A Comics Creator Who Needs More Publicity

Matt Howarth is the most prolific unknown cartoonist around. His work has been published by such companies as Fantagraphics, Heavy Metal, Vortex, Rip Off Press, Aeon, DC, and his own Howski Studios, among many others. He has written and drawn thousands of comics pages over the last thirty-odd years yet few people know about his creations. Howarth works mostly in black and white, and favours science fiction and horror as backdrops for his violently funny stories. The majority of his comics fit into the reality he has created called Bugtown, a city whose inhabitants can shift from one reality level to another and are reborn if they die in Bugtown. This sets the stage for much havoc and bloodshed. How can this work remain so unrecognized? Matt Howarth also has a passion for electronic music. He has a weekly strip called Sonic Curiosity that has run for many years, and which often stars his creations such as The Post Bros and Savage Henry. Howarth also integrates real musicians in many works, folks like Nash the Slash, Conrad Schnitzler, an original member of Tangerine Dream, and even Moby. He has self-published comics since the 1970s, and in the last decade has foregone print to instead make all his new material available in digital format. Matt Howarth is a true independent spirit. Here are some covers from a few of my favourite Howarth series:

Check out Matt's work. His comics cover so many themes that there must be something you'd enjoy!

A fave Batman story

I have been a Batman fan since early childhood. I think it was the Adam West tv series that originally got me hooked. I can remember watching it in colour at the twins' house across the street in Chomedey, and boy did the show look even better than on our black and white set! Since I moved away from that house when I was 5 years old, Batman has been part of my life for a long time. In fact, when I was four I was hospitalized to have my tonsils removed, and my parents gave me a Corgi Batmobile, just like the one in the tv show. I still have it, and it is a prized possession.

The comics also came early. Here is the cover from what I think was my first Bat comic, "A Vow From The Grave", from Detective Comics #410, April 1971. I was five at the time it appeared, and I loved this comic so much. Sadly all my early comics were thrown out by my mother in 1975 because I did not clean my room. The version that I own is from a 1978 treasury-size reprint called "Batman's Strangest Cases" (aka Limited Collectors' Edition Vol. 7, #C-59). I pulled the cover from the Grand comics Database at www.comics.org.

"A Vow From The Grave" is a 15-pager from the great team of Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano. It starts with Batman chasing a small-time criminal out in the boonies, during a rainstorm. He runs across some out-of-work carnies who live in an abandoned house nearby. A murder ensues, and Batman solves the whodunit and comes to the rescue of a little boy names Timmy who has flippers instead of arms and legs. And Bats does this in grand style, by stepping off a tower, and swinging around and grabbing Timmy when he is thrown off the tower by the bad guy. While the art is nothing particularly special, any Adams/Giordano looks great to my eye. Here's a photo of that page:

Track this one down. It's worth it!

My mini-comic

Here is my one and (pretty much) only attempt at comics. It was done back in the mid-90s but only printed in 1999 when I was a member of a short-lived APA. Now you can see why I am a teacher not an artist.

My Problem With Food, Part One

I do not eat like a normal human. Never have. It goes back before I have conscious memories. I am not difficult or picky but downright bizarre. It's something I've lived with...all my life, really. Lately I've been thinking a lot about getting help for this problem. But, then, what exactly is my problem?

I eat an extremely limited number of foods. It's far easier to list the foods I do eat than those I do not: peanut butter, bread, milk, apple and grape jelly, raspberry jam, most cheeses, french fries, juice, pasta (with cheese or alfredo sauce), pizza with tomato sauce, french toast, pancakes, some types of fruit smoothies, oranges, clementines, most cookies, chips, chocolate, and most candies. The only meat I eat, and only rarely, is bacon, and even more rarely pepperoni. No vegetables. That's it. And it has ever been thus.

My mother tells me that I had colic constantly as a baby. I would spit up everything that they tried to feed me. I don't remember this. And so my diet developed according to what little I could keep down.

All my life I've known that I had weird eating habits. In fact, I would just tell people "I'm not difficult, I'm weird". At some point, I changed that to "I have weird eating habits", in an effort to salvage some self-esteem from the sad situation. Obviously, since eating is such a social activity, my relationship with food has been a stigma and a burden all my life.

