WARNING: Some spoilers ahead for Toxic Avenger Comics and Toxic Crusaders.
Matt Bors was wise to go into Toxic Avenger with some hesitation.
“I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when you take a beloved property and tinker with it a little bit,” Bors said during a recent Zoom call. “Sometimes people are really precious about that, or have opinions about how you’re executing it. I think one thing working in my favor is that Toxic Avenger did not originate as a comic book. It’s a cult movie, and those movies still exist and aren’t sullied by my comic if you don’t like my comic.”
Precious is certainly one way to describe Toxie fans. To use just one example, it’s the movie in which yours truly “came online,” taking it all in amid the glow of an old, very heavy TV on the floor of my father’s bachelor pad. As such, Toxic Avenger has been an integral part of my own identity as a nerd for some 30-plus years. But as the writer proved with the first arc of Toxic Avenger, his thoughtful, inspired recreation of the Toxie origin was everything us Troma fans could want in an updated story.
“I’ve found all the Troma fans, all the Toxy fans really, are liking this,” Bors said. “I wasn’t really sure what to expect because Toxic Avengers is a couple of different things to a lot of people. I mean, it’s gore, it’s satire, it’s a superhero parody, it’s trash cinema. My goal is always to not completely re-imagine the character from the ground up, but do something that people who have no relationship with the movie or the cartoon could get into cold and enjoy and say like, ‘Oh, this dude is doing something interesting.’”
It’s not just, for instance, that the AHOY-published first volume gives us a more well-rounded Melvin. Or that it ups the already potent body horror from the original film. It’s that Bors understands the essence of Toxic Avenger, and balances that with a perspective geared toward this wonderful medium.
A, B…Z?
“Toxic Avenger, the reason why most of us love it is because the original movie is so schlocky, corny, campy, bad in a good way, even offensive in a gleeful way,” Bors said. “And they call it grade Z cinema. There’s a certain charm to doing a movie like that, which I think is why Toxic Avenger is so beloved. Like, bad special effects and it’s not scripted to win an Oscar.”
However, there’s a caveat in adapting this “shlock” to the realm of comics.
“But I do think in making a comic, you can’t make a grade Z comic,” Bors said. “There’s not a lot of charm in producing a poorly executed comic. Like, bad special effects even look cool on screen because you know what they’re doing and there’s blood spurting out of a head. So what I’m trying to create along with Fred Harper and Tristan Wright and the other artists is a good comic. A book, like I’d said, that even people who don’t know or care about Toxic Avenger can read and get something out of it. But I am trying to do it within the confines of Toxic Avenger. We’re trying to deliver on gore. We’re trying to deliver on jokes. But I’m trying to inject a little substance into the whole thing.”
Still, Bors also recognizes that a Toxic Avenger re-launch didn’t exactly come around at the best of times.
“We’re at the peak nostalgia wave,” Bors said. “It’s got to be the peak…I hope it’s the peak. They’re doing C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa. There’s not much left to do.”
The Toxic Avenger #2. Courtesy of AHOY Comic.
And, of course, there could’ve been problems with those occasionally tricky licensers.
“I’m not trying to throw any shade or anything, but I think a lot of times when there’s licensed work, there is, from the licensor, a real management of likenesses and the tone and everything,” Bors said. “And Troma is really letting me do my thing. They’re letting me riff on the character. I was trying to skate a line that wasn’t drawn for me. Troma did not set up any guardrails. They were very encouraging, but they don’t give heavy notes or anything. So I was given free rein. Maybe I could have done something different or weirder even or less aligned with what the property is, I’m not sure. They were self-imposed guardrails.”
And that very riffing continues as Bors, alongside a slew of artists and collaborators, will add to the Toxie Train with a veritable slew of new projects. Some are sillier than others, or more interested in other dynamics/events. But each new title will add to this compelling new spin on the most heroic man ever to don a tutu.
“I came into this pitching multiple volumes of stuff we haven’t even got to yet,” Bors said. “I pitched years of stories with the basis being this first volume was a new origin story for the universe. They all sort of originate out of this inciting event of this, which I’ve done as a train derailment. I wanted Melvin becoming the Toxic Avenger in this transformative part of his life. When you spend two hours watching a movie and it’s fun, you can fly through the premise or the origin. Here, you have to give a little more interiority to the character or at least more background.”
