With the Launch of the Kickstarter for I FEEL DOOMED: A Comics Anthology About Surviving the End (Again), we are delighted to be joined by the curator of the anthology, Joseph Karg. Joseph is an artist who has worked on FX’s Archer and Marvel Snap. He is also an art professor at Kennesaw State University.
Hi Joseph, it’s so great to have you here with us. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Joseph Karg: I’m an illustrator and comics obsessive whose career has mostly happened just offstage. I’ve loved comics my entire life, but I’ve spent more time working around them than directly inside them, which feels oddly appropriate. I’m 42, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and currently living in Atlanta with my wife and our soon-to-be two children, which means most of my daily problem-solving now involves tiny shoes and existential dread in equal measure.
Professionally, I’ve worked as a background painter on Archer, illustrated for Marvel Snap!, and for the past six years, I’ve been an art professor at Kennesaw State University. Teaching has become a huge part of my creative life—helping students figure out how to make work they actually care about while quietly trying to do the same thing myself.
Can you tell us about the origins of I Feel Doomed?
JK: I Feel Doomed started less as a thesis and more as a feeling I kept bumping into everywhere. As we move into the Kickstarter launch, the project has grown into a collection of work from 45 artists, split pretty evenly between seasoned professionals and first-time, younger creators, which is part of what makes it feel alive to me.
While the book absolutely engages with modern anxieties—political, environmental, personal—I always want to stress how much fun it is to read. The tonal range is huge. Some stories are dark and unsettling, others are genuinely funny, strange, or unexpectedly tender. The mix of styles and voices is massive, and the experience of reading it feels less like doomscrolling and more like flipping through a box of wildly different thoughts people couldn’t stop themselves from drawing.
Can you tell us about the creators involved with I Feel Doomed?
JK: How much time have you got? [laughs] The short answer is that the book brings together an intentionally wide spectrum of voices, and that contrast is really the point. There’s a pretty even split between seasoned professionals and younger, first-time contributors, and watching those worlds talk to each other on the page has been one of the great pleasures of this project.
On the professional side, one of my absolute favorites is Miki Montlló, a Spanish artist I connected with during the pandemic. His daughter is a little older than mine, and he began making these quietly brilliant strip comics about raising her. They feel like a contemporary Calvin and Hobbes filtered through adult exhaustion, and I’m thrilled to be able to showcase some of the best of that work here.
Another genuine legend is Thierry Martin. Someone recently asked me how my younger self would feel knowing I’d one day make this book, and working with Thierry is something I never would have dreamed was possible. He’s easily one of the top ten living cartoonists, in my opinion, and his single-page story about a boxer is both hilarious and technically masterful. I’m deeply grateful he said yes.
On the newer-artist side, I’m especially proud of Noah Schoper, a student I’ve been mentoring. In twelve years of teaching college art, I’ve never seen someone grow so quickly through sheer dedication and discipline. I genuinely believe he’s going to be a famous artist one day. Juaquin Tomas Mendoza is another force entirely. Their story confronts the darkness many children raised within unforgiving, dogmatic faiths experience, and I suspect it will be one of the pieces people immediately start telling their friends about.
That range—between joy, fear, humor, and revelation—is really what I Feel Doomed is all about.
How did you go about finding the creators for I Feel Doomed?
JK: The first twenty artists were literally in my own backyard. They were students in my classroom or recent graduates who had stayed in touch, which meant the project began less like a recruitment drive and more like a continuation of conversations we were already having about art, anxiety, and the world at large.
From there, the next wave came from friendships I’ve been lucky enough to build over the years. I can say, without exaggeration, that Rustam Hasanov is one of my favorite artists on the planet—and also, improbably, my neighbor here in Atlanta. Chris Bivins and I worked closely together on Marvel Snap and several other projects, and Josh Gossett occupies a rare position in my life: former student, later roommate, and now someone whose work I deeply admire.
Beyond that inner circle, things got a little more chaotic in the best way. My friend Adam Ford, who works on Rick and Morty, generously offered to invite some of his animation friends in Los Angeles to participate, which is how artists like Claire Seckler and Bill Cleveland came into the fold.
And then there were a handful of genuine cold-call, Instagram hail-mary messages that somehow worked out in our favor. Those always feel a bit like finding a great band by accident. Taken together, the book ends up feeling less curated in the traditional sense and more like a map of overlapping lives, friendships, classrooms, and lucky timing—which, honestly, feels very on-theme for a book about doom.
What can you tell us about Soup Drunk Princess?
JK: Soup Drunk Princess is the small publishing imprint I created for my first book, Dear Bernadette, which came out in the spring of 2025. The name itself is a mashup of three films that have lived in my head for years: Cat Soup, The Princess Bride, and Punch-Drunk Love. Which probably tells you more about my taste than my business acumen.
Years ago, a couple of friends and I toyed with the idea of starting a film podcast under that title. The podcast never happened, but the name stuck with me. I loved the way it sounded—absurd, emotional, slightly unhinged in a way that felt honest. At one point, I even planned to call Dear Bernadette “Soup Drunk Princess,” but it turned out to be the wrong container for that particular story.
