The Toxic Avenger, Volume One. By Matt Bors, Fred Harper, et.al. Dewitt, NY: Ahoy Comics. 2025. 130pp. $17.99.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
Matt Bors is a Comics Storm in himself, now barely 40 and evidently uncontainable. Raised in Canton, Ohio, he began cartooning for a student newspaper and moved quickly into political cartoons, at 23 the youngest syndicated artist of the day. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice over, winner of the Herblock Prize, he grew restless or perhaps watched the daily press collapse around him. His own first GN appeared in 2020, with his signature boldness of horror and humor in the title itself: War Is Boring.
A restless organizer, he made himself part of the new, globally-based Cartoon Movement, traveled to Afghanistan with the always-controversial Ted Rall, each of them more outrageous than the other. He joined a newly-syndicated project, The Nib, and when it failed, relaunched it a few years later. Three years ago, he announced that he was leaving editorial cartooning for political comics journalism.
The Toxic Avenger emerges from a Syracuse publisher AHOY, the first in a series to be created by a new artist in a new genre. “When I first approached [Ahoy] about reviving the Toxic Avenger in comics, I wasn’t modest,” said Bors. “I pitched a new origin, outrageous new characters…Now, Fred Harper and I have been given the green light to go fucking nuts.” The first is in what might be called a Creature Feature, those following within, also satirizing, the ever-popular genres crime, romance, SciFi and so on. They are planning a video grame and maybe, maybe a theatrical release of The Toxic Avenger itself (or himself).
My own background in Underground Comix (and before them, the EC Comics of “real war” and Mad Comics, 1952-55) leaves me rather stunned at the apparent genre-professionalism of Toxic Avengers. It feels like one of those Richard Corban environmental-horror comics of the 1970s where the grotesque is slick and commonplace, flesh slides easily off bones and may leave the surviving creature more than intact, and humor, at least a kind of humor, is never far away.
Mr.Avenger, huge, green and with one eye both smaller and situated above the other. He is a friend to the kid activists. They are collectively taking on the “Church of Troma” for-profit hospital, whose bigshots are busy rationalizing the latest toxic release into the community, poisoning the water supply. The Green Giant is busy rescuing his pal, a creature even in worse shape, from this supposed health-facility, while the very bohemian and cross-dressing teenagers are organizing around and against “The Quarantine.”
To say it goes on from here, with the forces of State Oppression growing steadily uglier, would be an underestimation. It turns out that extra-planetary, super-intelligent insects have the government fronting for them. To suggest that it would lead to one super-human creature going toe-to-toe with another is…familiar to any seriously addicted comic reader. “
“If you ever want to tell someone you love them…don’t wait until your skin melts off in a large industrial accident.” (p.77) A sweet thought of a cute teenager who, with a few adjustments (no beehive hairdo) might have fitted well, almost, in a True Love comics of the 1940s-50s. True love will win out, even here. To give anything more away would be a sin, although the involvement of those curious cicadas that I saw every seven years in my midwest childhood (they came, they mated, apparently, and they died, leaving a backyard mess), have something to do with all this.
Outside my world but not that of comic readers is the final pages of “Variant Covers,” with some (black and white) alternative character sketches. Donald Duck was never like this. Nor the wild and unpredictable Underground Comix, even.
Matt keeps busy and The Nib also marches on, through the web. It’s a cartoonist/comic artist saga of today that inspires, for this comics editor, astonishment and admiration.
Carry On, Matt!