A Brief Interlude on Friendship
The first book in the “Extended Toxie-verse” is Toxie Team-Up. It’s the one where Bors has the least amount of editorial insight; he said it was AHOY’s idea to “fill the gap between volume one and two, and to have fun and riff on Toxie.” That said, Bors will be reuniting with Ben Clarkson for a Toxic Avenger-Justice Warriors collaboration. You’ve got to give the mutant lovers what they want, after all.
“We come up with a reason for (Toxie) to end up in the world of Bubble City and the uninhabited zone,” Bors said. “And to his surprise, everyone there’s a mutant, not just him. But, of course, he is an illegal immigrant from another time. They arrest him for violating time ordinances, and like any good team up, there’s conflict and then the characters may have to team up against something else.”
And, of course, Toxie Team-Up (issue #3 drops August 20) has already seen a team-up with AHOY’s Jesus Christ character. Not too shabby for some dumb kid from Tromaville, New Jersey, right?
The Big Time
The next title, which has also a couple issues on shelves by now, is Toxic Avenger Comics. It’s that book that spins directly out of Toxic Avenger’s first arc, and builds onto the new canon with a collection of interesting one-shots.
“It starts with five one-and-done issues that are all different genres with different artists,” Bors said. “So the first issue is horror by Fred Harper. And I’ve really tried to lean in hard to horror and do a straight up horror story that is not winking and that is not pretentious. The second issue (out August 13) is the crime issue, and Felipe Sobreiro draws it. It has a very different visual style and a very different tone to it.”
While genre exploration is an essential part of Toxic Avenger Comics, Bors mostly sees that title as a proper extension of the first arc.
“So all of these, I think, are in the range of what I’ve established in the previous series, but they’re just leaning in different directions,” Bors said. “And then we do science fiction and romance and fantasy with all different artists. So part of that is just creatively an experiment of…I love different genres. I want to work in them. I think Toxie lends itself to it.”
Courtesy of AHOY Comics.
But it’s not all just stories for the sake of genre. There’s a larger thread uncovered and laid bare across the first issues of Toxic Avenger Comics.
“And then there’s a story that will be told throughout these comics,” Bors said. “The first two pages (of issue #1) are actually a little intro before the horror story starts. And then in each subsequent issue…there’s a story of the senator of New Jersey trying to get into Tromaville to check out what’s going on. It’s basically been abandoned and it hasn’t been cleaned up. And most of these first five issues deal with the fallout from that, like politically, culturally, crime-wise. A bunch of weird crimes, ideologies, derangements are reverberating from the spill.”
And there’s also repercussions for Toxie in a very personal sense.
“I had originally planned for Bonehead to basically be (Toxie’s) eternal antagonist throughout the whole series and the years of stories I pitched,” Bors said. “And then I realized, as I was writing issue #4 and #5, and it just made so much more sense for him to die and for their confrontation to end violently. To deliver on the gore for people, but also deliver on the actual catharsis and the conflict between these two characters.”
Bors added, “I do figure out a way to keep it going, in a stronger way, in this horror issue (out now). You’ll see the origins of a new villain that is going to be haunting him throughout the series. I think that reinforced some of the themes that I’m going for, which is that each thing that happens creates a new problem.”
Still, all of that’s just the appetizer, folks. Because after the first five issues, Toxic Avenger Comics grapples with its next major arc, and boy oh boy, is it 40 megatons of radioactive madness.
“After that, we start this arc called ‘Toxie Goes to Washington,’ Bors said. “It will be drawn by Fred Harper and will be a more overt political satire. I don’t think anyone’s ready for the amount of insanity we’re ready to unleash. There will be some obvious parallels with what’s going on, but I am making an attempt to…it’s like doing (Donald) Trump; I don’t think there’s any need to do Trump. It’s a different story, but it is about Toxie trying to go to Washington to basically get help for his town and to get a national spotlight on it and believing in his naive way that change is possible.”
Bors added, “Like, you can testify and talk to your legislators. Then you get a bill and then you get enough votes for the bill and then you pass the bill. He’s going to discover that not only are things a bit more complicated and a bit more bloody, but the alien subplot of what’s going on in the series will be pursued maximally.”
Cutting Wide and Deep
This seems like a natural point to talk about politics and satire in the world of Toxic Avenger comics. With that first arc, Bors didn’t get a ton of feedback about the political “stuff”; if anything, more fans seemed to have indicated that they “didn’t need aliens with my giant mutant superhero,” as Bors heard from a few readers. Maybe that’s because, despite the extra relevant subject matter (corruption, disinformation, etc.), Bors doesn’t see Toxic Avenger as being inherently political. Not like you’d expect, at least.
