artwork © Joe Matt, used with permission.

The Poor Bastard:
Two-Handed Man Interviews Joe Matt

"I'm a Joe Matt fanatic!"----Matt Groening

"Hot Cartoonist!"----Rolling Stone

"I can't wait to see what happens next!"----Robert Crumb

"Joe Matt uses clean lines and excellent caricaturing to drive his stories of emotional woe."----The Minnesota Daily

"Wonderfully pathetic, funny, and all too human."----Booklist

I'll never forget the first time I read Joe Matt's comix. I'd never read anything so entertaining, so revealing. I still haven't. His clean, crisp artwork and the laceratingly personal, sometimes gross, subject matter worked together to create a really unique and unforgettable reading experience. Still, I couldn't figure out exactly what made his work sooo much fun to read, so I thought I should take a trip up to Toronto and try to find out. Mr. Matt's intelligence and candour made this interview a real good time for me. Hope you like it!

Two Handed Man: One thing that's really noticeable in the reading of your two books (Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt, and The Poor Bastard) is the increase in your drawing ability from the first book to the second. What accounts for this? In what ways were the one page strips in the diary an experiment, a training ground for you?

Joe Matt: If anything accounts for it, it's just things like studying speigelman's Maus, and the work of other cartoonists, trying to simplify. In my last two issues, the art was simpler because, like spiegelman, I tried to draw the actual size of the comic, I didn't want any reduction in the artwork at all, I wanted it at a hundred percent, so I did do the pages the size of comic pages, 8 by 10 inches, so you have to simplify when you're working that tiny. But then I did end up reducing it 80% in the comic, making it even smaller, just because it looks better to tighten it up a little. But yeah, I made a conscious effort to simplify. As far as experimenting with the earlier one page strips, that was more a matter of being highly influenced by Krazy Kat and Raw, thinking that I wanted the pages to be large or something...the first eight issues of Raw I loved, and I was thinking that someday my book would be that big. That's why I was cramming so many panels onto a page, but it didn't work out that way. Big books like that don't sell. I didn't realize then that people don't order large, large books. Stores don't want them.

THM: Many of the diary pages consist of tiny panels centred on a human face or figure against a simple black background.At what point did you gain enough confidence in your drawing ability skills to break away from that format and draw actual scenes and settings instead of just talking heads? Your second book features a lot more detailing, and some extremely well-rendered backgrounds, which are almost completely absent from your first book...

JM: I guess I gained some confidence, but certainly meeting Chester Brown and Seth was important. Seeing Chester's very first autobiographical story, `Helder,' he certainly drew backgrounds and stuff. Those guys convinced me to switch formats from one pagers to a comic book, because it would be a much better income. So meeting them was very important, but I'm still not comfortable doing realistic backgrounds even now. My next issue is exclusively talking heads, just 32 pages of me, Chester, and Seth talking, with minimal backgrounds. We're just at a restaurant, at a table. The backgrounds are just black, they're nothing. To me, it's all about the dialogue. It's all about the dialogue and the facial expressions. If you look at Peanuts, the backgrounds never needed to be very detailed...I try to think of myself more as a writer, writing in this shorthand language of comix. It's not film, you know? It's not film and it shouldn't try to be, so I'm not really interested in backgrounds like that.

THM: Is there a danger that an issue of just talking heads might not provide enough variety of visual information to hold the reader's interest?

JM: Yeah, that's it, completely. The whole challenge is to make it hold their interest without any tricks of any sort, except for good writing. And the cartooning should serve the writing the way the letters of the alphabet serve literature, meaning that it should work on a purely iconic or symbolic level, hopefully without drawing attention to itself.

THM: It seems like you were getting towards that in the last issue, where you had several pages of just your head, watching the TV...

JM: Yeah.

THM: ...and I found that it got kind of boring, or at least kind of frustrating.

JM: Yeah. Again, that was the challenge, to keep it engaging, even though I'm just watching TV. It's also about the limitation I've set on myself with each issue not breaking the time, you know, they're all basically uninterrupted. These last,I'm talking about the new issue, #13, as if it's out already, but it's almost finished, the last three issues, 11, 12, and 13, they're all basically one scene each, of uninterrupted time. That restraint makes it challenging as well. I don't know, there is something interesting about it...Seth just pointed this out to me, that a lot of the things we love are a combination of interesting and boring, I don't know what comes to mind immediately, he mentioned these old Little Rascals films we really love which are awfully boring, the really early ones, right around 1930-1932 when sound had just been introduced Eraserhead! You know, again it's kind of a boring film, but it's that combination of boring and interesting. I thought that was a very astute observation Seth made, and it was very enlightening when he pointed that out to me a couple of weeks ago. It reminded me of the time years and years ago when Seth said, `Love is a combination of lust and pity.' I was like, `Wow.' It sounded like real wisdom. These are gems that I heard from Seth.

THM: It's funny that you mention `Helder,' because in Chester Brown's footnote to that story in his book The Little Man, he says that one of the major factors that led to him doing autobiographical strips was encountering your strips, and you're saying that one of the main things that encouraged your autobiographical work was encountering his stuff, so which came first?

JM: Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar came first. Crumb is certainly the largest influence on all of us. And Pekar had realistic stories and backgrounds, it was just such crappy artists that he was using. But yeah, Chet's skills as a cartoonist, his drawing ability, they're unparalleled you know? It was a love for his style that made me want to emulate it when I saw it. (laughs) I tried, but I couldn't do it.

THM: So you had encountered Crumb's autobiographical stories much earlier?

JM: Oh yeah. Crumb, Speigelman, and Pekar, I always think of them as the three largest influences on me, right from the beginning.

THM: Was reading things like Crumb's `My Troubles With Women' story a big turning point for you?

JM: COMPLETELY. They're still some of my favourite comix, absolutely. It's like, that longing for the complete Crumb graphic novel, that void that I've been trying to fill, sort of. Maus was the first really great graphic novel. Not too many have followed, and I always wish that there were more like it.

THM: I guess Crumb's never really done an extended narrative.

JM: That's right. I think Crumb's Troubles With Women is his best collection, and then Bob and Harv's comics, the collection of Crumb/Pekar collaborations.

THM: `Confessional literature' has a long and rich history from St. Augustine to Henry Miller, but when you started your autobiographical strips there was really nothing like it being done, and it was definitely at odds with the tales of heroic fantasy that unfortunately dominate the comix field on this continent. What was it what is it about the creation of autobiographical strips that appeals to you?

JM: What appealed to me? The honesty appealed to me. The ease of looking into your own experiences for material, it seemed like a natural thing for me. I don't know, it was just a very liberating decision. I don't know what to chalk it up to Catholicism? The need to confess? The therapeutic value of confessing, and exposing oneself? It was in direct opposition to the way I'd led my life up to that point, hiding my pornography all throughout high school. When I was an adolescent, I would have killed myself if anyone knew I masturbated. Again, those autobiographical cartoonists I cited were very important, Crumb especially, but I don't know why I was drawn to it. Nothing else grabbed me. Certainly not fantasy. Certainly not super-heroes. I could never draw that kind of stuff. There's something gay, I think, about drawing these big muscular men all day long.

