R.I.P. Joe Matt (1963 – 2023) – Another Talent Lost To Comics

Another great cartoonist and comics maker gone way too young. Joe Matt, the brilliant creator of the autobiographical Peepshow died at the age of 60 on 18th September.

 

I’m a little unsure when I first picked up something by Joe Matt – it was either one of the early issues of the Drawn & Quarterly series Peepshow, of which 14 issues were published between 1992 and 2006, or the Kitchen Sink Press collection of his Peepshow strips in 1992 – Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt.

Either way, he quickly became a favourite, part of a growing movement of autobiographical comics that I and many other comics fans were following – including his close friends Chester Brown and Seth, and the likes of Julie Douchet, Roberta Gregory, Dan Clowes, Ed Brubaker, and Peter Bagge. (And many more – I know I’ve missed so many out of this particular list)

 

Peepshow and Joe Matt was quite brilliant. It was brilliant, raw, disturbingly self-critical, and often embarrassingly frank. It had Matt portraying himself as a neurotic, self-obsessed, cheap, mean-spirited (invariably towards himself), pornography-obsessed, socially inadequate, whiny, and often quite horrible person.

Yet there was a real talent to his art, imaginative layouts, especially in that early KSP collection, and a real sense of what makes comics just work, free-flowing, easy to read, lovely to see.

And then there was that way he had of turning it all around, making himself the nasty idiot we could all point at and laugh at – he was always the butt of his own jokes, writ large on every page. There was such a skill in everything he did in comics.

According to this report from Mari Naomi, Matt died at his drawing board from a heart attack after complaining of chest pains for months. Aged 60.

Way, way too damn young.

A great talent lost to comics once more.

 

Joe Matt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before he moved (illegally it turns out) to Canada in 1988 where he’d stay until 2002, when he moved back to the USA and to Los Angeles.

Amazingly, in 2004, HBO and David X Cohen began developing an animated series based on Matt’s The Poor Bastard, stories from Peepshow #1-6. In the end, nothing came of it. But oh boy, it would have been something to have seen. Then again, it wouldn’t have that essential Joe Matt-ness that you just couldn’t replicate.

 

Matt also worked as a colourist on various comics, most often with Matt Wagner, another of his friends – they’d gone to the Philadelphia College of Art together. He coloured issues of Wagner’s Grendel, as well as Johnny Quest and Fish Police at Comico, and the Wagner-written and drawn Batman/Grendel series as well as the Neil Gaiman–written Riddler story When Is A Door from the Secret Origins Special 1989, with art by Bernie Mireault and Wagner.

 

Matt Wagner announced the news on his social media – it’s a lovely tribute from a friend so we’ll reproduce it in full for you here…

“Hey gang…it’s with a heavy heart that I have some extremely sad news to share. My longtime pal, occasional collaborator and fellow pop-culture junkie… Joe Matt has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away.

As many of you know, Joe and I first met when we were both students at the Philadelphia College of Art and our mutual love of comics and music soon sparked a friendship that lasted through the decades. Eventually Joe was a color and production assistant on my final issue of MAGE–THE HERO DISCOVERED and he graduated on to beautifully coloring many issues of the original monthly GRENDEL series and, of course, the classic first BATMAN-GRENDEL crossover series.

But his greatest fame and expression came in the pages of his own warts-and-all autobiographical comic, PEEPSHOW. Anyone who knew Joe knew that, yes, he was often as frustratingly stubborn and neurotic as he portrayed himself in those pages…but he was also charming, funny, insightful and loyal to the few friends he deemed worth the effort. I dug through an old sketchbook of mine from “back in the day” and here are a few drawings I did of Joe when we would all gather in my studio/apartment on Green St. in Philadelphia. The first was a mutual portrait as Joe and I sat at opposite ends of my couch and sketched each other. And the second is of Joe hard at work; I’m pretty sure he’s cutting friskets for the blue lines colors of one of the last several issues of MAGE.

Joe had lived in LA for the last decade or so and we mainly kept in touch every couple of weeks via late-night chats on Messenger. I’ll dearly miss my old buddy and his unique outlook on the world…and how we began every phone call babbling in Donald Duck talk at each other. So long, broheim…the world’s just a bit more boring without you.”

 

Chris Oliveros of Drawn & Quarterly has his own tribute to Matt here.

The Comics Journal have put up links to two interviews by Christopher Brayshaw, one with Joe from 1996 and another from around the same time, with his longtime friend Seth where Matt is discussed.