What were alternative comics? Questions like this will make a seasoned reader of this publication groan – if the Comics Journal has any legacy it is its role in shaping what readers today will call alternative comics, comics for serious readers with an artistic or literary focus. Maybe this term is outmoded in a time when what we call mainstream is almost trivial, not nonexistent but as shifting and imprecise as naming an alternative. But make no mistake, from the late 70s through the mid-2000s, there were Alternative Comics. We have a canon of artists and titles clustered around publishers and festivals based in cities like Montreal, Seattle, Toronto, Portland and Chicago. Alternative comics had a relationship to alternative music, ambitions of literary and fine art status, creative debt to underground comix and allegiances to counterculture and subcultures broadly. Many pursued comics as a home to memoir, autobiographical and confessional works, a space for a version of truth that made room for humor, melancholy, and self-effacing literary intensity. It was a male-dominated scene with a seething, vibrant underbelly of women and queer artists who pushed the medium forward.
There is no “end” to alternative comics. Indeed, there may have never been an end to the underground. What has arrived is a new generation of cartooning, one looking back on the alternatives with the same askance view that the alternative cartoonist of the 90s looked back on comix of the 60s. The autobiographical comic, briefly dormant in the scene after domestication by the bookstore market for graphic novels, has exploded with new creativity and ambitious new works in recent years. Two new comics in periodical format look back on the 90s alternative, taking up the memoir form, reawakened from its slumber. One, Peepshow #15, is a direct continuation of one of the definitive comics memoirs of the 90s, the posthumous final work of the infamous, influential graphic memoirist Joe Matt, returning for one last hurrah after a dramatic exit from the medium with the explosively harsh stories collected as Spent. In another corner, we have PeePeePooPoo #1, which is actually the fourth issue of Caroline Cash’s one-woman anthology. PeePeePooPoo is a deeply contemporary, proudly dykey humor series that would seem eons past the withering colossus of alternatives past, yet wears the history of alternative comics and the comics memoir on its sleeve with winking reverence.
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Peepshow #15
Joe Matt is dead, but he hasn’t changed. His brushwork is still fine, his wit remains brilliantly sharp. His honesty is no less devastating, his misogyny no less nauseating. Peepshow #15 is the final issue of the late artist’s notorious autobiography, returning his self caricature to our eyes after some 20 years of absence, a seance facilitated by additional inking by Matt’s friend and fellow traveler Chester Brown. If you’re looking for Chet, the major tell is the lettering, Matt’s calligraphy is just a little bit thicker, swifter, just as his inked cartooning is a little bit simpler and heavier compared to Brown’s narrow hatching. It’s a testament to Brown’s mature style that his finishes don’t really stand out from Matt’s, it’s nice to see his recent line at dimensions larger than a postage stamp.
Matt’s return to comics was clearly always intended to be his last. The stories in Peepshow #15 are preoccupied with legacy, hinting at Matt’s thoughts on his time in the medium while explaining where he’s been all these years. It’s an odd reading experience, if simply for the reason that the conclusion of Spent was one of the finest finales of any autobiographical cycle, a zoom out from Matt’s miserable condition to his frustrated love of comics, inextricably wedding the story of his porn addiction to his admirable impulses as a comics collector while he dallies on his deadlines. Full disclosure: I have written and tossed drafts of an essay on Spent numerous times. And while there is certainly a lot to unpack in Peepshow #15, it is less so for rich poetics.
If Spent has any flaw it is that it is a comic that one can sentimentalize. Matt’s condition is so abject in that work, the no exit finale so precisely acidic, you start to like the guy. Peepshow #15 finds Matt doing a little better, on his way to being a happily married man who sells his old books on Ebay, and he is horrible. Opening on a story we last saw in the Drawn and Quarterly anniversary book, Matt is in LA with dreams of securing a lucrative deal with HBO to turn Peepshow into a cable TV show, perving at (hopefully) women as he walks his merry way down the sunny streets, a flop-sweating figure of vanity. In the less interesting passages of the comic, we see that HBO deal fall through in an honestly typical story of thwarted royalties and Hollywood bullshit. Where Peepshow #15 comes alive is its central story of Matt’s short-lived relationship with a much younger fan named Maggie, who learned about Joe from his tenuous connection to Weezer (Rivers Cuomo wrote into Peepshow’s letters column one time, didja know?) and sticks to him like glue as he plans to permanently relocate to LA. In the comic’s funniest panel, Matt admits his starstruck lover “took on the role of my personal therapist,” as he lies in bed whining about how being part of the Toronto Three isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and Chet and Seth are actually really mean to him. Maggie sighs, every possible reason apparent on her face.