THM: Definitely! The whole super hero comic book business seems so perverted and sleazy.

JM: Actually, gay's probably the wrong word for what I mean. I guess I just outgrew the whole super-hero genre, and now I couldn't imagine it still holding my interest unless I was gay and enjoyed the idealized male figure, kind of like watching wrestling on TV. I mean, these things exist as power fantasies for young boys, plain and simple. And as far as I'm concerned, nobody can top Jack Kirby for superhero comix. He's what the Beatles were to rock `n roll or pop music. These guys are almost impossible to improve upon, so why even try? There's plenty of other untapped arenas to compete in, and autobiographical comix seemed to scream the loudest.

THM: Could we go back to Catholicism? You grew up Catholic, going to confessional regularly. Now you don't do that, but you had said something about the need to confess, as if you were now still confessing, just in a different form. Is there something you were sublimating or trying to express, just in your own way without an authoritarian structure? I mean, you stop going to confessional, and now you confess for a living! Also, what you said about high school, was it a reaction to the repression you'd been feeling?(This might help to explain why reading Joe's depressing confessions cheer me up--it's like they're a repudiation of shame!--THM)

JM: Maaaybe, but I'm not the one to say. I don't know. (we both laugh)

THM: Is there someone I could phone, who would know?

JM: I can't say, really. It may just be an inability to create fiction, or a complete lack of imagination on my part, I don't know.

THM: Well it seems like it was the right decision for you.

JM: Oh, I'm definitely happy with it. Before the interview we were talking about the Godfather, and I'm certainly not going to write about gangsters, you know? I have no idea how other people write. Even The Godfather, coming from Mario Puzo's writing, I would assume Puzo had some connection to the underworld, much more than Coppola did. His writing had to be based on some actual personal experiences to some extent. At least I guess so, I don't know. I don't know what else to say about this.

THM: It seems like repeatedly drawing a cartoon version of yourself would be a unique challenge. How long did it take you to get a cartoon version of yourself down on paper that you were happy with? Did you have to analyse photographs of yourself to decide which features to emphasize?

JM: I made a conscious decision not to use photographs. I don't really try for a likeness at all, and I'm not even really happy with the way I draw myself right now. It's simpler, but it's still not accurate. You try to find something simple, and again, I'm always thinking about Peanuts: you've just got to boil the elements right down to their basics. I didn't sweat about the likeness at all, I just strived for consistency. And I wanted different characters to be readily identifiable from panel to panel. Like, I make a conscious effort not to draw Chester with glasses, even though he wears glasses, because then he'd look too much like me. And when drawing Seth's glasses, I always push them down his nose so I can make dots for his eyes, whereas the dots for my eyes never appear when I have the glasses on.

THM: When I first met you, I recognized you from your drawings, even though your drawing of yourself is really simple, so obviously you did a pretty good job of choosing which elements to emphasize.

JM: It wouldn't really work the other way around. If you'd seen me first and then the drawing you wouldn't really think they resemble each other. It's all just like a mental impression of how I see myself. I still feel like I'm drawing myself looking a lot younger than I actually am. I'm wondering about how I will age the character as I get older.I was going to say heavier, but I don't want to even admit that I'll get heavier. You can only do so much to age a character. You can add wrinkles, or you can add weight. Or you can take the hair away. And nobody wants to do that, nobody wants to face that. I'm basically drawing myself the same as I was ten years ago.

THM: Is your hairline still going, or is it holding steady?

JM: Is my hairline still receding? I think this is about it. Actually, it's started thinning right at the back now.

THM: Really?

JM: Yeah. (leans forward to show me the crown of his head) It's thinning right back here, you see that? More than it used to, that's for sure. It's a mess, what can I say? But I don't sweat about it. We're all going to die.

THM: I think part of the resistance to autobiographical comix from readers used to `action-packed' stories full of sound and fury signifying nothing comes from a feeling of being ripped offª`Nothing happened!' `Who CARES what kind of bowel movement Aline Crumb had on such and such a date?' `What makes this guy think his life is so special that it's worth reading about like that?' --and for me, that's the point. I think, yes, ANYone's life is worth examining with that kind of honesty, and the first person I'll pass on the sidewalk will be more interesting and complex and mysterious that any Caped Crusader: one is something real and authentically human and one is a corporate lie distracting people from more important things. Do you know what I mean? Was autobiographical comix just the form that appealed to you most strongly, or were you trying to make a larger point about what does and should occupy or society's attentions? Was it in some way a repudiation of the super-hero genre and its cultural influence?

JM: Sure. At the starting point, a lot of autobiographical comix, mine too, are a reaction to the super-hero genre, but that's only the beginning. And I do think there is validity in someone saying that someone's bowel movement is not interesting. There are things that are boring, and it is all story-telling, in the long run, and there's good and bad storytelling. Mundane boring events aren't important in and of themselves. It's all about the context. I saw Goodfellas the other day, and one thing I noticed, they're all in prison at one point, and they're cooking, they're cooking away, and I'm noticing the attention paid to their cooking. They're using a razorblade to cut the garlic, and there are all these little details. Then later there's this heist where millions of dollars are stolen out of the airport, and you never even see the heist! One of the largest heists in American history, and you don't even see it, the money is in later, and they've got the money, and that's it. And that kind of decision-making is really impressive, when someone like Scorsese has such good instincts and really knows what he's doing. Same with the Godfather. They can concentrate on the smallest thing, and if it's done right it contributes something. (laughs) What's the question that I'm supposed to be answering? Oh, yeah. Autobiographical comix are a reaction to super-heroes, but that's only the starting point.

THM: Is the autobiographical work sort of your way of saying that our attention should be on other things than the contrived sorts of stories that dominate the mainstream culture?

JM: No. I can't dictate what people should or shouldn't be into or enjoy. This is a Salinger quote that Seth quoted to me, it's from Seymour an Introduction maybe, or maybe it's from Zooey. Buddy Glass, or maybe it's Seymour, says you've gotta create the book you most want to read. It's what you find most interesting, and that's all I'm trying to do, trying to create something I would really enjoy reading because it would be an honest glimpse into someone's life, very much like the voyeuristic pleasure I got out of reading some of the best Crumb strips. But we're all having bowel movements, we're all showering, doing the same little acts, and to me, the act of showering, it'd be interesting to see what his thought processes were while he was in the shower, not the act itself, they could be doing anything. You're better off just using your instincts, and focusing on whatever excites or interests you.

THM: I think what interested me about Aline talking about her bowel movements in Self Loathing Comics just came from the fact that it was something I'd never seen in comix before.