“Where people come down will just depend on their own sensibilities,” Bors said. “Toxic Avenger is definitely political. Maybe it’s not as overtly political as, like, Justice Warriors, but there’s there’s the obvious jokes I do and the topical humor and then there’s the more layered stuff that I hope people are picking up on.”
A lot of that approach is because Bors, who made his bread and butter with The Nib, found himself inadvertently doing these robust, deeply satirical cartoons.
“I spent my career mostly doing political cartoons, and I’ve pivoted into what I call ‘proper comic books,’” Bors said. “And I’ve always wanted to do that. I almost got derailed by political cartoons. I started doing them in the run up to the Iraq War, when I was really young and I was opposing the war and everything happening in the Bush Administration.”
Courtesy of Matt Bors/The Nib.
During the course of his successful career, Bors found himself grappling with people’s perceptions and what that meant for his own efforts to speak truth to power and still engage and entertain folks.
“The Nib and my own cartoons would tackle really serious issues directly, like the police killings of black people,” Bors said. “I would even have people tell me sometimes, like, ‘This isn’t funny; you’re doing stuff about real world stuff and making jokes out of it.’ Political cartoons and satire are just not for those people.”
Bors added, “I reached a point of exhaustion with what I felt I could say and how much I was enjoying it creatively. The way I would say it is when you’re doing a political cartoon, you don’t really want to be misinterpreted at all. You certainly don’t want people to take the wrong meaning or the opposite of your meaning, and they don’t lend themselves to ambiguity and thoughtfulness. Nor are they telling a story really. It had less to do with the politics then with just being bored creatively by it. I wanted to do comics and stories and draw interesting stuff and draw cool cyborgs and mutants.”
To an extent, Bors recognizes that he might “lose some readers,” and he’s perfectly OK with that as he transitions into the direct market.
“Other people certainly may have no interest in me doing silly genre comics and wonder why I’m not doing, you know, serious comics journalism anymore,” Bors said. “And that’s fair. I guess I have come around from how I felt when I was younger and was really gung-ho about political cartoons and wanted to do really direct, didactic stuff, which I think it can be easier to reach people with actual storytelling and with things not being as didactic.”
Relevant but Starring Mutants
Because he’s not leaving behind politics for the toxic landfills of a fictionalized New Jersey. Instead, he’s just doing something bigger and more inspired.
“In some ways, it is obvious satire,” Bors said. “But we’re also trying not to do something that is just about…you like this if you agree with it. That’s really what I’m trying to get away from in political cartooning. Because I think, and I saw this at The Nib: People are so attuned to their specific bandwidth of their political beliefs and online persona and aesthetics. Anything that steps outside of it, one way or the other, they’re pretty hostile toward.”
Bors added, “We would run things that would span from liberal to far left and anarchist. And sometimes a lot of our readership wouldn’t get the far left stuff, particularly if it criticized Israel. And then a lot of super-online lefties wouldn’t like when we’d run something that’s, like, a mainstream liberal position; like we’re defending Democrats, for instance. I’m glad to be able to step away from that and do stuff that you don’t have to have a partisan mindset to absorb and enjoy. I think that even perhaps works better with more conservative-minded people, where if something is not flagged in their mind as being too political or too woke, they could actually read and enjoy it.”
In fact, Bors almost feels fated to have become the “Toxie Guy” as he leads the franchise into new and daring directions.
“I was drawing a lot of mutants in my political cartoons and I just thought, ‘I can’t believe no one’s doing anything with Toxic Avenger,’ Bors said. “I am very consciously trying to carve a little lane out for myself in this, like, mutant dystopian satire, which I don’t know how big the audience is for that, but I know I like it.”
From The Toxic Avenger #2. Art by Fred Harper. Courtesy of AHOY Comic.
Given his unique spin on Toxie, and the state of the comics industry in general, Bors is more than aware of his rather good fortune to drive this toxic dump truck for the long-term.
“It’s hard to do anything beyond a miniseries these days,” Bors said. “It’s hard to make your creator-owned projects work. It’s hard to write for a licensed character where they allow you to do anything more than five issues long. So I’m really lucky. It’s harder to find this kind of work in comics I’ve found. I know a lot of people who are writing for the Big Two and more mainstream publishers, which I haven’t done yet and would certainly be willing to do and have ideas for. But it also seems that everything just gets canceled. It’s very hard to work in that milieu.”
