan on bringing back "The Toxic Crusaders" as well.

So it's kind of updating the concept of "The Toxic Crusaders" to make it sort of a contemporary, you know, R rated satire as opposed to a kid's cartoon, but.

- It's fun when something that you loved when you're younger is something that you can work on as you become a professional.

So as somebody who remembers "The Toxic Crusaders" and the fact that there were so many of those "Toxic Avenger" movies and they got broader and more comedic as they went on, how do you sort of balance the fact that you are a fan of this work with somebody who is entrusted with telling a great story and not, you know, making it too much fan service?

- Yeah, well I'm definitely not interested in fan service per se.

You know, there's a lot of characters I like, a lot of mainstream superhero stuff and that I'd love to write someday, but I don't, yeah, I don't know, I guess I, I don't even consider myself a fan of a whole lot.

I mean, maybe I am, but I'm a reader, right?

Like I'm a reader of certain comics.

I enjoy them to the extent that, you know, I want to write them.

I see it as a vehicle to tell a story and a story that is partially already there.

You don't have to come up with it from scratch.

So in the case of "The Toxic Avenger," you have all of these relevant things.

Pollution, transforming a bullied kid into this sort of hero of a small town where he is, you know, it's a lot of things.

I mean, it's partially body horror, it's a superhero parody, it's an environmental fable, anti-corporate stuff.

So that's stuff's all there, that's built in.

That's what I love about it and want to focus on in just sort of a different way.

But it's there.

And I don't have to create my own pollution hero from scratch.

I can just write "The Toxic Avenger" and it turns out more people already know about that and will hopefully, you know, like my iteration of it.

- Let's go back to your work as an editorial cartoonist or political cartoonist.

I don't know what the correct phrase is.

- Either, either is fine.

Yeah.

- Going from somebody who is reflecting on current events and putting out strips very quickly that reflects something that's happening, how do you sort of look at the paper or watch the news and turn that into something that has a point that's going to be relevant right now because it is an immediate sort of art form?

- Well, you just, you described it.

You come up with something really fast and get it out there.

Thankfully I don't do it anymore 'cause it got pretty exhausting.

I almost, now that I quit, I don't know how I did it for 18 years.

I did, like, when I started out, I was doing three a week and then by the end I was only doing one a week, plus other stuff, 'cause I was editing a website called The Nib.

But I don't know, man, you just, you get really good at it.

I don't, I mean, I would say that some were not as good as others, that's for sure.

But I still always did them.

You know, you don't get to have writer's block or to treat it like, it's not a pastime.

It was my job, so I treated it like a job.

I had to do it.

And I did my best to come up with something that was kind of entertaining.

I mean, I guess, I guess it's the same process that a lot of people use to engage with the news these days.

It's like, you know, you read about something going on that's terrible or horrendous or pisses you off and then you go post about it online.

And instead of posting about it online, I did a political cartoon about it.

So, you know, that was kind of the motivation, I suppose, is constantly coming up with stuff that agitated me or that I wanted to make fun of.

- It's true too that people now engage with news differently than they did 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago in that there are shows like "The Daily Show" or you know, you can tune into Seth Meyers and he's going to do a deep dive into something with, you know, a closer look, where people are getting news a lot of times from these lighter or more comedic points of view.

So as an editorial cartoonist, you're kind of leaning into that.

Is it something where, you know, if we look at some of the great works from 20 years ago or 30 years ago, is your stuff a little bit more on the absurd side or is it something where you're a little bit more able to play into language 'cause people are getting used to the idea of comedic news being pointed?

- I don't know that I'd be the best person to describe my own work, but it would be, you know, heavily influenced by online culture, I guess, and the age in which we live.

And towards the last few years of doing political cartoons, I really started to incorporate a lot of these genre elements that I'm doing now in fiction.

So like, I would kind of jump to a post-apocalyptic future wasteland where, you know, the earth had been ravaged by climate change and there's mutants and cyborgs and all that stuff that I've always wanted to draw 'cause I kind of got sick of just drawing politicians and talking heads and everything.

So I would try to give things science fiction premises and do some kind of absurd leap forward in the future, maybe, to exaggerate some premise from the present.

So I wasn't doing maybe, you know, like the traditional editorial cartoons.