JM: Yeah, it's like Harvey Pekar making lemonade for a page, licking the spoon and everything. It was something you'd never seen before. It's like Crumb and his `Joe Blow' strip or something, these things have to be done for the first time. Taboos have to be broken before you can really determine what's of value and what isn't. And in retrospect, it's usually the way something is handled that's of more value than the thing being handled.

THM: The version of yourself you depict in your art is nervous, twitchy, and timid, and yet your insistence on pushing shameful/humiliating confessions into the reader's face seems to constitute a kind of bravery that the conventional `tough guy' couldn't dream of. It only takes you until page four of your cartoon diary to start admitting things about yourself that most people would rather die than tell anyone, let alone thousands of strangers. When you first started, was there any embarrassment or fear that you had to conquer before you could write with such honesty?

JM: Sure there was. Mostly for the very first page where I'm talking about pornography, but somehow I just got over it. It was the first and probably biggest hurdle ever, and after that it's been all downhill. I guess it would be like a musician getting over stagefright the first time he goes out on stage he just has to do it. The first time is always the hardest, and you just do it. You decide you want to do this thing, you're in it for the long haul, and you've got to start sometime.

Sharon: (Sharon is a pal of Joe's who sat in on most of the interview -- THM) Can I ask a question?

JM: Yeah.

THM: Yeah, please.

S: How do you feel about your Mom seeing all that stuff? She's kind of religious.

JM: She's kind of religious, but I don't care. I'm not living my life for my mom. I'm angry at her for putting me through all that Catholic school, that church stuff. It's a good and healthy thing to break off from your parents and have your own ideas and feel that you can stand behind them.

THM: So even at the age you are now, you are still angry at your mother for putting you through Catholic school?

JM: Yes. I'm going to go to my grave angry. A couple of weeks ago I went back to my grade school. A summer festival takes place there every year, and everyone looked so happy! I'm looking at these people, some are my age, some are kids, and they all look so happy, and I'm like, `Why am I so completely fucked up?!' I was furious! I mean I really believed all that Christ stuff. I can't tell you how many hours I spent talking to Jesus in my head, praying my guts out in that church. I was even considering going into the priesthood at one point. And then there's the whole sex thing, that completely fucked me up. You're not allowed to have sex until you get married, and who the hell wants to get married when you're eighteen or whatever, so what're you supposed to do? And then they tell you that masturbation's wrong, and that was in high school! Some people might've actually killed themselves hearing these things, if you got the right impressionable person and told them masturbation's wrong, you may as well tell them breathing's wrong. Luckily I wasn't a complete mental case, but I could see other people killing themselves over that kind of trauma.

THM: Do you believe God exists at all?

JM: I have no idea. How can anyone know that for sure? I get mad at people who walk around acting like they know. It drives me crazy. I want to hear them explain it, but they never can. They're like, `Well, you either have faith or you don't,' and that answer never satisfies me. I just want to shake them and say, `Well how do you have it, then?'

THM: So seeing people being happy makes you angry?

JM: It makes me angry that I'm not happy. It makes me feel like I've been cheated somehow. I don't understand why everyone else is happy and I'm not happy. Why do I feel like I'm completely in a state of misery?

THM: What about sex? Were you happy before sex came along?

JM: Yeah. I feel like I was happy as a child, right up to the age of 9 or 10, but then I started feeling sexual urges, and having to deal with them, and everything completely changed. That's where adulthood comes in, that's where you become an adult. I say this in issue 13. Once you have sexual urges, you've gotta know how to get a woman to satisfy them if you're going to actually have sex with someone, and not pay for it, you have to develop these skills, and that's always been impossible for me. Even now, I still can't believe that I'm not still a virgin. I don't know how I ever pulled it off. It's been over four years since I've had sex, and I don't know when the next time is coming. It feels like it's never going to come again, but I'm surprised I was lucky enough to ever have some experiences. This whole area of social skills, there's never any,THAT'S what they should have been training you for in school, not calculus.

THM: So the pleasure pornography gives you is purely physical and short-term, and gives you no real happiness?

JM: Exactly. Pornography is just like alcohol: a tool to numb intelligence and emotions. People can do the same thing with drugs, anti-depressants, over-eating, or television. Too much of anything, you know? I don't think of it as a healthy thing. It's just a way for me to increase my own misery.

THM (to Sharon): Do you mind if I ask you a question?

Sharon: No, not at all.

THM: How does the Joe Matt that appears in Joe's strips jive with the actual person you know? And, when you first read his stuff after knowing him for awhile, was there any sort of resistance or weird feelings you had to get over?

S: Well I met Joe Matt when I was about 17, and he was an old man, even back then...

JM: I never touched her! Never touched her.

S: Nothing ever happened. He was kind of afraid to show me his comic book, because he thought that I would think he was creepy, and I already did think he was creepy, so it was all good. And he is kind of a nervous twitchy guy, but he's a lot funnier, and not as pervy.

JM: EVEN funnier.

S: EVEN funnier, wayyyy funnier. And his whole perverted side doesn't really come out when we're talking at all. Actually, it does sometimes, the whole Woody Allen-envy thing...

THM: Ewww. Why would you envy Woody Allen?

JM (to Sharon): What envy thing?

S: the whole young girl thing.

JM: You think I envy woody allen?

S: You envy the fact that he's got a young asian girl.

JM: Yeah, so what? Soon-Yi's nothing to write home about.

THM: Seriously, Soon-Yi is not hot.

S: Anyway, Joe is kind of like his character, and sometimes I read his books and I'm like `Eww, gross,' and the peeing in the sink thing, I'm always asking him when he comes out of my bathroom if he pee'd in my sink, but otherwise...he's different. He's kinda nicer. And he's not quite as whiny as he sounds in this interview today.

THM: Oh. Okay.

S: He actually is kind of happy. He's a little happier than he wants people to believe.

JM: It may seem that way, but I'm crying on the inside.

THM: So is this Joe Matt on a bad day, that I'm getting right now?
S: This is you asking Joe Matt questions that are making him sound really whiny.

Joe: No, this is what I'm like every day.

S: You're not that bad though. Usually you're pretty happy.

JM: I feel like I project a happy persona. I NEED to laugh, an awful lot. I need to crack myself up just to get through the day. So I do have a happy persona, to some extent. Still, I'm alone in my room most of the time. I spend a lot of lonely empty hours in my room, and no one knows what it's like, exactly.

THM: would you call yourself a happy person?

JM: Sometimes. (laughs) Rarely. (laughs harder) VERY rarely. I remember being happier in the past. I remember being in love. I remember, vividly, falling asleep with the love of my life in my arms, waking up and kissing her in the morning...it's not that I long for Trish specifically, but I long for the nicer, better person I was back then. Now I'm just kind of, I was going to say the word jaded but I dunno, I just know that it was better in the past, and that's what I can't deny. I'm not living in the past, but I do know I was once much happier. And I also know that it's wrong to think a girlfriend WILL bring happiness in the future, because I already experienced that with the last girlfriend, who I met on the other side of this restaurant actually. The first time I met her was right here, five years ago.

