Your Anxieties Aren’t Unique — Joseph Karg Talks Curating ‘I Feel Doomed’

If you’re feeling down these days, you’re certainly not alone. From politics to health care concerns to the economy, there’s plenty to cause agita. Joseph Karg, an illustration and sequential art professor at Kennesaw State University who has worked on Marvel Snap and Archer, has curated more than 20 tales of existential angst from his students and industry professionals. The collection I Feel Doomed, launches a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter February 1st. In an interview with Comicon.com, Karg discusses his own sense of doom, why crowdfunding the project makes sense, and how art helps us to deal with these feelings.

 

 

Tom Smithyman: Let’s start with an obvious question: Do you feel doomed? And if so, how doomed do you feel?

Joe Karg: That’s a funny question to ask me today instead of seven months ago (when this project began), because I’m about five weeks into my first experience with an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — a type of antidepressant). At my house, my wife has affectionately started calling me Lexa-Joe, which feels like either a superhero origin story or a cautionary tale.

So yes, I still feel doomed in the macro sense. The future of our planet, our climate, and our political systems is genuinely unsettling. But on a day-to-day, internal level, the doom has been…turned down a notch. It hasn’t disappeared; it’s just quieter now. Which is interesting, because it’s made me realize that doom isn’t always about what we’re facing. It’s also about how loudly our brains insist on narrating it.

 

 

Smithyman: You’ve chosen crowdfunding to bring this project to life. Did you have any trepidation in trying to convince people to financially support a book that is seemingly so depressing?

Karg: I actually think the danger would be presenting the book as only depressing. If I’ve done my job right, the project makes it clear that while we’re all carrying different versions of doom, those feelings don’t have to paralyze us. In fact, they can be connective tissue.

There’s something quietly comforting about realizing your anxieties aren’t unique. Through art, those shared worries become a kind of pressure release — less about wallowing and more about acknowledging reality together. In that sense, the book isn’t asking people to fund despair; it’s asking them to support a collective way of metabolizing it.

 

 

Smithyman: The book collects over 20 stories of doom. What should readers expect when they crack open the tome?

Karg: This is the part that excites me the most, because I think it will genuinely surprise people. A typical comics reader might come in expecting a single tone, but instead, they’re getting over 350 pages of wildly different approaches to doom. Some stories are dark fantasy nightmares, others are absurd, horny pirate romps. There are abstract illustration galleries paired with short essays, and single-page palate cleansers from international cartoon superstars.

It doesn’t read like a themed anthology so much as a controlled collision of voices. I’ve never seen a book that swings this hard between sincerity, humor, discomfort, and beauty — and somehow still feels cohesive.

 

 

Smithyman: How did you curate the stories? Did each of the artists follow their own creative process, or did you guide them on their storytelling journey?

Karg: It was very much a two-hander. With my students — both current and alumni — I was deeply involved, guiding each story from pitch through layouts to final execution. That mentorship is part of the DNA of the project, and I wanted to help them shape something ambitious without losing their voice.

With the professionals, I took the opposite approach. These are artists who know exactly what they’re doing, and my role was mostly to get out of the way. Some of the most exciting contributions come from artists working outside traditional comics altogether, including two tattooists of the highest caliber who had never made a comic before. Their work feels fresh, slightly dangerous, and completely unburdened by comics conventions, which is exactly why it belongs in this book.

 

 

Smithyman: What surprised you the most as you were going through the stories in the book?

Karg: What surprised me most was how often the stories seemed to know things before the artists did. There were moments where I’d read a piece and feel like it was answering a question no one had asked out loud yet. Certain images repeat across the book — graves, bodies in transition, liminal spaces, and no one coordinated that. It just happened.

It feels less like editing a collection and more like tuning into a frequency.

 

 

Smithyman: You talk about art as a way of processing the unprocessable. Why do you think humans are wired that way?

Karg: Humans seem to be wired for cognitive dissonance. We’re remarkably good at absorbing contradictions, normalizing trauma, and continuing on even when things don’t make sense. I think that flexibility (our plasticity) is part of how we survive.

Not everything can be processed through spoken or written language. Some experiences are too abstract, too emotional, or too contradictory to be neatly explained. Art gives us another channel. Creating it, or even just encountering it, lets us sit with things we can’t resolve, and somehow that act alone makes them more bearable.

 

 

Smithyman: What will readers of I Feel Doomed, come away with after reading these stories?

Karg: I hope that readers come away having felt something undeniable. I’ve tried to curate a dangerously eclectic mix of voices and ideas, so the book isn’t meant to be universally comforting or agreeable. Ideally, every reader finds at least one story they’d call a new favorite and at least one they actively recoil from.

That friction is the point. If the book only affirmed your taste, it would be forgettable. I want it to expand it, challenge it, and maybe even annoy you a little. That’s usually where the interesting conversations start.

Smithyman: I couldn’t agree more. Best of luck with the crowdfunding campaign for I Feel Doomed!