The Poor Bastard

AUTHOR: Matt, Joe

ARTIST: Joe Matt (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1992-1994 (Peepshow, issues 1-6)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1997

Publication History

In 1987, Joe Matt began publishing single-page comic strips under the title Peepshow. Targeted to an adult readership, these autobiographical strips chronicled Matt’s obsessions with women, pornography, and reading and writing comics. The single-page iteration of Peepshow ceased publication in 1991. Kitchen Sink Press published a collection of these early one-page strips in 1992 as Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt. Matt published the first Peepshow comic book in February, 1992.

Matt’s The Poor Bastard collects the first six issues of Peepshow, which ran until November, 2006 (issue 14). The Peepshow issues reprinted in The Poor Bastard were originally released between February, 1992, and April, 1994. Subsequently, Peepshow issues 7 through 10 were published in 2002 under the title Fair Weather, and issues 11 through 14 appeared in the 2007 collection Spent.

Montreal-based comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly has produced both Peepshow and Matt’s subsequent collections. It released the first edition of The Poor Bastard in 1997, with second and third editions appearing in 2002 and 2007, respectively. All editions of this title have been published in paperback formats, though a signed and numbered hardbound edition with a print run of four hundred copies was released in 2002. Both Fair Weather and Spent are available in hardcover editions.

The British publishing house Jonathan Cape published an edition of The Poor Bastard in 2007. The Poor Bastard has been translated into Spanish, French, and German. Two editions of the Spanish version have been published (2006 and 2008) by noted Barcelona-based comics publisher Ediciones La Cúpula. Parisian publisher Delcourt released the French version of The Poor Bastard in 2008.

Plot

Organized into six sections, The Poor Bastard chronicles the decline of Joe Matt’s relationship with Trish, an art student and his live-in girlfriend of four years, and his subsequent attempts at romance. The tensions in their relationship, alluded to in Matt’s earliest Peepshow strips—namely Matt’s selfishness and obsessions as well as Trish’s professional aspirations and dissatisfaction with his behavior—finally drive them apart. In this book, these tensions manifest in Matt’s attraction to Frankie, a young woman who works with Trish at a local day care center. Though he knows nothing about her as a person, Matt finds both Frankie’s appearance and youth tantalizing. While his interest in Frankie ultimately fades after a few embarrassing encounters with her, Matt’s impulsive fantasizing about other women and Trish’s move to the Toronto suburbs for school ultimately facilitate their breakup.

Matt befriends local hipsters Andy and Kim, who try to set him up with one of Andy’s former girlfriends, a woman named Mary. Attracted to Kim, Matt is reluctant to meet Mary, though he encourages Andy to find him another suitable match. Matt also begins corresponding with Laura, his first significant girlfriend. He regularly meets with his best friends and fellow cartoonists Chester Brown and Seth to discuss his relationships and social interactions as well as to get updates on Trish’s burgeoning romance with a university student named Graham.

The Poor Bastard concludes with Seth telling him that Trish has left Canada for a job in California. Before learning of this turn of events, however, Matt gives Trish a black eye, alienates his new friends, has an awkward encounter with a possible romantic interest named Jill, and engages in a humiliating sexual episode with Laura during a family visit to Pennsylvania.

Each of the six episodes of The Poor Bastard follows a loose narrative trajectory that typically ends on an ironic note that foreshadows events in the next section. Part 5, for example, concludes with Matt’s new neighbor, Jill, knocking on his boardinghouse door and asking if a carton of eggs in the refrigerator belongs to him; an important subplot in part 6 concerns Matt’s attempt to save a pigeon mangled by cats. Also, in part 1, Matt’s concluding words to Trish (“Trust me!”) ironically allude to their final breakup in part 2.

Characters

•Joe Matt, bespectacled and scrawny with long hair and a receding hairline, is the main character of The Poor Bastard. He is an independent comic book artist who occasionally freelances as a comic book colorist. Notoriously opinionated and thrifty, he spends most of his days masturbating and obsessively thinking about his relationships, both real and imagined. Matt is quick to anger around his girlfriend Trish but passively accepts the criticisms and ribs from his friends Chester and Seth.

•Trish, an aspiring cartoonist, is Matt’s girlfriend of four years. She is enrolled in college and hopes to use her degree to work as a cartoonist or animator. She is slender with long hair. In contrast to Matt, she is outgoing and enjoys making friends and having new experiences. She barely tolerates Matt’s masturbatory habits and pornography obsessions, which remain a source of tension for her in their relationship. While she supports her boyfriend’s cartooning work, she would prefer that he did not write and draw about their relationship.

•Seth, a cartoonist and close friend of Matt, sports round glasses, often wears a coat and tie, and chain-smokes. He exhibits patience and is always trying to temper Matt’s delusions about women and romance. He also provides comic relief throughout The Poor Bastard. He shares Matt’s enthusiasm for vintage comics and rare Fisher-Price View-Master reels.

•Chester Brown, a.k.a. Chet, is a cartoonist and Matt’s other best friend. Casually dressed and lanky with long hair, he speaks far less often than Seth or Matt. When he does voice his opinions, he usually supports Seth’s take on Matt’s ideas and perceptions.

•Andy meets Matt at a local comics shop and professes his enthusiasm for the cartoonist’s work. Tall with a goatee and shaved head, he plays bass guitar for a local band. Though he lives with Kim, his girlfriend of five years, he has a wandering eye. He is affectionate and loyal to Matt.