THM: Wow.

JM: Ahhh, it's all old history to me. I don't know how to find happiness, I really don't. Do you?

S: Um, I dunno. Do that you're missing daily interaction with people?

JM: I don't LIKE most people, I don't WANT interaction with a bunch of strangers.

S: But how do you know you won't like them if you don't meet them?

JM: Where am I supposed to meet them?

S: I know, we have this discussion all the time.

JM: I know enough people already. I do have friends, I have really good friends, Chester and Seth are the best friends in the world...I just want a chick to maul.

S: That's Joe's dream, to have a young impressionable girl that he can mold into a..

JM: No! I don't want to mold anybody! I'm not looking to mold anyone!

S: You want a protege.

JM: I'm looking for an easy relationship.

S: You want a protege.

JM: No, I don't! When you say protege, you mean a young chick.

S: You want a young chick that you can...be arty with.

JM: Be arty with? Sure, she can be arty.

S: Okay, here's the fantasy: Joe Matt has a girl who's...arty. And she works in one room and he works in the other. And they get together now and then and compare art and have sex.

JM: Yes. Yeah.

S: Yeah, that's it.

JM: That's my John and Yoko fantasy, where I see them as both like-minded... it's the shared values thing, you know? Then again, I wouldn't mind if the girl went off to work every day, 9 to 5 or something, and...actually, I don't know if I could resist, I might be watching porn videos all day. That wouldn't be healthy either. There's no answer, it's all hopeless.

THM: You rarely use cross-hatching in your work, and your figures are always drawn with crisp clean lines, even when veering toward caricature. Your juxtaposition of a warm and friendly cartooning style that is usually associated with children's strips like Schulz's Peanuts, and the actual content of the strips that is always adult and often vulgar, seems to be a big part of the hook that holds the reader's interest, and is one of the reasons the strips are so funny. Describe the process of discovering, defining and refining your unique and personal style of cartooning.

JM: I'm not really happy with my style of cartooning. I have been using cross-hatching for the backgrounds in issues 11, 12, and 13. I've been thinking that cross-hatching suits the backgrounds but not the characters. If you look at Dick Tracy, if you look at Little Orphan Annie, it's always nice to have some black up behind the word balloons in the top of the corners of the panels, and then to go down, and have some nice gradation leading down to the figures. So yeah, I like to use some cross-hatching in the backgrounds now.

THM: But it seems like in the past, comix that dealt frankly with sexuality were generally drawn in a messy way like, I dunno, S. Clay Wilson, and a big strength in your work seems to be the contrast between the content and the style, so where did you get that idea?

JM: It's not an idea as much as an instinct. Everyone draws in a very unique way. Wally Wood drew his way, and Basil Wolverton drew his way. You do it the way you can. A lot of things are holdovers from past loves and influences. I hate the fact that, when I'm drawing an ear, I start over-rendering the inner ear; I know that that's because I copied too many Bernie Wrightson pieces when I was in high school, and that influence is still in my work. Seth has always berated me for putting these little specks of dirt over everything, like a tabletop or something, and that's something that became a habit because Crumb's got a lot of dots everywhere. I don't know, but I am definitely seeing the value of a cleaner style as I get older. Something like Peter Bagge's cross-hatching on all those faces, all his cross-hatching on faces looks really muddy and dirty to me, like it dirties up the drawing (for the record, I'm a big fan of Peter Bagge's comix. His website is www.peterbagge.com--THM). Crumb is still the big guiding light, and if I look at how he's cross-hatching on figures, he's doing it to define a light source, and it's very controlled and beautiful. Again, I don't feel like I have half of Crumb's drawing ability. Someone like Spiegelman, he's got less drawing ability than Crumb, certainly, but he knows it, and works it to his advantage..he simplifies, and then he simplifies even more. The initial breakdowns for Maus, he could have printed them the way they were, they were very readable, but then he took it another step and cleaned it up and made it even crisper and simpler. It's always clarity above all, clarity is the most important thing. S. Clay Wilson didn't have ANY clarity. It's not easy on the eyes, looking at that stuff. And again with Schulz, Schulz was always the master of simplicity. (shrugs) You like whoever you like, and you go from there.

THM: So Bagge's cross-hatching doesn't appeal to you the way Crumb's does because it's not helping you to add definition and just seems to be there for its own sake, or something?

JM: Exactly. Actually, when he puts cross-hatching on a face it flattens it out, and Crumb's cross hatching is more about adding volume. And I don't even think Bagge would even be insulted by my saying that; very few people have Crumb's drawing ability. And Peter Bagge has a whole level of grotesqueness that underlies all the art, so it's even harder to simulate realism on top of that grotesqueness. I look at the art in The Poor Bastard, and to me it looks horrible, it looks like a real mess. It's always like, Why am I always putting these little lines on everything? I can see my big mistakes, I can see where I've gone wrong with that early artwork. You've got to make a decision if you're doing a close up of a face, for example. Am I going to draw individual teeth? Am I going to draw just the upper row of teeth as one big white block? Why not show the bottom row of teeth? These kinds of thing mire me down. Like, why aren't I drawing individual teeth? Because it'll look goofier, or...why? I need to know the answers to these things. And again, this is like a paralysing thing too, and accounts for my lack of productivity a lot of the times. (laughs) No, that's just a cop out.

THM: What kind of brushes and pens do you use?

JM: I just tend to use a very small white sable brush, a very cheap brush, zero, double zero, or triple zero, and I use that for all the artwork, except for the lettering. I use a rapidograph pen for that. I've had no practice using a nib, but I would like to use a nib someday. I roughly pencil the figures in using non-photo blue lead before I ink them with a brush.

THM: So you do all your inking with a brush?

JM: Yes. Sometimes it's really counter-productive, because some things, like cross©hatching on a wall behind a figure, should be done with a pen nib. It's the right tool for the job, but I can't control a pen nib the way I can a brush.

THM: Don't most people have a harder time with brushes than pen nibs?

JM: They do, I know. A brush is really hard to control but once you can do it, it seems to give you the ultimate control, which is why I can't switch over to a pen nib now. My problem is I always work too close to the artwork. I see the line coming out of the brush and I see the left and the right side, I see the two sides of the black line and I've always wanted both sides to be really crisp and if there's any dryness or jagged edges I'll go in and start sculpting it out with white paint. I'm really anal about the artwork, and it takes forever. Hence, I procrastinate a lot, just to avoid the nightmarish unpleasantness of the inking stage.

THM: Which stage in creating a finished page of comix is most satisfying, fulfilling and fun for you?

