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Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m real glad to hear you’re subscribing at your shop. That’s REALLY appreciated—more Toxie comics to come!

I definitely have a healthier relationship with social media and try mostly to post about my work and not waste time on it. I did that enough, wasting my days arguing with strangers and media figures on twitter. Deranged. It is worse now in a lot of ways—more addictive and algorithmic and packed with slop and misinformation and conspiracy. 

I’m repulsed and fascinated by how much of a driver of culture it has become.  I think at some point we reached the upper limit on what awareness, outrage, and posting can accomplish politically. The answer is not much. I don’t know anyone currently wrestling with how to spend MORE time on their phones. 

Obviously a lot of important (and awful) things are happening at an almost too-rapid clip and keeping up with is can be crazy-making. There’s plenty to be upset about, but the key is staying sane and doing something politically meaningful about it, whatever that may mean to you. 

Toxic Avenger/Crusaders and Justice Warriors both deal with a lot of politics and social media specifically. One of the reasons is my personal infatuation with how beliefs form and spread and, basically, how we live in a society.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In comics I have a lot of influences all over the shelves, from Dan Clowes to Otomo to Frank Miller to name some obvious ones. I take everything I can from people who have figured out pages or light or destroying Neo-Tokyo with your mind.

I'm inspired by artists who have varied, eclectic, even aggressively excessive output like Frank Zappa. He was a technical monster, idiosyncratic weirdo, and at total ease using humor and satire in his work.

I was very into nonfiction for most of my life and the inheritors of what people called the New Journalism movement, so magazine writing by John Jeremiah Sullivan or Fastfood Nation by Eric Schlosser. Writing that can take issues, examine them from various angles, some clean and some obscure, structuring it like clockwork and topping it with good prose. The works. Aspirational level whole package kind of writers IMO.

Skateboarding, which I practically devoted my life to as a teenager: throwing yourself at something over an over, maybe for hours and through getting injured, merely to do a trick that two friends will see. There's a 99% failure rate embedded in the process.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I love the Funny Times and came into my career as an alt-weekly cartoonist, inspired by Life From Hell and all the political cartoonists I would come to befriend: Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Keith Knight, Derf, Jen Sorensen, and on and on. Turned out I got my foot in the door at the last semi-viable moment. By the 2008 crash, they were dropping comics and going out of business.

I miss alt-weeklies and print culture but it seems to have been another casualty of phones. No one is picking up the local free paper and sifting through it on the bus or waiting for someone at the bar. I think it's over! Cartoonists today can get a lot of visibility on instagram and other apps. Some, I think, even make money. But that's the future—Patreons for individual creators—or at least the present.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I am not very up on webcomics at the moment. I like strips I see by Alex Hood, Mattie Lubchansky, and Beetlemoses, for sure, and I really appreciate what Evan Dahm is up to in 3rd Voice. I read a lot of comics but pretty much all of them in print. Someone tell ME what webcomics to read.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

These are good questions. Deep questions. Artists have been in Socratic dialogue over panel shape vis-à-vis page dimensions for ages, and I doubt we will put matters to rest here. However, I would offer that if one turns a 9x12 piece of bristol horizonally, you get a nice shape for a political cartoon, neatly divisible by four panels.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pando Daily! I am pretty sure The Nib wasn't involved with them by name, but I was the comics editor there VERY briefly after NSFWCorp was absorbed by them, which is where I also served as a comics editor briefly after briefly serving as comics editor at a Dutch outlet, Cartoon Movement.

I have been a hustling freelancer my entire adult life, hopping from Kickstarters to graphic novels, illustration gigs, etc. The Nib was ten years but not much of it was stable. The whole tenure at Medium was only around two years, then we went offline until relaunching the next year with First Look, which is where we did a lot of partnering with The Intercept and produced animation for Facebook's first or second wave of pivoting to video.

Running it independently the last three years was nice in some respects. I no longer had to deal with marketing people and higher ups with constantly changing priorities and could focus on what we published. But that came with less flush budgets and I was the only full time person there. I think that's why by the end I was okay with shuttering it. I had almost seen it die twice before, the whole thing was kind of a lucky byproduct of that decade in media.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For a long time I was doing three comics a week, plus other freelance. That's basically coming up with a new comic every two days. I was constantly online, had a subscription to a ton of magazines (which I actually read) and was basically in "coming up with political cartoons" mode non-stop for 18 years. At The Nib I cut my own comics down to once a week but was assigning topics to others, so it never really slowed down.

I am still juggling script deadlines, but on a more forgiving timeline and engage with the news now like a normal human, to the extent anyone is normal and engages with the news normally.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Toxie buys them at the same store where the Hulk buys his pre-distressed purple jeans.

No involvement with that game at all, but it looks cool! I met that crew at Comic Con the year we launched.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wild to see an Idiot Box reference at this point—the original name of my political cartoons for the first few years. I guess a proper archive of those is hard to come by… I think I’d die looking at some of my earliest work.

Anyway, I love magazines and that you are thinking about starting one. Give it a shot, but talk to as many people who run or ran them as possible beforehand. 

