Joe Galaxy

In the years before Massimo Mattioli’s death in 2019, the artist surrounded himself with a certain air of mystery. The man seemed to shy away from public life. He did not produce new comics, and his works had been out of print for a long time until Italy’s Coconino Press, Panini Comics and Comicon Edizioni took the initiative to publish his work in newly curated editions starting the same year of his death. That year Coconino curated a collected volume of the underground classic Squeak the Mouse, released in English by Fantagraphics in 2022. Coconino followed that with Joe Galaxy Comics: Space Wonders & Horrors, published in Italy in 2020 and now available in English via Fantagraphics as well.

Mattioli had a huge impact on underground comics and pop culture, and reading Joe Galaxy we find ourselves stepping into such a composite rich narrative universe that is appears deceptively simple but is deeply complex. Unlike the overtly violent, direct, and explicit nature of Squeak the Mouse, Joe Galaxy presents a protagonist who, while no less violent, offers a more elaborate narrative.

The feathery interstellar adventurer Joe Galaxy is just one facet of Mattioli’s wildly eclectic body of work, and is possibly his most layered work, one that blends different graphic and storytelling styles and influences. To get an sense of the creator, consider, for instance, that alongside his transgressive underground comics, Mattioli was even more known for creating children’s comics, like Pinky, a delightfully whimsical series published in the Catholic magazine Il Giornalino. Joe Galaxy embodies all his contradictions and virtues. It's a collection of short stories brimming with idiosyncrasies, shifting seamlessly between absurdity and satire, simplicity and depth.

Born in Rome in 1943, Mattioli co-founded one of Europe’s most revolutionary and influential underground magazines, Cannibale, in 1977 with Stefano Tamburini. It quickly became a playground for total creative freedom, a place where Mattioli, Tamburini and his other pals Filippo Scòzzari, Andrea Pazienza, and Tanino Liberatore could push their work beyond all constraints. Then, in 1979, working for the magazines Il Male, Frigidaire, and Comic Art (yes, at the time Italian newsstands overflowed with comics magazines), he created Joe Galaxy, a series that detonated like a sci-fi-fueled hand grenade, packed with irony, absurdity, and bursts of graphic violence.

And who exactly is Joe Galaxy? Basically, he’s a funny animal. But of a cruel, cunning, and unhinged species. He is a space adventurer in the form of a lanky yellow bird with sharp, expressive movements and eyes brimming with mischief. His plastic, elastic energy makes him leap off the page. As a testament to Mattioli’s ability to fuse underground irreverence with pop art’s deconstructive tendencies. Mattioli’s comics pages followed no rules — except, perhaps, the rules of anarchy. Then again, choosing to have no rules is a rule itself, right? Maybe I’m overthinking it, but if there’s one thing Mattioli excelled at, it was messing with his reader’s head. And he used to do it so damn well.

Joe Galaxy's adventures are short, an average of 5 or 6 pages, with no real narrative thread binding them together. As a result, the only real constraint on Mattioli’s creative output was page count. Beyond that, his comics were pure, unfiltered madness. The series was published in a time when anthological magazines were the go-to outlet for publishing comics outside the circle of mainstream long running series, which was dominated by major characters like the heroes of Sergio Bonelli (Tex, Zagor, Mister No), as well as the pocket sized Diabolik, and Alan Ford, and their adventures were delivered mostly in standalone books.

With a rare mastery of diverse artistic techniques, ranging from traditional ink and color work to the incorporation of photographs, Mattioli structured his pages mostly within a six-panel grid, which he often enjoyed to betray with crazier and wider solutions. Each page exploded with color, each panel was a standalone universe with its own logic (or delightful lack thereof), populated by bizarre contraptions and surreal creatures that required no introduction, no justification — just their own irreverent existence.

Every panel is a new vision, a gateway to another reality. Ideas seem to be wildly spill from Mattioli’s mind, as if he were channeling them faster than he could contain them. His visual compositions have the same electrifying energy as those songs where every second bursts with so much invention and unpredictability that each time you play them it feels like a fresh, mind-bending discovery.

Mattioli crafts a new dimensions — simple, yet boundless — where the laws of physics are defied and no rules apply. Joe is a braggart, so powerful and brutally fierce, yet comes across as utterly reckless, often looking like an idiot. He is a walking contradiction — a funny animal stripped of charm and cuteness, a rude creature that could morph into a feral beast in the blink of an eye.

Each page of the book is enriched with inventions and sudden shifts in technique. Mattioli often experimented with collage — just like his pal Tamburini — and with a technicolor-style flat palette. He’d play with pop culture characters and icons that randomly appear on his comic pages (looking for them is an endless game), deliberately evoking a satirical edge that permeates many of these stories.

Much like Fritz the Cat — the godfather of all debauched funny animals — Joe Galaxy is unapologetically offensive, unpredictable, and irreverent. Perhaps this is why Massimo Mattioli’s creation, with its unmistakable blend of cartoonish and pop sensibilities, might look like a precursor to today’s unhinged Adult Swim funny ragtag antiheroes (Galaxy’s fast adventures would make perfect mini episodes), with both his raging and all too human attitude.

Joe Galaxy's short stories are simple and frantic adventures where the hero fights aliens and solves absurd mysteries in deep space, nothing too fancy or elaborate. With its at-times pompous, pulpy voiceover (the one detail that hasn’t aged very well) guiding the reader through deranged sci-fi adventures, and its soft psychedelic vibes, Joe Galaxy feels like the kind of product you might have gotten if someone commissioned an animated cartoon series to Philip K. Dick, and fueled by hallucinogenic substances.

Of course, that could never have happened. And yet, the very essence of Joe Galaxy lies in its nonsense exploration of the impossible, a total and unfiltered anarcho-post-pop explosion of colors and ideas. Mattioli’s writing style is no less creative than his visual one, with a large use of invented funny words and neologisms, in pages rich of text. Jamie Richards and Adrian Nathan West did a remarkable job with their translation.

I have no clue what substances or bad habits Mattioli might or might not have indulged in, and I have no personal experience in such matters. But I like to imagine him waking up after a night of excess and acid-fueled dreams, crawling toward his drawing table in a not-quite-lucid state, and regaining all energies once the pen is in his hands to start transcribing the visions from his delirious trips — where a wicked imagination toys with the relics of our collective pop subconscious.

Now, in an era where we are all very familiar and accustomed with such iconoclastic visual and narrative approaches, I anticipate skepticism from some random readers (while Joe Galaxy is for sure a comic book for comic book creators). But let me be blunt: my words will never fully capture just how violently revolutionary Mattioli’s work was in its time — and, to be honest, how fiercely relevant it remains today. His pages can still slap us across the face, seize our jaws, and smash them against the floor without a hint of hesitation. And to tell the truth, I love being slapped like this by guys like Mattioli. His reassuring colors and soft lines are part of a great comic-book swindle — an exquisite scam of the highest order.

Narrative boundaries, genre conventions, stylistic traditions — none of these mattered to Mattioli. That’s why we can say he approached a highly disruptive kind of underground comics and children’s comics with the same raw, explosive energy, making him a peculiar figure in both Italian and international comics history.

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