JM: The writing and the pencilling to me are the same thing. The most exciting part is deciding what's going to go into the panel. It's kind of like chess, feeling like I've chosen the best move I could possibly make. Feeling like you've done the right thing, like you're on track. It could be as simple as choosing to break up a sentence over two panels as opposed to shoving it all into one balloon, or knowing when to put in a silent panel to full effectiveness. It's about making that right decision, and feeling confident that it is right. That's the most satisfying part. Inking is all just after the fact to me.

THM: Do you write the story out first, and then draw it, or do you write it as you're drawing it?

JM: I write it as I'm drawing it. The word `drawing' is misleading because I'm drawing very loose lines of where the figure is, conveying if the figure is smiling or shouting, but there's really no detail in my pencilling. I don't write the story out, but I have a list of information that I want to convey, and I try to convey the information that I want to convey naturally, naturalistically, so it doesn't feel forced. Just as an example, some characters sit down at a table, it always jumps out like a sore thumb when suddenly everyone's saying each other's names just to establish who they are. Or at the beginning of a movie, you're introduced to the characters..how quickly will they convey the information about who these characters are? And if they do it too quickly and force it down your throat, you know...Jack Kirby's the worst example. Kirby's characters will say, there'll be a cowboy, and he'll say `I can't believe I'm here in the city, Me, Jonathan Brackman from Minnesota, who owns twenty oil fields, and lost his wife to cancer last year, and now I'm wrapped up in an intergalactic catastrophe!' You know? He'll tell you everything about himself in the very first sentence that comes out of his mouth.

THM: Remember that New Gods comic when all the humans are introducing themselves, and it's like, `I'm old but wealthy industrialist John Smith,' `and I'm dim-witted yet virile Harvey Black,' or whatever...

JM: (laughs) I was just reading a Kirby Captain America comic where the Red Skull walks into his chamber, and he's got all his chiefs of staff there, and they introduce themselves one by one, and when they're done the Red Skull's like, `All right, I don't wanna hear it anymore, that's enough about you.'

THM: `Try to focus on me, guys; I'm the guy with the red skull.'

JM: Yeah, it's so silly. But it's like that. If I want to convey information, it could be anything, in my next issue, issue 13, we're at the restaurant ordering lunch and Seth says, `You've got LOTS of money,' and then I go on about how my money's invested, and it needs to grow, and to me this helps to establish something that I want. It looks like we're just joking and talking, but it establishes something that I want known, for whatever reason, and that's how I justify whatever's in there.

THM: There's not a lot of formal experimentation in your work, in the sense of varied page layouts and stuff. Every page of The Poor bastard conforms to a six panel per page rule (2 across, 3 down) and this regularity gives the book a rhythm that becomes a tool in terms of pacing the story. (I noticed this same effect achieved by Alan Moore in his From Hell book, where the rule of using the 9ªpanel grid design on each page, instead of being a limitation, freed him and allowed him to do all sorts of new and strange narrative tricks.) On the other end of the spectrum is someone like Dave Sim, whose constant experimentation with the page design is, for him, an essential part of the storytelling. Would you ever want to try messing around with more unconventional page compositions, or do you view things like innovative panel layouts as just irrelevant distractions from what the artist is trying to say?

JM: No, I'm not interested at all in messing around with the page layout. I do think of it as distracting. It calls attention to the medium, like you're reminding the reader that this is a comic book that someone drew, someone clever enough to mess with the layout. To me, it'd be like if you were in a theatre, watching a movie, and suddenly the director decided to use just the right half side of the screen for whatever reason, let's say he felt it made his character feel more isolated or something...to me, that'd be horribly jarring. I'd be like, Hey, what happened to the projector? Why's the left side of the screen blank? To me, it's a pretentious kind of thing, manipulating panel layout too much. Neal Adams is a bad choice to emulate. I mean, look at what Schulz did with those same four panels for so many years. It's like working in haiku or something. I should point out though, that I LOVE Herriman's Krazy Kat layouts. It works on those Sunday pages, all that experimentation, because they're self-contained, beautiful pages, almost like paintings, meant to be viewed as a whole. Wait a second, I just thought of Joe Sacco's work..he varies every page's layout and I absolutely love his work, `Palestine and `Safe Area Gorazde,' both great books. So I guess it's not a hard and fast rule with me, but for me personally, I'd rather leave it out of my work.

THM: The stories compiled in The Poor Bastard hold together as chapters in a larger story very well, even though you were working on them before the events depicted at the end had taken place, so it was before you knew how the larger story would end. How is it that the pacing in the book feels so strong, given that you didn't know what it was all leading up to?

JM: I don't know, and I still work the same way. I don't know where the story that I'm doing now is going, but I try to keep each issue cohesive and always keep my eye on the larger picture.

THM: After The Poor Bastard, you switched gears and moved back in time to do an autobiographical story set in your childhood. Why?

JM: I was really at a loss for anything else to write about. After Trish and I broke up, I really didn't want to, I don't know, what's the word? (laugh) I felt like I had to keep producing comix, even at my slow rate. I needed something to work on. Now, in retrospect, I can see I was overly-influenced by Chester Brown's I Never Liked You. I was very impressed by his use of silent panels everywhere, the kids biking around and stuff, so I was imitating that to some degree. I tried to construct this nice childhood story that I'm ultimately not happy with. I don't like the ending, but it was something to do at the time. I was really just letting real-life experiences build up until I could write about them again, things I would continue after The Poor Bastard. I sort of do have the last ten years now of my life to look back on and take what I want from them. That's what I'm doing now, the whole focus of pornography in the story I'm doing now.

THM: In your first book, your girlfriend accuses you of failing to even attempt to deal with your flaws out of a fear that if you were happy and well-adjusted you would then run out of material to write about. Whether that's factually true or not, it made me wonder about the results of an artist binding himself up so tightly with his art. The events of your life obviously would be the main influence on the content and shape of your art, but how do you think your art has leaked out of the panels and influenced the content and shape of your real life? How has your depiction of your life in your art reaction to it, what you learned from doing it, the long periods of solitude it requires exerted pressure on the character and destiny of the life you are living?

JM: In some ways I do feel like the art and reality have completely flipped. Even in this interview, I am giving the stock answers of a confessed porn addict, compulsive masturbator, a guy who's mooning over lost love, who's miserable; and it does feel sort of like a stance I've taken, like it's just easier to answer from this point of view. I was just thinking about a previous answer I'd given you, where I was complaining about the past being better, and how much I loved having a girlfriend and being in love, and yet I was thinking how it doesn't completely ring true deep down inside, because I know that if I did really want a girlfriend as bad as I'm claiming to, I would be actively seeking one out. And I'm not. I don't know, real life is very complicated. There's never any black and white and things are never simple. It's really hard to know, to have genuine self-awareness, and if I did have self-awareness, if I knew why I was neurotic I wouldn't be neurotic. Again, if I choose to call myself neurotic I'm choosing to assume a certain stance. I'm calling myself neurotic, so I am. It's a selfªfulfilling prophecy, or it's just my own self--image.

