30 days of comics I love #2: I'm the fuckin' pearl!!

Peep Show #15
by Joe Matt

The thing I'm already missing most about Joe Matt's comics is how far he'd go to show what a complete asshole and total loser he was. By all accounts, he wasn't really exaggerating too much about his real world life for his comics, but you had to admire the guy for his honesty, if nothing else.

It's only fitting that the last comic he ever did comes with a cover featuring him sitting on a toilet, pants down around his skinny legs. But that smile, as he enjoys some old piece of pop ephemera, shows that this is his happy place, and that's a good a place as any to leave a final statement. Before it is flushed away.

This last Peep Show comic, coming out months after Matt fled this mortal coil, comes with the inevitable sadness that the artist isn't with us anymore, and even though the comics were created years ago - the final update on the life and adventures of Joe Matt peters out with events from 20 years ago - it's still fresh Joe Matt comics, and after his history, you know what you're going to get.

But there is some kind of statement, some kind of small culmination of his life's work, in three key areas. Most obviously in the adaption of the speech from Seth on leaving Toronto in 2003 (right down to the sharp punchline at Joe's indignation at being an irritating piece of sand) - but also with the listing of all the women he slept with, in all the unpleasant details (all on Joe's part, the women all seem pretty cool), and the final panel of his final page of published comics has him trying to sell off some Sopranos DVDs he grabbed from the HBO offices, which was only good and proper. He was always trying to make a buck.

I'll miss these glimpses inside Matt's sordid life, and I'll always miss his art, which was as pleasing as ever, becoming much more freer than his earlier work, more open and more room to breathe, even as Joe Matt loses his shit again, or just exposes how much of a goddamn perv he was.