The Poor Bastard

by Joe Matt

I've never really been too interested in reading the work of the holy trinity of underground Toronto cartoonists - Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt.  I'm not really sure why (I loved Brown's Louis Riel, and plan to read it again soon), but I've really avoided their autobiographical work as being a little too masturbatory (literally and figuratively).

Not wanting to always stick with my snap judgments without at least sampling the work I've judged, I decided to give The Poor Bastard a try.  I was right of course, there is a lot of masturbation going on, but there is also a funny and decidedly insensitive nature to this comic that I really enjoyed. 

The book is basically Matt's life, as he argues with and mistreats his long-suffering girlfriend, eventually driving her away completely.  After that, moves into a rooming house, and proceeds to try to find a suitable replacement for her, although his insane need to judge and belittle women keeps him from finding anything even resembling happiness.  It's a sad tale, made even more so by the fact that I, as a reader, couldn't always tell if he was making fun of himself a little, or was trying to justify all of his actions, as he frequently does in conversation with fellow cartoonist Seth, who fills the role of loyal friend and lone voice of reason.

I enjoyed this book, but I don't know if I liked it enough to start tracking down the rest of the Joe Matt library.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13

Edited by Chris Ware

This is the comics issue of McSweeney's, which received a fair amount of attention when it was published in 2004 for showcasing a lot of up-and-coming talent in the arts comics field.  It contains a wide range of short comics and excerpts from longer pieces, as well as a few essays or memoirs about comic books, their history, or their influences on other artists or writers.

The biggest problem with reading this book for the first time six years after it was published is that I've read a lot of the material in here in its complete, finalized form.  This is not really a problem, as I am very happy to return to some of the works here, but it did limit the novelty of reading such a well-produced and designed hardcover with some of my favorite 'independent' artists contained in it.

Ware and company have assembled a very interesting collection, with contributions from people like Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings), Joe Sacco (The Fixer),Charles Burns (Black Hole), Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers), Chris Ware, and Los Bros. Hernandez.  There were also plenty of lesser-known cartoonists included, some of whose work I found irritating, while others were quite enjoyable.

Strangely, there was a very visible Canadian delegation to this collection, with and excerpt from Joe Matt's Spent, David Collier's strips about moving to Hamilton, and a long excerpt from Chester Brown's classic Louis Riel, detailing the death of Orangeman and agitator Thomas Scott, a pivotal moment in Riel's story, and a great example of the genius of that book.

Some of the pieces that were new and interesting to me were Ben Katchor's Hotel and Farm strips, one-pagers that dealt with those two topics; David Heatley's Portrait of my Father; and Kim Deitch's Ready to Die, about a man on Death Row.  I also really enjoyed Chip Kidd's memoir on friendships and Batman merchandise.

Of course, as with any anthology like this, there were plenty of things that I either had no interest in, or just flat-out hated (I'm looking at you Kaz), but overall, this was a very worthy purchase.