THM: You mean that a person becomes whatever he thinks he is, until the cover story becomes the real story?

JM: They become it or they stay it. It's like, I don't know, if I didn't have the whole porn problem that I'm writing about now, I don't know what I would be writing. It would be SOMEthing else, and it's a safe bet that it would be some other source of tension or strife, otherwise why would I want to write about it? I'm not driven to show the good times or the happy moments of my life, because I feel like it would make for a less interesting read, which is why I'm always drawn to self-deprecation and all that, but it isn't reality. I know deep down what is reality and what is the comic. Now, when I talk to people, I like to project, I like to perpetuate this myth that the comic and life are exactly the same thing, but I'm the only one who knows deep down that it's not the same thing.

THM: So you pretend to be the popular perception of yourself out of convenience?

JM: I don't pretend anything. But Seth would say that the comic is more me than I'm me. Seth would say, if anything, I'm worse in real life than I am in the comic, or something to that effect. It's hard to...I don't even know what I'm trying to say, but I know the differences between the two, but it's just easier to kind of go along with it, I think.

THM: You obviously examine the details of your life much more than the average person--how do you think this experience has helped you to learn things about yourself you wouldn't have learned otherwise?

JM: Well first, I don't know how much the `average person' examines his or her life or thinks about things. I just do the best I can. Thinking about things is the easy part, lying around thinking is easy. Taking action, actually changing things about yourself and your basic nature, that's the real challenge. It takes so much willpower or whatever to better yourself, if that's what you want.

THM: Would you view your artistic journey as something that has helped you to grow and mature, or as something that's retarded and stunted your growth at an immature level?

JM: (laughs) Well, it's both. It's helped me to grow as an artist. I feel best about my most-recent work, but as a real person, it's probably helped me build a cage around myself. My own self-perception has certainly been lowered. I've got less self esteem than I've ever had. I was just at this comic book convention the other day, and I kept on apologizing to anyone who came up to me for not having my new issue done, because it's been well over a year, and Seth was like, `That's not the right attitude! Be arrogant! You're the artist! It takes as long as it takes! You don't owe these people an apology!' But I don't feel that way though, I feel like I DO owe everyone an apology. And he's like, `Even if you do, you gotta act like a man! Be a man!' (laughs) I sort of feel like that in real life now--as far as girls and relationships go, I kind of do perceive myself as old and over the hill, like I've had my turn at bat, and now I just have to live out the rest of my life out in the pasture. I've been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. This is how I view myself. I see young girls around, but I'm on the outside looking in, now. It's...crappy. (laughs) Then again it's just my perception, I know that, but I can't help it. I can't think of what accounts for this self-image.

THM: If you had to weigh things out, would you call it a fair trade? The increase in drawing ability on one side, and on the other side.

JM: Yeah! Of course it's a fair trade. I do live for the work, the work is the most important thing in my life.

THM: And that's the way you want it?

JM: That's the way I want it. Although you wouldn't know it from the fact that I don't work hard enough. But I am very happy, I couldn't be happier with the last issues, 11-13. And I'm hoping that when the collection's out it will have come pretty close to what I wanted. I am doing the best I can. I don't ever compromise the execution of the comic. I take as long as anything takes, and if there's a single line out of place anywhere I won't hesitate to, I can't go to sleep without having fixed it. If a word need to be in bold I won't hesitate to white it out and think about the lettering. So I'm not lazy, in that sense; just slow.

THM: You have been obsessed with pornography for decades, ever since you hit puberty. First, hasn't it ever just gotten boring? And second, how do you think your `sex-addiction' has affected the way you view and interact with real women?

JM: It doesn't get boring. I equate it with eating food. You eventually get hungry again, very soon. And the things that I like, the girls that I like to watch, I seem to be able to watch them endlessly, the same scenes...I don't get tired of it. That's why I almost feel like an alcoholic discovering a magic whisky bottle that refills itself (laughs). The stuff I like does the job for me over and over again, the way you can keep eating pizza once or twice a week without getting tired of it. And, how has it affected the way I relate to women?

THM: Yeah.

JM: I can't say. Of course it makes me objectify women's bodies more and view them just as objects, just as these...things, but I don't feel like that's so wrong, so what? And to some extent that appreciation is aesthetic. It's not completely carnal, I don't think of them solely as these gross animalistic things. More often than not, I am admiring beauty. I'm not just talking about bodies, it's mainly faces. I'm into faces more than any other part of the body, so the girls that I gravitate towards, it's always about their faces first. How do I interact with women in real life? I do think that the porn keep my self-esteem down, keeps my confidence low, keeps me feeling like a worm. Actually it doesn't keep me feeling like a worm, I keep myself feeling like a worm, around women. Once again, my own self perceptions...but I never felt otherwise. I never once felt like I was this guy who had any ability with women, so why NOT have the porn then? It's the old chicken and the egg thing.

THM: At one point in the diary when talking about the misery your affliction has caused you, you refer to yourself as `a compulsive masturbator.' However, the word `compulsive' properly refers to something that is beyond your control, something you are forced into against your will, and there are several moments in your strips when you resist treating your problem, give up on treatment, or make rationalizations for continuing the behaviour you claim to loathe. It seems, therefore, that your obsession with pornography is not a compulsion but a CHOICE, whether you like to admit it or not. If you're willing to go along with that idea for a minute, why do you think you choose to spend so much time collecting, watching, and editing porno tapes? It's almost a cliche to say that porn is a way to get revenge on all the women who you were unable to conquer in the real world by dominating them in a fantasy world, but do you think there's any validity to that?

Joe: No, the porn has nothing to do with gaining revenge on women. Like I said, it's simply a way to numb emotions. It's to experience pleasure and then be numb afterwards. I've always thought about the stuttering guy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, the crazy kid, and after he has sex with a prostitute he's relaxed and seems to be completely at peace and normal, and that's very much how I feel. I am like a heroin addict who's just shot up and is just lying there, experiencing that bliss. But it doesn't last long. Yeah, addiction is a choice, and addiction's also just a word, you know? Chester loaned me a book, Addiction Is A Choice, I think that was the title, appropriately enough. If someone was to offer me $5 million dollars to go the next year without masturbating, I would do it. You would see, I wouldn't be out of control, I would go that year without masturbating. (laughs) Enough incentive and people will change. It's in their power, but they have to want to change. Actually, forget change, I'm just talking about behaviour. People can control their behaviour. Anyone claiming to be `out of control' is just making excuses if you ask me. It's this whole victimªculture we're living in. Every night on the news, some crazy person `just snapped' and went on a killing spree. It's all too simple and convenient, these expressions. It lets people off the hook.