•Kim is an attractive young woman in a long-term relationship with Andy. She sports a pixie cut and has a taste for funky clothes. A beauty spot accentuates her smile. Though she is initially cool toward him, Matt is initially attracted to her because of her classic looks and petite frame. She performs tarot readings and claims to be receptive to people’s auras.

•Mary, Andy’s former girlfriend, is slight, fair-haired, and freckled. She works as a server at a local dive. While she is receptive to a friendship with Matt, his aggressive bids for physical contact and a more traditional, exclusive romantic commitment ultimately discourage her. Matt initially insists that she is not his “type” because of her pale complexion.

•Frankie is a twenty-year-old woman of West Indian descent who first attracts Matt’s attention at a local copy center on account of her exotic looks and dreadlocks. He thereafter associates her with the song “The Girl from Ipanema,” which plays on the shop sound system when he first sees her. She works with Trish at a local day care center.

•Jill moves into the boardinghouse where Matt lives after he breaks up with Trish. An ethnically Chinese nineteen-year-old, she is studying cuneiform script in the hopes of becoming an expert on ancient Assyria. She seems to find Matt pushy and eccentric.

•Laura, Matt’s first sex partner, contacts him by letter and phone after getting a divorce. During their correspondence, Matt discovers that she has become sexually adventurous, a fact he finds both distressing and compelling. The Poor Bastard concludes with Matt’s pathetic tryst with her; she has retained her slender appearance and has grown out the long, dark hair that Matt loved in his youth.

Artistic Style

Matt’s bold visual style conveys a remarkable consistency throughout his work over the years. His appreciation for classic comic strips such as Peanuts and Gasoline Alley is evident throughout The Poor Bastard, especially in the way he organizes panels on a page and in his sense of composition in each panel. His use of ink, pen, and brush produces a strong line that maximizes the stark and dramatic effects possible in an adult-themed, black-and-white comic. As a result, Matt suggests to readers that even though the story he tells is autobiographical, his account possesses a certain stability and is therefore credible; an idea he underscores with his use of contrast and composition in each panel on the page.

Generally, Matt renders objects and people in space according to simple perspective and foregrounding to convey depth, and he mostly eschews the use of cross-hatching. Because conversation and monologues drive most of the plot, Matt often limits the number of figures and background details in a panel. Also, because The Poor Bastard is a textual comic, conversation bubbles and captions typically share the space with one or two figures set against a dark background.

Surroundings, whether domestic interiors or outdoor scenes, usually display some sort of unifying horizontal black space, such as a city skyline or a simple black interior. Matt’s panels all exhibit a thick, black frame, and he rarely deviates from a format that situates six frames in three rows of two frames each on a page. This consistent organization draws the reader’s focus to the action occurring in the panels themselves and further suggests that the events Matt depicts throughout follow a logical, cohesive progression toward an inevitable conclusion.

Themes

The Poor Bastard, along with most of Matt’s work, centers on the theme of authenticity. Throughout The Poor Bastard, Matt’s cartoon version of himself constantly questions how he can best maintain his own sense of personal integrity. In turn, he questions how he can maintain this sense of self in his relationships with others, especially in his romantic relationships.

Matt ironically undermines such lines of questioning with his choice of format. The comic book is, after all, a work of art, and Matt’s rendering of people, places, and objects is exaggerated and simplified. He contains his drawings in boldly framed panels arranged logically on a page.

Despite the artifice that necessarily characterizes his depiction of life, Matt’s view of his struggle for authenticity remains credible. In the end, it is unclear if Matt’s seemingly rigid standards of conduct, appearance, and behavior have been at all changed by his experiences. What remains evident, however, is that readers can identify with Matt’s double standards, defensiveness, and reluctance to admit fault or defeat as human responses to adversity and confusion.

Impact

Matt’s work belongs to the tradition of autobiographical comics pioneered by Justin Green (Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary) and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) in the 1970’s. What distinguishes Matt’s work from these seminal titles is his unsentimental and unapologetic portrayal of his life, his personal values, and his proclivities.

The earliest autobiographical comics creators sought to convey everyday experiences and real-life situations in the interest of understanding their values and interrogating their motivations and reactions to people and events. Matt, unlike his predecessors, flips this dynamic to show how the world around him does not necessarily comport with his view of life and how to live it. In other words, Matt suggests that he is happy being who he is and doing what he does. If the people around him have problems with that, then those problems remain their own and do not affect him.

Matt’s particular worldview is one he shares with his contemporaries in the Toronto comics scene of the 1990’s, Chester Brown (Yummy Fur) and Seth (Palookaville), both of whom appear in Matt’s comics and intermittently include him in their work as well. This referential component to Matt’s work is another factor that distinguishes it from earlier autobiographical comic books. Matt’s references to and depictions of interactions with his cartooning friends reinforce the documentary quality of his stories. Matt’s realism also emphasizes that his personal story is an outgrowth of being part of a creative community and is shaped by peer influence and mutual creative exchange as much as by personal motivations.

Further Reading

Brown, Chester. Paying for It (2011).

Brown, Jeffrey. Clumsy (2002).

Miss Lasko-Gross. Escape from “Special” (2006).

Bibliography

Beaty, Bart. “Selective Mutual Reinforcement in the Comics of Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth.” In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, edited by Michael A. Chaney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.

Chaney, Michael A. “Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography.” College Literature 38, no. 3 (Summer, 2011): 21-44.

Matt, Joe. “Interview with Joe Matt.” Interview by Christopher Brayshaw. Comics Journal 183 (January, 1996): 47-75.