Speaking of modern developments, there’s something about that first Toxic Avenger arc that’s political but also so much more. At some point, I asked Bors if he, as someone else who came of age during the George W. Bush years, was working out life under Prince Idiot. While he said there’s “nothing specific,” he did add that it’s “hard to talk about anything going on that’s relevant and not be a link to that.” And that’s when we got on the subject of COVID.
“I developed this idea of the toxic train spill, which is based off of the train derailment in Palestine, Ohio,” Bors said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how this would play out today.’ And then I developed a story from there. Then, as I got into it, and especially as I rewrote issue #1 to be reverse chronological order, I realized the obvious thing, which is how many parallels there were to the pandemic and to lockdown and everything.”
Bors added, “On the one hand, we have a corporation that’s given control over this town and forced the quarantines, so it could be interpreted as almost anti-lockdown in a way. I wasn’t saying this is about the pandemic or anything, but I did find myself in the writing of it, you know, of going back to those days to dredge up some stuff about how I felt about it, especially in Melvin’s narration. There’s this idea that for him…this was this horrible thing to everyone else, but in his reality, this is not necessarily the dividing point of when his life got bad.”
The Gang’s all Here
OK, politics back on the shelf; let’s really return to the juicy stuff.
To some extent, Toxic Avenger Comics is very much the main title of this endeavor. As such, it’s one where a lot of the emotionality and character development of that first arc will continue. That includes further adding to Melvin’s background and “lore” as he adjusts to his newly-mutated life.
“I like writing Melvin,” Bors said. “He’s a kid. I imagine, and I think this comes from the movies, he’s naive and goodhearted and often makes mistakes and he’s not some well-informed know-it-all. I think depending on how much runway I get here, that story can expand and contract a bit to fit the realities of how long I get on this title. But I do have a few years of stories.”
But it’s not just Melvin, either. Toxic Avenger Comics also keeps his friend, Yvonne, in the mix, and their dynamic is a vital part of this larger story. It very much grounds that aforementioned political satire in a deeply human manner.
“I like writing Yvonne as this sort of foil in a way, where she’s crass and cynical and a lot more skeptical of things, which I think you’ll see more of as the series goes on,” Bors said. “Neither of them are mouthpieces, but they play off each other to get at what the truth of the situation might be.”
Cover by Tristan Wright. Courtesy of AHOY Comics.
But if you’re not entirely about politics and personal growth, then you may be interested in the final piece of Bors’ master plan: Toxic Crusaders.
Debuting on September 10, Toxic Crusaders #1 sees Bors and artist Tristan Wright basically doing a “reinterpreted adult version of the cartoon, with Bors adding that it’s basically “a cool Captain Planet.”
Before we delve into Toxic Crusaders a bit more, though, there’s an important point that Bors made that needs a little recognition. As with the movies, his stories have bounded about between the weird and horrific, the serious and silly. It’s not creative whiplash, though, as Toxic Avenger is basically built to be so profoundly multifaceted.
“That cartoon launched in 1991, which was less than 10 years after the original movie,” Bors said. :So I figured that they didn’t have any qualms about changing any pure stance about how the character should be or how he should be portrayed because he went from this over-the-top exploitation cult film to Saturday morning cartoon with environmental messaging in less than 10 years. So my goal was to take both of those things and create this new amalgamation.”
Of course, you’ve also got to give it up to ’90s consumerism.
“There was also a lot of stuff going after that mutant money at the time,” Bors said. “You had brought up Street Sharks…comics saw all kinds of riffs on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Everybody was trying to watch, like, Taekwondo Ferrets.”
Admittedly, Toxic Crusaders won’t have any Taekwondo Ferrets, but Bors said that there’ll be “new characters and villains in every single issue of Avenger and Crusaders, through issue #10 at least.” And are there ever some real winners.
“We have a new character, for instance, a new crusader called Fungirl,” Bors said. “She willfully mutates herself, wanting to have powers and be combined with her mushroom collection, which she’s obsessed with in a weird way. She wants to be a post-human mutant. I’m trying to explore all the concepts that come out of this spill, both good and bad.”
New Friends and Mutations
And while not specifically new, an old favorite from the Crusaders cartoon will also get a new lease on life.
