Joe Matt speaks of "Spent" with Ivan Brunetti In Chicago



LONELINESS AND BITTERNESS AND ALIENATION AND COMPACTED MALE RAGE CAN BE TRANSFIXING MATERIAL IN SOME HANDS, but sometimes you have to give in and loathe those who are self-loathing. Forty-three-year-old comics artist Joe Matt, whose comics include “The Poor Bastard” and “Peepshow” promoting his new hardcover collection, “Spent,” at Quimby’s in Chicago on a sunny pre-summer Saturday night. The cover image of his alter ego face down on a bed, surrounded by soiled tissue, is a striking sight in such a handsome edition. Displaying a desiccated facsimile of R. Crumb’s epic, lifelong moan, Matt takes pains in his pages to insist that the story of the chronic masturbator whose days are spent mostly chiseling his friends—fellow cartoon artists Seth and Chester Brown—and editing VHS dubs of hardcore pornography for his persistent delectation took place many years ago in Toronto. Talking about his work, however, being interviewed by Ivan Brunetti, whose “Schizo” comics are among the finest contemporary artifacts of self-mortification, Matt seems compelled to confess in front of the small crowd, largely young, beaming women with fresh-scrubbed faces that soak up his dither, that the collection burgeons still and he may now be the stingiest man in Los Feliz. (“The weather in LA is great, I get outside every day, I don’t feel like I’m in Hollywood, per se. I’m just sort of alone with a few friends, I ride my bike everywhere.”) Brunetti knowingly nudges the conversation to more fertile ground, but Matt spirals into confessional detail, then tires of his own story. “I wanted the focus to be about porn addiction. It’s hard to have a relationship and jerk off ten times a day. You can’t find that balance or anywhere near that balance.” And he elaborates on the fondness for young skirt he shares with his character: “I’m too old now to be like chasing 20-year-olds.” He knows his own oeuvre: “In the books I jerk off constantly. As far as addictions go, I feel like I chose the right one.” He admits the collection ranges past 1,000 tapes now, “edited to my taste.” He’s not a prolific artist and brags on living cheaply. “I haven’t had a job in like—since I was 20.” There’s one book he most admires: Art Spiegelman’s “’Maus’ is the book I look to.” The hermetic world of “Spent” is set across the 1990s in Toronto, and it “encapsulates the period where I stayed in that room all the time. I was young and naïve and it was easier. Now it’s about being paralyzed. I’m capable of doing nothing for the next five years.” “I relate to this,” Brunetti says with a warm smile, “you have a kind of a self-destructive urge.” “Yeahhhh.” “You’re almost sabotaging your own work. Is—“ “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Matt mumbles. I don’t know how to answer these questions.” Matt describes comics as one might sticky Kleenex. “The single issue comic books, y’know, are meaningless to me, the flimsiness, the impermanence. Matt says he “runs away from the perfectionism he sees in Chris Ware’s work, but “my original art has so much white-out on it… My god, this is boring. Everything in ‘Spent’ is as perfect as I could get it.” He looks out to the crowd, now down to his feet. “Is this boring? This is boring.”

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