Before the move, Joe’s caring friends Chet and Seth give him a little send off (with a cameo from Peter Birkmoe, of course) and Seth delivers a farewell speech that is as underhanded as any of the one-liners gifted to him in Matt’s work, but deeply tender, doubly so to read after the artist’s passing. “He was always smiling,” Seth muses, “He added a little complexity to the group. He was like the grain of sand in the oyster, an irritant that stimulates the complexity of a pearl!” This moment is the beating heart of Peepshow #15, and thus must be scorned completely by Joe, scoffing “I’M THE FUCKING PEARL!” as he storms off with his nonplussed girlfriend. This has always been the point of Peepshow, Matt’s unwillingness to accept that anyone likes him.
After the HBO deal and the relationship with Maggie shatter in tandem, the back half of Peepshow ruminate on Matt’s turgid sexual history, a dalliance with online dating and a catalog of all his former partners that doubles as a summary of Peepshow, finally ending on Stephanie. All these years later, Matt still ends the story before he begins to like himself. Matt never shies away from observing that his girlfriends continued to be “fresh out of high school” even as Matt began pushing 40. It’s honestly gross. I’m not going to moralize, but my revulsion isn’t really moral, is it? I want to leave that feeling here, ignoring it would not be honest to the work.
The closing pages of Peepshow #15, like the conclusion of Spent, turn away from the chaos of Matt’s life to a telling reflection on cartooning and his artistic heroes. Selling a friend a copy of Crumb’s Book of Genesis Illustrated, Matt gets into an argument about the book, bemoaning the late work as “so goddamn boring,” declaring, “I demand great cartooning as well as a great read!” while hypocritically defending the collected sketchbooks as “a direct link to Crumb’s brain!” Matt breaks down, realizing he hasn’t drawn anything in years. His friend admonishes him, “Remember – you’re Joe fuckin’ Matt!” but Joe has already moved onto some other bullshit fixation. One last cartoon Plop! and the seance is over. Put the comic down. He’s gone. This comic is not Joe Matt’s best, and like all his best comics, it may also justifiably make you completely hate him. But it’s the last, vivid connection he has left us to his rich, exhausting inner world, a direct link to his twilight years. Joe Matt is dead, but he hasn’t changed.
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PeePee PooPoo #1: The First Issue
Caroline Cash is a young cartoonist, an archetypical cool dyke whose greatest vice (as best I can tell) is liking One Piece, but her work is no less concerned with the legacy of alternative comics from the underground through the ‘90s. This may be most apparent in the covers of her solo anthology, PeePee PooPoo, which have cast Cash in spoofs of everything from Eightball to Wimmen’s Comix. Her humor is ribald, her cartooning is expressive, her inking and even her lettering rich and inviting. But it’s those spoof covers that have really made Cash’s name, an emotional bridge between the old guys who have a box of Kitchen Sink catalogs in the garage and the young gals who love kissing each other. I picked up an issue of PeePee PooPoo at one of those modest out-of-the-way sunbleached comics shops that’s got a dozen boxes of Warrens, and the shopkeeper remarked the comic hadn’t really been selling but he ordered it on the strength of the cover. Nature is healing.
PeePeePooPoo #1: The First Issue is not the first issue. I don’t really get the joke there but I do think it’s funny. The cover remixes Charles Burns’ iconic cover for Dope Comix #5: The All-Marijuana issue, a cover which has profoundly outlasted the legacy of the anthology which it graced, recasting Burns’ wired punk man, with Cash, greening out and peering into a vision not of an eyeball resting on the seat of her mind, but herself, dizzy from cheap beer. It’s a pretty good swipe, but it’s absolutely a different scene – the lines are softer, thicker, Cash has added some sparkles and the lightning bolts coursing through her don’t seem nearly as vicious as Burns’ graphics. That difference in mood is just as transformative.