“There’s a character name Blobbie,” Bors said. “In the cartoon, that’s just some pink blob that doesn’t really have an origin. He’s some kind of sentient goo. I’ve got a new Blobbie coming at some point, and I have given Blobbie an actual origin that I think is outrageous. I’m just going to town.”
And, of course, we’ll get some updated versions of both Headbanger and Junkyard.
“Junkyard, which we haven’t really focused on in the book at all yet, is a woman now,” Bors said. “She’s a middle-aged homeless woman who is merged with her dog. A merging of a dog and a person, not just a person who looks like a dog.”
There’s also a new hench-person that will be tied closely to the aforementioned “new Bonehead” (who, again, debuted in July’s Toxic Avenger Comics #1).
“And then there’s this character that was in the cartoon called Psycho, who was this weird half-cyborg henchman,” Bors said. “Now, if you notice, there’s one panel toward the end of the first volume where the original Bonehead, his girlfriend, who was also involved in the toxic waste spill and loses some of her limbs as they melt off, gets these new cyborg limbs and looks like a new version of Psycho.”
Of course, you can’t have henchmen without an evil leader, and that’s just what we’ll get with Toxic Crusaders.
“Mr. K, the villain behind the scenes in the first volume, becomes the main antagonist,” Bors said. “This guy is clearly based off Dr. Killemoff from the cartoon series. And now that we know that he is an alien, we’re going to get a lot more direct with his plans. He does become their arch-nemesis in a way that he becomes obsessed with Tromaville and Toxic Avenger and the Toxic Crusaders. He is a thorn in their side that he seeks to eliminate and he enlists a couple of mutants to do this.”
But no matter who is being introduced, Toxic Crusaders is very much a continuation of Bors’ first story in all the ways that matters. Which is to say, editorial decisions that hit hard and heavy.
“The narrative gimmick that I came up with, jumping back to the before times for a couple of pages in each issue of the first volume, is actually going to continue and you’re going to see each character before they were mutated and what their lives were like,” Bors said. “That’s specifically relevant to Junkyard and NoZone, who we haven’t seen a lot of. So the first issue of Crusaders actually focuses on NoZone, who was a driver of the train that derailed. A lot of the action and the consequences flow from the fact that this guy was a train worker who was hauling this toxic waste. He knows the point at which it came from, and he has different views than the other characters.”
Variant cover by A.R. Sullivan. Courtesy of AHOY Comics.
Take Your Nostalgia to The Dump
Because, at the end of the day, this “adult cartoon” -style comic is so much more still. Leave your endless nostalgia at the door and prepare for something that will render flesh from bone and possibly break your heart to boot.
“It’s not intended to be a total nostalgia play for anyone that is looking for a retread of the cartoon,” Bors said. “It’s about these gross, transformed people who find themselves wanting to do something about this problem. It’s going to have a lot of body horror. Its violence is going to be in line with the main book. And it’s going to be, I would say, oriented a lot around ecological action. It is environmental, but everyone on the team doesn’t necessarily agree with what must be done or how to go about it.”
Bors added, “In the first issue, we attempt to make a choice that will announce what this series is about and that it is these characters trying to figure out how to save the planet and what they can actually do to do that.”
And Bors isn’t just doing it for the mere fan service, either. No, he really wants to elevate Toxic Avenger to a cultural echelon it truly deserves.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m getting to my own head, but I’m trying to do something that’s bringing in elements of X-Men and Doom Patrol,” Bors said. “Like, this is like a mutant book where their mutant-dom is a defining political reality for them and determines who they are and what they seek to do.”
Toxie’s Eternal Reign
Oh, and we haven’t even talked about the dang movie reboot! While Bors said that flick “looks great,” he pitched his stuff some time before he even knew of its existence, and “there hasn’t been any interference or a desire to make them align” from other parties.
But none of that really matters. Yes, we actually want the movie (supposedly in theaters August 29) to be actually good. Just as much as we want the various Toxic Avenger comics titles to be entertaining and meaningful. While Bors and company have every intention of doing just that, he’s also taking a moment to celebrate where Toxie is right now. To really bask in the weird occurrences that have let this freaky little anti-hero finally have his moment in the spotlight. He may just be some irradiated loser, but the Toxic Avenger is the hero we need for this mad, mutated world.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be a huge success or a total flop, but that won’t really even reflect on the quality…,” Bors said of the film specifically. “Things can hit or they can not hit. But the cultural awareness of Toxic Avenger right now is higher than it’s been in my adult lifetime.”
