Joe Matt was a cartoonist who became well-known during the 80s for his pitiless autobiographical comics. When I think of the art history of comics in North America, the late 70s and early 80s were a period of incredible creativity. A bunch of young cartoonists followed the ground-breaking work of the underground cartoonists, especially influenced by the pioneers of autobiogra[hy as a comics genre. Absorbing the lessons of artists like Justin Green, Aline Kominsky, Harvey Pekar, and Robert Crumb, people like Chester Brown, Seth and Matt started producing comics that examined aspects of their own life in embarrassing detail. This movement was geographically centered in Canada. Matt was an American, but moved to Toronto to hang out with Seth and Chester Brown. The Montreal=based publisher Drawn & Quarterly published all of Matt’s books. (They are all out of print in English, but some are in print in other languages.)
This was Matt’s last published book from 2007. As you may be able to guess from the cover, Matt’s compulsive masturbation and porn addiction are a big part of this book. When he turned his narrative powers on himself, Matt was pitiless.
In a beautiful article written about Matt after his death, Canadian journalist Jeet Heer wrote:
Joe moved to Los Angeles in 2003. He had never had immigration status in Canada, although being poor in the United States was surely not a better option. I always thought his return to the United States was a mistake, since it cut Joe off from the artistic fellowship of Seth and Brown. Sometimes Joe said as much himself.
In a farewell speech before Joe left, Seth said, “I have never met an individual as irrational and irritating as Joe Matt. I have spent endless hours discussing the various merits of puppet styles in View-Master reel, over the proper height and width of a Peanuts book or the correct volume of a urine jar.” Seth added, “He added a complexity to our little group. He was like a grain of sand in an oyster—an irritant that stimulates the creation of a pearl.”
As a result of his long drought of producing new work, Joe’s work fell out of print in English.
Matt died of a heart attack at his drawing board on Sunday. Which is ironic—it makes it sound like he was a hard-working, under-paid cartoonist who died doing the work he loved. But Matt was famously lazy. According to Heer, Matt had started drawing new comics pages shortly before his death, so maybe he was working on that when his ticker gave out.
Here is a comic that Matt drew for the back cover of Spent. It shows how weird he was to the rest of the world, and how aware he was of his own weirdness.
Matt was almost exactly four moths younger than me. I only met him once, at one of the earliest Small Press Expos. Partly because he was my age, his death spooks me. He and his peers affected my artistic tastes. He was a funny and gufted cartoonist.
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