People may think of like the old school newspaper, one panel comics.

- And is this something that you were able to, you know, get people's attention because you're able to use the internet to sort of get out earlier strips and then you get the attention of a syndicate or some other group that's looking to publish editorial cartoons?

Or is it the old school way where you're knocking on doors and trying to get your name out there?

- I, well, the old school way, I think, would be getting a job at a newspaper and becoming a highly paid professional, which happened for, you know, a couple 100 people through at it, like simultaneously, a couple 100 jobs in North America through the latter half of the 20th century.

And then it all went away, unfortunately.

I came in at the tail end of, what I would find to be the tail end, of like the alt weekly craze.

Young people may not know this, but there used to be free newspapers in every major city that were different from the major newspapers and had a bunch of cool stuff that basically came out of '60s counterculture and were, so, I guess they were initially started by boomers, but there's sort of, when I came in, they were very like Gen X branded 'cause I was influenced by this school of cartoonists that's like Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, even Matt Groening, the creator of "The Simpsons," did this great strip called "Life in Hell."

So that type of stuff was really influential to me.

It's called alt, basically all weekly cartooning, is what people called it.

So you get in those papers and then, you know, they give you a little bit of money each week, not a lot, but if you get in a lot of 'em it can add up.

And then websites were coming around at the time too.

I mean, websites had been around, but like real media sites and places that could pay, and then social media created a ton of traffic for them.

So for a while it was a decent environment.

I mean, there was, you could get a lot of readers online in the, I guess, you know, early 2010s.

Not as much anymore.

- Yeah, I would imagine that the media landscape has changed dramatically and there's so much more content that people can get lost.

Basically, you're drowning in a sea of choices and you don't know where to go.

So as you've made that conscious decision to get out of it for your own, I guess, mental health, in a way, like you're tired of reading the same depressing headlines over and over again.

I know for a lot of us during the pandemic, it was the doom scroll, going through, you know, Twitter and just reading- - Yeah.

- Stuff over and over again.

So is that sort of the same mindset for you as a professional, just like, "Let me try something new."

- Yeah, yeah, that's, I quit in 2021 as a, you know, I would say it's improved my mental health, but that's not necessarily the reason.

More like creatively, I just sort of came to the end of, I mean, I've been doing political cartoons professionally since I was 19 and I had, you know, a lot of accomplishments and got plenty of popularity and had a few cartoons go viral and all that good stuff.

But I didn't wanna do it until the day I died.

I wanted to do other things in the medium.

I like graphic novels, I like comics, I like nonfiction, I like weird mutant comics.

So mostly it's about my desire to do this other stuff, which I have always had.

I just had luck in political cartooning and then became a political cartoonist.

But it was definitely influenced by like, you know, the changing landscape online and news media where it's harder and harder, if you're a creator, it's harder and harder to get attention online.

And social media has sort of collapsed and diffused in a lot of different ways.

Some of that is better and some of it's for the worse.

There's more and more stuff every day.

You know, when I was coming up, images could share widely on Facebook, you could easily get tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of shares.

Now the algorithm's all tweaked out.

I get nothing.

And you gotta be figuring out how to edit video and be like an influencer to blow up on Reels and TikTok, which I'm just not gonna be able to do, I don't think, it's not in me, and I don't think it's works well for comics.

So everything's just changed and I decided to throw my towel in and I mean, I'm still very dependent on the online world and promote myself that way and everything, but I don't create content, to use that word, you know, for the internet the way that I used to do.

I make comic books and you have to buy them to read them.

- If the folks at home wanted to learn more about your work, where can they find you on the web?

- I'm pretty easy to find.

I'm on all those social media sites I just disparaged.

Matt Bors, you know, I'm on all of them.

- If the folks at home wanted to find out more about "The Toxic Avenger" or "Justice Warriors," I always wanna say Social Justice Warriors, but if they wanted to find out more about that and your work at Ahoy, where can they find that?

- Well, "Justice Warriors" is available, you know, wherever you buy books online or in real life.

And "The Toxic Avenger" is coming out in comic shops as individual issues starting on October 9th.

- Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

It's been a fun half hour.

- Yeah, no problem.

Thank you.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

We will see you again soon.

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