Joe Matt, one of America’s greatest indie comic artists, died this Monday, September 18, just shy of his 60th birthday. His major autobiographical series, pepshow, It had a great influence on many subsequent authors. Created by Joe Matt, Chester Brown and Seth, the triad largely defined the alternative comics of the 90s. It was perhaps the main successor to the comics that Harvey Pekar or Robert Crumb had cultivated in the previous generation.
Screenwriter was Matt Wagner who spread this information on social networks: “My longtime friend, occasional collaborator, and fellow pop culture fan Joe Matt passed away suddenly and unexpectedly,” he wrote. Comic book artist Marie Naomi, who had a close relationship with the late artist, He announced that he died of a heart attack That it happened to him while he was drawing at his desk, and he had been suffering from chest pains for a long time, but he did not go to the doctor.
Matt (b. 1963, Philadelphia) began publishing pepshow As a series of autobiographical strips and in 1991 he turned it into a comic book, achieving great success thanks to the comic book publication of one of the main authors of the time, the Canadian Drawn & Quarterly. Matt would not hesitate to talk about his relationship with his girlfriend, as well as pornography and sex, always with humor, where he himself was the main target of his satire.
Drawn & Quarterly founder and editor Chris Oliveros He posted a farewell text today In which he recalls his relationship with Joe Matt: “He was always incredibly funny and balanced it with a direct, sometimes disturbing honesty, just like his comics!” he wrote.
despite pepshow His most famous title is one of his favorites for Oliveros fair weather (2002), “a book that relentlessly analyzes his childhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia,” and the other is his most recent work, consumed: “Besides being funny, Joe’s skills as a cartoonist were at their peak, which unfortunately I don’t think a lot of people give him enough credit for.”
“Looking at Joe Matt was like looking in a mirror”; said one of its two editors in Spain, Fulgencio Pimentel. “Damn it, Joe, we don’t want to believe it. “Wherever you took us, no one took us.” His other publisher, La Cúpula, said: who introduced his work to Spain.
Უjra Albert Monteis also mourned his death, admitted that it was a “major influence” for him. “Joe Matt’s work,” wrote expert Ruben Lardin in this newspaper, “is based on shame and reaches a level of brazenness that is embarrassing even for the reader.” In its pages, which could not be more amusing, it mocks all traces of decency and begins to attribute to itself endless miseries that are generally swept under the carpet.
Source: El Diario