THM: Throughout the Poor Bastard, part of the reader's interest came from the feeling that you were at a turning point, and might be about to make a major positive life change. Of course, The Poor Bastard ends inconclusively, and in your strips since then you seem to have given up even attempting to struggle for something better, settled into a comfortable rut and have become even more obsessive in amassing the perfect porn collection. This lack of inner conflict seemed to make the last Peepshow issue frustrating and harder to get into than your past work, like the view had become so obsessively insular a reader would have to share your obsession to really enjoy it. Do you think there's a danger this loss of dynamic tension in your real life will cause a lack of tension in your art?

JM: Well, I still do dream of a better life, I do dream of...in a million ways I dream of a better life, I'd kill myself if I didn't have this dream to hold onto. But it's a lot more complicated than just giving up porn, there's a lot more to it. Again, as an artist I'm not sure what I would be expressing if I weren't in the state I'm in. I don't know what I would have to express. I think the story I'm working on now, in fact I KNOW it will have that continuous struggle for something better, because I can't resign myself to this fate. If I did I would kill myself. I think Seth has told me before, `Just resign yourself to it. You've chosen it. You've made your bed, now lie in it and shut up.' And (laughs) I don't know how to respond to that. I don't see it that way. I'm not able to see it that way and still live. It might be self-deluding but I have to hold onto that hope.

THM: Charlie Chaplin's famous axiom about `long-shot for comedy, close-up for tragedy,' suggests that as the viewer moves closer in, the situation becomes less and less funny. Yet, in your strips, the opposite is true: the more of your flaws you list, the more pathetic you make yourself seem, the more detail and magnification you give to your scenes of failure and humiliation, the harder we laugh. Why is this? What do you think makes your strips so incredibly funny?

JM: (laughs) I don't find them that funny. And what I'm laughing at isn't what everyone else is laughing at. I don't find it hilarious but I do laugh at certain parts. I laugh at the lines I give to Chester and Seth in my new issue, things I've heard them both say a million times. And I'm just laughing at the fact that I feel like I've accurately got something down, and if its used right, the context is right. Issue 13 is just one long drawn-out conversation between the three of us, and Seth has just this wealth of great lines. Seth is the funniest person I know. Most of the time I can't use half of the stuff he says.

THM: But your two books were really funny, and I'm just wondering if you always had a flair for it?

JM: What you find funny is, like you said, the patheticness of my life or something, and I don't find that funny. If it ends up being funny to the reader, that's almost by accident.

THM: So the strips weren't meant to be primarily humorous, and all those laughs were unintentional?

JM: It depends. The scene in The Poor Bastard where the squirrel's on my lap, I'm feeding a squirrel in the park and it climbs right up into my lap, and I'm yelling, `Get it off!' It's something that really happened, and I know it can be funny because my character's part of me, but the only reason I would put something like that in there is, it sounds pretentious, but to me that's symbolic of a relationship forcing itself onto me, and me not wanting it, or something.

THM: Really?

JM: (laughs) I don't know if I'm just making that up, but I know I justify everything in some kind of crazy way, some inner logic...

THM: But at that point you DID want a relationship with Mary (the girl who was with him in the park) so why'd you push the chipmunk off?

JM: I'd have to look at the book right now, that just popped into my head. Maybe at the time, I thought that the squirrel was symbolic of me, trying to force myself onto the girl, reinforcing the way I kept trying to kiss her. I don't remember. I'd have to think back to something more recent, something that I know for sure. But with that Mary girl, I did and I didn't want a relationship with her, because she was sweet, but she wasn't my physical type. I just don't know. I'm thinking now of that scene where I'm giving Mary that little toy, the little pteradactyl toy (It was Pterri, from Peewee's Playhouse--THM), and it's not a coincidence that that's a bird, and later there's that bird in my room, that I find wounded. To me, there's something satisfying about having recurring motifs that suggest that there might be a deeper meaning, even if there isn't.

THM: So then there could be something symbolic in the fact that the bird was extinct? (laughs)

JM: No, to me a bird is in a sense--this is stuff I'm not comfortable verbalizing, or, I can't articulate it exactly. It's all just kind of works on a deeper level to me a bird is like the exact opposite of me living inside that little room. The fact that the bird is wounded before it comes into my room, I relate to the wounded quality of the bird, post-relationship. This kind of stuff, I feel like I'm babbling, but to me, as I'm doing it, this is all I have to guide me.

THM: That's pretty smart, though.

JM: What is?

THM: Well, are you saying you were trying to use your description of the natural physical world as a reflection an interior mental state?

Joe: (laughs) That SOUNDS good. But like I said, something inside has to guide you when you're picking and choosing from reality what to put down onto the page. I am picking and choosing from real events. There was a real bird that I brought into my room like that, that was attacked by the cats in the yard, all that happened, but there's a million other things that happen every day that don't go into the book. A million conversations, a million things, a million people. So many other people that don't get into the book, other friends and acquaintances and stuff. I've got to feel a purpose in some way, so the instincts can guide me.

THM: How much exaggeration and/or stretching of the facts is required for you to turn the events of your life into a structured and entertaining story? How much difference is there between you and comic ook version of yourself?

JM: I try to accurately portray events. I'll combine events...I feel like I'm fictionalizing in that I'm taking bits and pieces from all over the place, different conversations and I'll put them all together. So they didn't happen exactly the way I'm showing them, but in my mind they may as well have, so I really don't feel like I'm fictionalizing or making anything up.

THM: So it's more like journalism than fiction?

JM: Kind of. It's selective journalism, I guess. I try to minimize any exaggeration. Well, I guess that's not true. Anything that's exaggerated, to me it's not exaggerated internally. If I see a cute girl, well this is in the past, it doesn't happen so much anymore, but if I see a cute girl in public, in the comic I'll have huge sweat beads on me and be just freaking out, but that's more what's going on inside of me than on the outside. So that's an exaggeration in a way, but to me it's not, it's just my inability to act like that in real life, that's the problem. (laughs) I'm babbling!

THM: Why does it take you so long to complete an issue? It almost seems like you're afraid of finishing things.

JM: That's exactly what I'm afraid of. I am afraid of finishing things. I don't know why exactly. If I knew why I probably wouldn't be. Yeah, this particular issue, I don't know why, I've kind of been leaving it to sit alone unattended, hoping it would ink itself or something. Sort of like if enough time goes by eventually the day will come when it's just finished. I just work on it here and there, and it's been taking forever. Most of my time has been going into pornography, as I show in issue twelve, and I'm really lazy. I spend a lot of time procrastinating--reading, playing my guitar, watching tv, bicycling. Those are my major activities. Talking on the phone, I talk on the phone a lot...

