Spent
I picked up Joe Matt's Spent at the bookstore yesterday. Amazon.com had recommended it to me and I had since added it to my wish-list but never got around to purchasing it. Since I was driving back from St. Pete taking US 19, I couldn't resist making a stop at Barnes and Noble since they always have a very impressive selection of alternative or biographical comics. Not only do they have the classics by favorites like Harvey Pekar, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware, but it was through Barnes and Noble that I was able to get into Jeffrey Brown and Alex Robinson's overlooked gems. I have yet to read anything by the Hernandez brothers at length (where to begin?) but they had plenty from those guys too.
Anyway, Spent is pretty decent. The book is dedicated to R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar gives the book a good review on the back cover (he "dug" it) so I knew going in not to expect a particularly rosey perspective. Joe Matt is a pretty miserable guy: he spends all his time watching porno and editing videos together (think Boner Jams) and obsessively worries about his financial investments to the point where he rips off his friends just to make a cheap buck. Meanwhile, his masturbatory sessions take so much time out of his comic-book writing/drawing that he never gets anything done and ultimately he receives angry phone calls from his publishers demanding new material.
A few months ago I read and wrote about Ed Brubaker's A Complete Lowlife and talked about how worked because it was brutally honest about all of the horrible, horrible things he had done. Spent feels like a confession much in the same light, but there isn't the same feeling of remorse; the only feeling I have that Joe Matt knows how pathetic he is via his portrayal of himself. He treats his friends--fellow comix authors Chester Brown and Seth--like a jerk in this book and makes no attempt to show himself as a righteous, likable person. Of course we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he is only showing the despicable side of himself on purpose of by way of his own neurosis, much like how I only seem to write about the awful things about me, so we can at least take comfort that if he is willing to admit that he jerks off up to twenty times a day and had once given his girlfriend a black eye that there is likely not anything much darker in his life. One of the characters in his book tells Joe that his comics are nothing more than a form of masturbation for him and to a certain extent I agree. I enjoyed reading his book, but there wasn't much I could get out of it except the feeling that hopefully Mr. Matt was able to properly express himself which can't be that bad.