Matt, Joe – The Poor Bastard

Joe’s Myspace page

The Poor Bastard

I can’t imagine a better title for a collection of his work. This collects the first 6 issues of Peepshow, and these were the really good ones. A lot of people didn’t like his later work (when he retold a childhood story), thinking that he was ripping off Chester Brown, but I thought it was OK. It hasn’t been collected though, so maybe he thinks it’s bad too. Whatever the case, the “story” here involves Joe and his longtime girlfriend Trish. Anybody who has read the first book should be familiar with her. Anyway, after she reads the first issue (about Joe having a crush on a friend of hers), she breaks up with him, and the rest of the book is mostly about his emotional torment of going through the whole ordeal. Not as dense as the first one, but after you read this you’ll wonder why he didn’t keep going with this. Actually, you might not wonder because it might be obvious that him bitching for entire issues could only be entertaining for so long. Whatever the case, I wasn’t sick of it when he essentially stopped.