Someday, I fully intend to write a book that actually deserves the title Soup Drunk Princess, and when that happens, the whole thing will probably make more sense from the outside. Until then, it’s the banner under which I get to make strange, personal books with people I admire, which feels like a pretty good use of it.
When you were looking for creators to be involved with I Feel Doomed, what did you look for?
JK: When I was looking for creators, I was really just looking for the same thing I look for as a reader. But above all else, I was looking for risk-taking. That sits at the very top of my personal hierarchy of artistic needs. I would much rather read a beautiful disaster than a perfectly competent piece of mediocrity. Every story in I Feel Doomed is trying to say something that someone, somewhere, probably isn’t ready to hear yet—and that tension is what makes the book feel alive to me.
As you are crowdfunding, I Feel Doomed and dealing directly with consumers, does that make I Feel Doomed special for you?
JK: As for whether crowdfunding makes the project special: absolutely. I’ve reached a point where I have no real interest in commercial work unless I genuinely love the project and I’m allowed to approach it on my own terms. Crowdfunding gives me the freedom to write, draw, curate, and promote exactly what I want to make. The only people I ultimately answer to are the readers themselves, which feels like the healthiest creative relationship I’ve ever had.
For you, what makes an anathlogy special?
JK: For me, what makes an anthology special is restraint. A lot of anthologies suffer from bloat—they’re five hundred pages when they probably should’ve been fifty. My personal standard for I Feel Doomed was that every page had to earn its place. If something didn’t feel necessary, or at least interestingly strange, it didn’t belong.
Stylistically, the book is wildly eclectic, and I do not doubt that some readers will skip certain pieces or even actively dislike them. That’s completely fine. What I hope doesn’t happen is a reader pausing to wonder why something is there at all—like it was included out of obligation, nepotism, or politeness. Even when the work is challenging or uncomfortable, I want it to feel intentional, like someone took a real swing and meant it.
Do you have a favourite anthology?
JK: Lately, I’ve been really enjoying the newer volumes of Métal Hurlant. What I love about them is the way they collapse time. You’ll be reading a classic Moebius or Enki Bilal piece and then, a few pages later, encounter a contemporary artist doing something completely different but equally fearless. That dialogue between generations feels alive in a way a lot of anthologies don’t.
They also include interviews and essays, which I’m a sucker for, and I love that the whole thing feels curated rather than dumped together. I was also oddly happy that it was something I backed on Kickstarter—it felt appropriate to support a project that understands the anthology as more than just a container for pages. Strangely, it reassured me that books like I Feel Doomed still have a place.
Can you tell us about the cover for I Feel Doomed?
JK: The cover wasn’t my original plan at all. I initially illustrated something much busier—closer to a Jack Davis-style poster—loud, crowded, and a little manic. When I showed it to my publicist, she very kindly suggested I do the opposite: make something simpler, quieter, and more emotionally direct. An image someone could glance at and immediately understand the tone of the book, or at least feel its weight.
That suggestion completely changed the direction of the project in a good way. The final image is intentionally restrained, and it happens to feature a young blonde girl with very curly hair—not unlike my daughter Bernadette, who is the love of my life. I didn’t set out to make the cover personal in that way, but once it happened, it felt unavoidable. The book is about doom, sure, but it’s also about what we’re trying to protect, and I think the cover quietly carries both of those ideas at once.
What can you tell us about I Feel Doomed?
JK: I can tell you pretty confidently that you haven’t read a comic quite like this before. The book puts tattoo artists and fine artists next to twenty-year-old maniacs and brilliant European madmen, and somehow that chaos feels intentional. It’s as raunchy as it is poignant, often on the same page, which is my favorite kind of contradiction.
At 400 pages, I genuinely hope no one tries to read it in a single sitting. This feels like a book you return to—one you flip through, revisit, or open at random and surprise yourself with whatever story you land on next. Ideally, it’s less something you finish and more something you keep unboxing over time.
Any message for the ComicBuzz readers?
JK: At this point in my life, I’m mostly interested in finding the people who are weird in the same way I’m weird. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted from my art—to act as a kind of lighthouse for people who recognize the signal and think, oh… this might be for me.
If I can leave ComicBuzz readers with anything, it’s this: there is real value in investing in things you know are a risk. Books like I Feel Doomed exist as places of discovery. They aren’t designed to reassure you that your taste is correct—they’re meant to expand it. My sincere hope is that many of you will open this book and stumble onto your new favorite artist somewhere inside its pages.
The younger artists in this collection need readers who are curious enough to go looking for them, people willing to invest attention and belief before there’s consensus or hype. And middle-career artists like myself and my peers need that same trust so we can continue using our skills to make things that are new, strange, and personal—rather than just another drawing of the Green Goblin, however cool that drawing might be.
Backing a book like this isn’t just about buying an object. It’s about choosing discovery over comfort, and helping build the conditions where interesting work can still happen. If that idea resonates with you, then you’re exactly the kind of reader I’ve been hoping to find.
We would like to say a big thank you to Joseph for chatting with us and wish him the best of luck with I Feel Doomed.
Feel to check out I Feel Doomed on Kickstarter.