THM: You (or at least your cartoon depiction of yourself) seem to have a love/hate relationship with your body. On the one hand it gives you pleasure masturbating, eating scabs and snot, etc. but on the other hand its frailties and limitations cause you a lot of hassles. It gets twitchy and sweaty and inopportune moments, and your strong physical urges (porn) have been possibly the most forceful shaper of your life's destiny--in the Crumb movie, his wife says he would rather be a head floating in a jar than be a mind trapped in a body. Do you feel that way?

JM: Unlike Crumb, I wouldn't be happy being a brain in a jar, I do love physical exertion. It's a hedonistic attitude, but I do love all the pleasures of the body so much. I love sleeping and waking up and going back to sleep, and eating and bicycling and showering, hot showering! They're all in that strip, I think it's page 8 or 9, The Joys Of Being Human, all those things I never get tired of. (pauses, laughs) WHAT was the question?

THM: Well, you and Crumb seem to share this interest in detailing tactile sensations, and there's a lot of attention paid to bodily functions, and it seems like it might have something to do with the way you relate yourself to the outside world. Like how your skin is like this barrier between you and `them,' sort of, you know? It just seemed like this constant referencing of the physical, how it comes into contact with the mind, might be hinting at something larger, and maybe you don't know what it is...

JM: Well, it's a fact that we're all trapped inside of our bodies. It's almost the biggest tragedy of existence, the fact that you never connect with anyone. Even your lover. ESPECIALLY your lover. Your brains never become one, you never communicate in that way, your thoughts are never really shared with another person. All you can do is articulate and verbalize them somehow, and even then there can be distrust, and there are things that are held back, there are still these false personae that we're projecting. And you know that you die alone, inside your head, when the time comes. And death is the other big tragedy. (laughs) Knowing that it's gotta come, that really sucks. I do have a lot of crazy notions about the mind and body being connected that I'm sure I'm not alone in sharing. Oftentimes I'll be lying in bed with glasses off, thinking that if I just had the willpower I could correct my vision. Like I shouldn't be blind, my vision should be 20/20, if only I could somehow get the brain going, believing in it. I wonder if I was hypnotized, could I be hypnotized to see without my glasses on. I'm so preoccupied with it because I hate my glasses right now. I think about having laser eye surgery, and I'll never have the courage to go through with it. And still I look at all these people without glasses, and they're all dancing around, having a good time. And I perceive my glasses as being the biggest barrier between me and the outside world, especially with girls, or women. I have a very hard time making eye contact, looking through these big pieces of glass. They do distort my eyes, my eyes are much larger, (he lifts up his glasses to show his eyeballs, and they are much larger than they look when he has the glasses on) They're coke-bottle glasses, and I can't establish good eye contact with them.

THM: That's incredible. They're huge!

JM: Yeah. My eyes are much larger, twice as big under the glasses, but the glasses make them look microscopic.

THM: You're like the reverse of Milhous(van Houten, Bart Simpson's best friend. When he takes off his coke-bottle glasses his eyes are these little tiny dots).

JM: Or Crumb. Crumb has these glasses that make his eyes look huge. I'm extremely near sighted, severe astigmatism. I don't know anyone who's got worse eyesight than me.

THM: So if you don't have your glasses on, you can't--

JM: I can't even climb out of bed without my glasses on. I wouldn't be able to find the floor! (laughs)

THM: The early part of your answer was interesting in the sense of suggesting that the obsession with the body might be an expression of a desire for something transcendent or something higher outside of the physical limitations that define the human experience, in the sense that your body never does exactly what you want it to, nobody gets what they want exactly, things never go exactly according to your plan, the world outside isn't like the idealized world in your head.

JM: Yeah, but what's your question, though?

THM: I don't know, maybe that accounts in some way for the obsession with the physical, the tactile, the sensations.

JM: I wouldn't say I'm that obsessed with the physical sensations. If I am I'm just as obsessed with good things, like we just said, dreams that have that never come true, things that we want but never get, (laughs) I seem to spend more and more just lying on my bed daydreaming about what I would like, in terms of the relationship and all that...

THM: Stephen King has a non-fiction book out about writing, and at one point he talks about his skin problems, his eczema, and a reviewer made a point about writers having an abnormally high incidence rate of problems with their skin (Joe laughs) and it seemed like a pretty sharp physical metaphor. You know, the outside world rubbing against you in a really forceful way, and a person with an artistic personality might be more inclined than the average person to be disappointed that the world in their head doesn't conform to the world they dream of, you know?

JM: Before I came here today, (laughs) I took a hot shower and then put some cortizone 10 on my eczema, still hoping that it's going to go away. I've been rubbing stinking lotions on this rash on my leg for years, ever since I was fourteen or something, and it's never gone away. And here I am, even today, putting medication on it, thinking if I can just leave it alone long enough, it'll just go away this is starting to sound like I'm talking about the porn addiction again and it's all up to me, and yet I can't go a week without just rubbing the hell out of it,my rash, that is. If I don't I'll scratch it in my sleep and it'll be a bloody mess all over my leg. It's just on my shin, now. And it's not that bad now. It's been a lot worse.

THM: What causes it?

JM: I don't know; hot showers? It could be a psychosomatic manifestation of God knows what, the porn addiction, or who knows what. And I'm certainly not picking and eating my scabs anymore, it's not even scab country anymore, they're almost gone but I just can't quite put it away. It's like I'm at the 30-yard line and I just can't quite kick it in. I haven't worn shorts all summer. We were talking about hypnotism, and I've always wondered, when I see these hypnotists on TV, could a good hypnotist convince me that my pillow is a really hot chick? (laughs) I don't know.

THM: I read a neuroscience book called The 3 Pound Universe, and the title referred to the fact that the entire cosmos is contained inside your 3 pound brain; without someone observing it, it may as well not be there. It needs a brain perceiving it to give it life. So, everyone invents a world that they want to live in, and maybe some people do it more successfully than others.

JM: That's true. Things like Star Trek's holo-deck leave a deep impression on me, because I'm often thinking that everything exists just for me, and it's all being controlled by something greater than myself for some purpose that I can't see, like I'm a rat running through a maze. Defending Your Life, that Albert Brooks film where he goes to the Hall of Reincarnation and they're playing clips of his life back on a big screen, concepts like that really make you think that it's all, you're just being observed by someone, and you're supposed to...learn something. Like in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself in that situation and he's supposed to learn from it and he's not going to get out until he does. Yeah, these thing leave a deep impression on me, even if they are crappy Hollywood movies. That whole idea of, we ARE here for betterment, or to help others. Helping ourselves by helping others. I don't know if I really believe that, because I've been mired in hedonism for quite awhile now...

 

Joe Matt on August 28, 2001

 

Joe Matt's books are published by Drawn & Quarterly. Check out their web site, www.drawn&quarterly.com. Score yourself some books by Chester Brown while you're there, too. Everything by him is also highly recommended. And check out www.beguiling.com. An excellent comix store, they sell Joe Matt's books as well as his original art pages.

 

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