Are we cortisol spiking?

• 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…

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…

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.

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.