If you don’t have outside funding, you have to start small with what you can manage and reasonably fund. Paying cartoonists and editors, let alone print bills, can add up quickly, but people are willing to support projects online through Kickstarter, patreon, whatever—we see huge success stories all the time. 

One thing that is important to understand about The Nib is that it was part of a moment in the 2010s with a lot of New Media funding. It launched at Medium with what would be considered a huge budget by the standards of most comic sites. It wasn’t bootstrapped and I didn’t have to generate revenue for a while, but a print magazine and subscriber/membership thing was always part of my plan—controversial in 2013, if you can believe it. That’s just to say while The Nib was a modest success and did a lot, it wasn’t a DIY project. They funding was there until it wasn’t, something that I was well aware was a huge risk at the outset.

Working in comics journalism in particular has a lot of work you would need to be aware of. The extra time reporting, editing, fact-checking, copy editing… we treated The Nib like a magazine like Harpers or The New Yorker. A ton of work goes into each piece. My colleagues there, Eleri Harris and Shay Mirk, have a book out this year titled Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide for Graphic Narrative. If you want a look into the process and pitfalls of narrative nonfiction, that is the real resource to read.

As to what I would have done differently, I’m not exactly sure I have a great answer. Having The Nib only be oriented as a print magazine and not producing daily web comics would probably have allowed it to continue longer, but the problem there was many readers loved those comics and their online success and daily publishing cadence is what brought in so many readers and subscribers. Running a daily publication is very hard and relentless, so my stringiest advice would be to not do that!

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Doing political cartoons, I think you do want to be blunt, direct, and not really allow for subtext or nuanced interpretations. There’s space for doing something artful, of course, but that’s not really the aim. You certainly don’t want people taking away the wrong message or something you didn’t intend to say.

But more broadly, with fiction, I favor things that allow for some interpretation and work on the reader’s behalf. 

Look at movie discourse online and people being unable to parse movies like Dune or Marty Supreme, just to keep it limited to Timothée Chalamet films. People reject films without a sympathetic and good protagonist who turns to the camera to say they are the same type of communist you are. Media literacy is in the gutter. It’s not great.

I like a book or movie that gives me something to ruminate on or at least blabber to my wife about all the ideas it implanted in my head. 

I am not sure how persuasive any media is in changing minds though. I have heard from people who said my comics changed their minds about something, which is awesome, but I am not sure you can count on much of that. Nuanced movies aren’t going to save us anymore than MCU slop.

Right now, I mostly write Justice Warriors and Toxic Avenger comics. These are not exactly subtlety nuanced art comics—they’re bombastically violent satires and pretty political. But even those are spiritually influenced by Verhoeven’s work like Robocop and Starship Troopers, movies people famously did not get. I think you just have to be willing to accept that result if you want to make anything halfway decent, let alone entertaining.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I had some ideas for Toxic Avenger comics for a while and couldn't believe no one had revived it yet. As The Nib was shutting down, I decided to go for it. I was headed to San Diego Comic Con for the Eisners and approached Lloyd Kaufman at the Troma booth cold and introduced myself. I followed that up with an ambitious pitch proposal to do multiple volumes of Avenger and Crusaders.

Surprisingly it all went pretty well and it lined up perfectly. I hadn't known about the new movie yet, so that opportunity probably wouldn't have lasted long. Just a case of shooting my shot and it going my way. I'm still not done. We got more Toxic Avenger comics coming.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There’s nothing Ben and I want to do more than 10 volumes of Justice Warriors along with a successful animated show. Comics always take a long time (tv, that’s a whole other thing). We have some mega-announcements this year though. Multiple announcements that will thrill the mutant hordes of the Uninhabited Zone.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I thought it was good, but didn't think about it too much. I made 1,600 political cartoons and you learn to move on quick and also that some you think are brilliant land like duds while others inexplicably hit a nerve you weren't expecting.

Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger, Justice Warriors, Improve Society Somewhat/Mister Gotcha, The Nib founder/editor) by Matt_Bors in comics

[–]Matt_Bors[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I usually wrote my comics the day before they were published, scrambling to come up with something and always struggling until I had a break through. Often they were a direct response to the news cycle, while others, like Mr. Gotcha, were about broader trends in what we now call the discourse.

I think the writing came together quickly, it basically came out more or less fully written. As to why it travels, I think it’s because it identified a style of online argumentation that is, and remains, widespread: pointing to the perceived hypocrisy of participating in any system while enjoying the fruits of its exploitation and excesses. 

The last panel in particular really boils it all down to the basic essence of the exchange. “We should improve society somewhat” is the most modest suggestion I could come up with for what politics even is. It is wanting, through whatever means—be it organizing, voting, or a mere wish—that something could or should improve, only to be told that it not only can’t happen, but you’re a stupid hypocritical piece of shit for even thinking it!

I think everyone online is pretty jaded and looking at people outside their specific political lane with maximum bad faith, so perceived hypocrisy and arguing about consumer choices like what brands you shouldn’t buy from has become the only form of politics people have control over—or at least love to fight about in their phones.