New ‘The Toxic Avenger’ Comic in the Works

The Toxic Avenger is returning to the world of comics.

Matt Bors, the Pulitzer Prize finalist who founded the daily online political comics publication The Nib, and artist and caricaturist Fred Harper, are collaborating on the what will be a five-issue comic book series.

The publisher behind the revival is AHOY Comics, a Syracuse-based publisher dedicated to satirizing horror, space opera, social satire, sword & sorcery, and superhero stories. It is known for putting out Second Coming, a story of Jesus Christ and a Superman-like hero forced to become roommates. The company is eying a fall debut for the mini-series.

The comic takes its cues from the infamous 1984 low-budget cult classic movie made by Lloyd Kaufman and grade Z film production company Troma Entertainment. Toxic launched a B-movie franchise with sequels, a stage musical, cartoon. There was even a short-lived Marvel series that was published in the early 1990s. The title still has plenty of cultural currency, as Legendary produced a remake that stars Peter Dinklage and Jacob Tremblay which premiered at Fantastic Fest last fall.

AHOY’s editor-in-chief Tom Peyer believes the comic will give fans of Toxie, as the character is endearingly called, what they yearn for in such a story while still keeping one foot rooted in the franchise’s origins of environmentalism.

“The series has violent action, gross mutations, bursting pustules, eye-popping visuals, and trenchant humor,” he said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

In the original movie, Toxie is a 98-pound janitor named Melvin Junko who, after falling into an oil drum filled with toxic waste, becomes an unlikely vigilante in his New Jersey town.

The comic takes a different spin, making Junko a teen who is helping his parent run a junkyard in their boring New Jersey town, until train derailment of toxic waste transforms Melvin into a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength. He will fight the corporation named Biohazard Solutions, also known as BS, and its PR-spewing chairwoman, uncovering a vast conspiracy more far-reaching than he could have ever imagined as his faith in humanity doing the right thing tested in ways he never thought possible.

“This series will combine elements of the original films with the Toxic Crusaders cartoon and characters in familiar ways, updated to tell a story of environmental devastation, corporate control, and social media mutation,” said Bors in a statement.

He continued, “The Toxic Avenger is first and foremost an environmental satire, one about a small town and its unremarkable people trapped and transformed by circumstances they don’t control. The story Fred Harper and I are telling is about people frustrated by authorities telling them not to worry about their life, that things are fine, even as their dog mutates in front of their eyes. And at its core it is about a powerless boy, Melvin, who finds out he can be incredibly strong, hideously mutated, well-admired, and incredibly heroic… but still ultimately powerless over human behavior.”

The first issue is due to hit Oct. 9. Check out the first-look image, which will be one of the covers for the series, below.