The Comic is a Lie
I read Joe Matt’s Peepshow recently. (That was one of the books I bought at Big Brain on Saturday.) I’ve read Joe Matt’s comics in reverse order, starting with Spent, moving backwards to The Poor Bastard, and finally getting to Peepshow. (Okay, and I read Fair Weather, which is about his childhood, somewhere in there too.)
I’ve found moving backwards to be an interesting (though somewhat tragic) way to read Joe Matt. All of his work is autobiographical, so by beginning with Spent, I began with “the way things turned out” which is, to say the least, not entirely positive. (All it takes to understand the meaning of the title is a glance at the cover. The back cover is also pretty revealing.) By the time he wrote Spent, Matt had hit 40 and broken up with his longtime girlfriend Trish, his apparent addiction to porn finally having driven her (and most other positive influences in his life) far away.
But the Joe Matt of the early collection of Peepshow is only in his mid-twenties. He’s just gotten together with Trish, and although things aren’t perfect, you feel like this is a guy who could do all right once he calms down and grows up a little. But of course, this is not what happened at all. To me, this made the early comics all the more interesting, though at times I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or cry. For example, the following, taken from the very first Peepshow comic, is young Matt’s “Basic Guide To Life”:
Rule #1 – Don’t Get Hung-Up.
Rule #2 – Don’t Look Back.
Rule #3 – Nobody Likes A Whiner.
(If you have read even one page of Joe Matt’s comics, you will understand why those rules are hilarious coming from him.)
Oh, Joe Matt. Sometimes I think I hate him, but I’m always obsessed with him. And I am in awe of his ability (perhaps compulsion) to make such soul-bearing autobiographical comics. And however repulsive some of his behaviors may be, he’s still fucking funny. Seriously, I laugh out loud every time I get to the last panel of that back cover comic.
Note: All of Matt’s autobiographical comics are part of his Peepshow series, but “Peepshow” is also the title of the first collection of them.
Also Note: There are previews of all the Joe Matt books I’ve mentioned today on the Drawn & Quarterly website.
June 25th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Hey Athena -
As you know, Mom and I caught Siri Hustvedt at the Carnegie Library Lecture Series. One of her themes is the Ambiguity of Memory. I shouldn’t even try to talk about it here, you should probably read some of her more recent novels and essays, however…
I think that she suggests that there is your past…and there is your memory of your past. To greatly over-simplify, ultimately it is your memory of your past that truly matters.
I guess I’d suggest that “there are as many different truths as there are memories”…and maybe moods.
June 26th, 2010 at 5:08 am
mmm, I’m feeling the number of truths as a function of moods. Figuring out how things happened is always the worst when I can’t figure out if it made me angry or not–is it the angry version, or the not-angry version? They build off of one another. That said, I especially like the succession of the second and third panel. Good work.
June 28th, 2010 at 10:54 pm
In my own feeble attempts at writing semi-autobiographical stuff, I find that if I know less about something, it is easier to write about. What the hell.
July 13th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Thanks for the words, Dad! Memory is a bitch.
Tabitha: Yeah, anger is REALLY a bitch. It clouds everything–just like my Intellectual Pipe smoke in the second panel!
Mom: That’s intersting, my Div III chair seemed to feel the same thing about writing. She is a huge proponent of fiction, and always referred to my cartoon self as if it were a fictional character. Sometimes I very much prefer that view.