Some of the stories in PeePeePooPoo #1 have appeared in different forms elsewhere, but brought together they show Cash entering a contemplative phase of her art, dare I say it nostalgic. Like Peep Show #15, PeePeePooPoo #1 opens with the artist moving, in this case Cash moving from Chicago to Philly, but finding that she cannot melt into the background of her new city – the Philly comix scene runs pretty deep, people know her work. But melt away she does, with the aid of an edible, in the next story “Caroline Cash Is Stoned Again,” fulfilling the premise hinted by the cover choice. However, thanks to a fun little about the author page at the beginning of the book, we know that Cash is no longer a stoner. This is not going to go well. But it might not be awful either. What follows is a meditative gag strip, Cash lost in a part of town she doesn’t know, her phone missing, struggling to get her bearings. The anxiety of night walks on pot washes over these pages, the absolute terror of asking a stranger for directions who wants to ask you if you’re actually a girl, but also those little observations one makes walking a city at night, high enough to not really feel like part of it – the texture of concrete, the flickering of street lights, the cold night air, the beacon of a Dunkin’ Donuts storefront. The humor and the poetics of this comic both come from the way that when one is stoned, alone, and a little afraid in a different part of town at a different time of day, time slows down and every moment is oddly important.
The other long story in PeePeePooPoo #1, “First Date,” is also peculiarly nostalgic, Cash recalling a slightly awkward Tinder date in the summer of 2020, amid the first months of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The silence and slight danger of city streets, the hazy hours of numb swiping on apps, the momentous excitement of being close to someone new – honestly I think lesbian dating is just kind of like this nowadays, but it did feel particularly magical in that time of lockdown, and Cash captures that mood so deftly. It’s a funny story about Caroline struggling to tell her date what she wants amid the rush of being around anyone at all, let alone a cute, charming lady. The best sequence in this, Caroline’s first kiss with her date, is so joyous, the pair’s eyes spiraling and their smiles bursting into cartoonishly wide grins, the absolute thrill of remembering what a good kiss feels like after completely forgetting. Perhaps Cash is not a searing confessional artist like our last generation’s most revered memoirists, but her work is no less deeply honest and revealing.
The shorter strips throughout PeePeePooPoo #1 are largely observations on queer women in cities, deeply funny to anyone who spends enough time communing with dykes. Anticipating an inevitable comparison, one of these strips is an update of an Alison Bechdel comic, the four-panel strip “Butch and Femme” reimagined for today as the page long “Femme and Butch.” The observation at the heart of the strips are the same – some lesbians hate labels, others love them, sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don’t. But Cash’s version has another dimension: after decades of young dykes coming to these words, sometimes we don’t know what we mean when we use them. (“I’m sooo butch today in these jeans.”) Cash’s version asks if we are forgetting our history or transforming it – as the binary collapses and our relationship to gender grows more nuanced, “butch” and “femme” have remained just as silly and just as precious. The important change here really isn’t the update of the strip, but the length of it – there are more wildly different silly scenes than ever. Such is Cash’s relationship to dyke culture, and such is her relationship to comics history – maybe things have changed beyond recognition, maybe everything is secretly the same, but there will always be moments of beauty, moments of humor, moments of powerful embarrassment and small victories, the stuff of gag comics.
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Read alongside each other, Peepshow #15 and PeePeePooPoo #1 form perhaps an ending and a beginning to the history of the comics memoir, marking the passing of a chapter of this medium that nonetheless continues. In Peepshow #15, we mourn the passing of an artist through work that feels as concerned with observing its own finality and the passage of time as it does with reassuring you that Joe Matt never changed, at least not as a comic book character. PeePeePooPoo #1 cements Caroline Cash as a vital comics memoirist of the moment, deeply aware of her artistic roots while training her focus toward markedly different readers and preoccupations. Confession remains an aspect of Cash’s comics, but the intensity and self-flagellation is not a part of her work, nor is it as focal in more explicitly intense memoirists today such as M.S. Harkness. To put it plainly, the contemporary graphic memoir is not as often an intentionally alienating declaration of outsider status but work by marginalized people forming a connection to their audience. What persists is the moments of observation, the bumbling cartoon likeness gazing off at a bustling or barren city street on their way home, the world rendered in loving inks. Then and now, the strength of the comics memoir, as literature, art, humor, confession, Pure Comix or whatever else, is that ability to hold onto the feeling of a place, a time, a temperature, commemorating moments in sequence with ink on paper.
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