SPECTATORS - Part 81
And celebrating cartoonist Joe Matt
You are much too kind.
Brian here, enormously grateful for the outpouring of love for my “brilliant wee dog,” as Garth Ennis used to refer to Hamburger. My office is much too quiet without him (Hambo, not Garth), but our other lovable mutt Milkshake is doing her best to pick up the slack.
Speaking of our canine friends, let’s revisit last Monday’s triumphant double-page spread from artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon and letterer Fonografiks before we get to this week’s new pages, as spectral spectators Val and Sam observe the living world taking another unexpected turn.
For the record, today’s Spectators pages were written months ago, and no connection to recent global horrors was intended.
As always, my thoughts are with innocent civilian noncombatants everywhere.
Quite a few friends of Exploding Giraffe have excellent new comics coming out, including early podcast guest Becky Cloonan and featured “Come Up and See My Etchings” artist Tula Lotay, who have combined their considerable talents on a staggeringly sexy new comic called Somna:
BECKY CLOONAN and TULA LOTAY-Both writing and drawing a creator-owned project together for the FIRST TIME! Set amidst the terrifying backdrop of the witch hunts in a quiet 1600s English village, SOMNA follows one woman’s descent into an erotic escape from the confines of her puritanical world.
It’ll be in stores November 22nd, but a comic this white hot is going to sell out fast, so you should probably ask your friendly neighborhood retailer to reserve your copy today.
While you’re at it, former guest of the ‘Stack James Tynion IV has yet another terrific new Image miniseries coming out, this one with artist Joshua Hixson, an instantly enthralling horror story called The Deviant:
“The Deviant is something a little different," said Tynion IV. "A dark, focused psychological crime thriller where I get to explore the intersection of my queer identity and a broader scope of cultural transgression and deviance. This is my response to Silence of the Lambs and Jeffrey Dahmer serving as my first real glimpses of my queer identity as a young closeted Midwestern boy. It’s one of the darkest and most personal stories I’ve ever written. It’s also a story about Christmas.”
The Deviant will be on shelves November 15th, so tell your shop to save you a copy when you call them about Somna!
Very cool to see what fearless and original work everyone is creating. I have a giant digital stack of other PDFs to catch up on this week, so I’ll be back with more recommendations in our next installment.
I miss the old St. Mark’s Comics.
I’d been reading comics for years by the time I moved to NYC for college in 1994, but that overstuffed emporium of awesomeness was where I finally discovered more “independent” (semi-underground?) series like Jessica Abel’s Artbabe, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Daniel Clowes’ Eightball, Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve, and Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library.
It’s also where I first encountered three of my all-time favorite autobiographical (to varying degrees) cartoonists, “the Toronto trio” who occasionally featured each other in their comics: Chester Brown, Seth, and the dearly departed Joe Matt, recently remembered by those who knew him best in this Comics Journal piece.
If you’re not yet familiar with this triumvirate of legends, Chester Brown wrote a series called Yummy Fur, whose spare, brilliantly observed stories (often involving sexuality and shame) were sometimes collected into editions like my personal favorite, The Playboy:
Chester’s recent graphic novels Paying for It and Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus deal with his ongoing interests (to put it mildly) in both prostitution and religion, and he’s also been releasing some fascinating mini-comics through his Patreon:
Meanwhile, Seth wrote (and continues to write) a remarkable series called Palookaville, whose fourth through ninth issues were eventually assembled into this standalone graphic novel with maybe the greatest title ever conceived:
The story involves Seth’s obsession with a forgotten (?) New Yorker cartoonist, but saying anything more might spoil the pleasure of this essential read.
Seth—who was recently interviewed by my pals at Cartoonist Kayfabe—is still creating some of the most gorgeous comics anywhere:
While I instantly fell in love with the work of those two serious, cerebral, and intensely Canadian cartoonists, I perhaps unsurprisingly identified more closely with Seth and Chester’s unlikely friend Joe Matt, a brash and darkly hilarious recovering Catholic from America’s middle-class suburbs.
Most folks who write autobiographical work are the literal heroes of their own stories, bravely overcoming some tragedy or trauma before inevitably triumphing, transforming, whatever.
But Joe Matt always made himself the fucking villain.
He unflinchingly presented himself as lazy, cheap, greedy, deceitful, self-obsessed, weak, and mean, saving special cruelty for those people who actually seemed to like him.
And I was horrified by how much of myself I recognized in those pages.
But the reason I kept reading (and laughing) was because Joe Matt was one of the best cartoonists of his generation, able to capture even the most vile aspects of real life with beauty, clarity and precise emotions.
The book of his that I’ve returned to the most over the years is definitely Fair Weather, a bit of an outlier work for Joe since it was inspired by his childhood, instead of chronicling his attempts at adult life. Publisher Drawn & Quarterly nails the tone in their description:
In a surprisingly tasteful and thoughtful memoir young Joe Matt is a selfish child who steals from stores, takes advantage of his friends, threatens to burn his mother’s house down, teases those weaker than himself, and reveals himself to be a fairly normal child. Completely unsentimental and strangely kind of endearing, Fair Weather continues the American tradition of hilarious self-exhibitionism.
I’ve never encountered another story in any medium that so perfectly captures the casual awfulness of kids of a certain age, bullies and bullied alike.
I never got to meet him, but Joe and I corresponded a little bit over the years after I nervously commissioned him to paint something for me. I was only somewhat disappointed to discover that he was not the irredeemable creep from his comics, but the complete sweetheart people like Seth and Chester had said he was all along.
Even his most loving obituaries have been giving Joe shit for not having been more “productive,” but I worry that comic creators (all laborers, really) are increasingly expected to generate unreasonably vast bodies of work over our lifetimes. Forget about the volume, I’m grateful for the depth of the work we got from Joe Matt.
And I hope all of it is back in print someday soon, as Joe’s books are currently very hard to find and/or incredibly expensive. So for now, I’d like to at least give away a copy of Fair Weather to one of you.
Inspired by that timeless tale, this week’s question is: Did a parent or guardian ever throw away something precious of yours, and if so, what was it?
Our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe will randomly select one of you generous paid subscribers from this week’s chat threat to win a copy.
Also for you loyal members of The Tower, after the paywall, I’ll be revealing my modest collection of original artwork from the so-called Toronto trio. Oh, boy!
Everyone else, have a great week, and I’ll see you next Monday for more free comics…