I became stubborn and stuck in my ways, not just food-wise, but I'm guessing that that's where it started. It leeched itself into other aspects of my life and became a character trait. I have been working on that as well.

I always figured that since my food habits started when I was extremely young, and that no one that young with any sort of survival instinct would willingly choose to be that way, that the root cause of it all must have been a very negative event or events. I imagined some sort of abuse getting linked to food in my brain, short-circuiting my capacity to eat normally. And since I cope pretty well in other aspects of my life, did I really want to dig through my consciousness to find out what this trauma was? Easier just to let sleeping dogs lie.

Recently my wife was watching a tv show about people with a weird obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes them gather stuff to an extreme extent. I was reading on the couch, not really watching but nonetheless aware of the show. One woman had so much crap in her house that it was piled 3 feet deep on the floor, everywhere, and she had to walk on this to navigate through her house. She even slept on a pile of this stuff since her bed was no longer visible underneath the tons of crap. I shook my head while watching, and remarked to my wife, "This woman has adapted to her illness to the extent that she no longer sees that this stops her from leading a normal life".

And then, bingo...I saw myself in her. Just like that, I realized that I too had become so used to my weird food habits that I did not even recognize how much they affect and limit me on a daily basis. Big epiphany. One of the "wow" moments, just not entirely in a good way.

So I have decided to try to fix myself. My first step was to recognize that I have some form of mental illness. Then I asked a bunch of close friends if they thought it would be beneficial to me if I sought treatment from a specialist, and to a person they all agreed. So here I am at 45 years old, trying to fix myself. I don't know if I have the mental toughness to do this. All I know is that there will be a long road ahead.

Just received!

Today the letter carrier delivered GENTLEMEN'S HOUR by Don Winslow. It's the British version in trade paperback format since the book won't even be published at all in North America until 2011. Oh, just salivating thinking about the great reading waiting for me!

Don Winslow, crime novelist

I first read Don Winslow with the mm edition of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF BOBBY Z back in 1998. His publisher had packaged it with a fluorescent orange cover, the image being a yellow licence plate with a pot leaf between the Bobby and the Z. A quaote from Carl Hiassen, comparisons to Elmore Leonard, and the NYTBR's blurb of “Fast and funny” prompted me to include this in the comedic mystery vein. Good marketing, really, as GET SHORTY and STRIPTEASE had done well and this was intended for a similar audience. This was Winslow's seventh book, and his breakout novel.

It is a fun read. It has snappy dialogue, is indeed fast and funny, and feels like it was intended to be easily transformed into a film (which it was). While I recognized all these qualities at the time, I nevertheless did not particularly like the book. I realize why: I just never bought the underlying concept. Winslow presents Tim Kearney, a three-time loser on the Hell's Angels death list in a California prison, who is offered a deal by a federal agency to replace Bobby Z, a big-time drug dealer. Why? Because he looks like Bobby Z, enough like him to fool just about everyone.

I just couldn't find this believeable. So in spite of all its qualities, I never gave this book too much credit, and I was wary of trying another Winslow book. In retrospect I think the novel is well-written and deserves all the praise it received. It is still on my bookshelf, in fact, so that says something. I refused to read his next book, CAILFORNIA LIFE AND FIRE despite its good reviews and the urging of a friend whose opinion I trust.

Then came POWER OF THE DOG, a sprawling fictional history of the California/Mexico drug wars in the 1980s and 90s. It follows the intrigue inside the FBI and the cartels, portraying all the corruption and ultimate failure of the USA's War on Drugs. An ambitious work, very engaging and intricate. Lauded as Winslow's “comeback” book, and masterpiece which took six years to write. I liked it very much.

THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE. 60ish SoCal mobster who has a very regimented and comfortable lifestyle, 3 or 4 part-time jobs (mob-connected, natch), is well-respected in the community and is just enjoying life. Until he gets sucked far deeper into mob life than he has been for many a year, and the old hit man part of Frankie has to resurface. This is a wonderful novel; fast, tight, great dialogue and characters, excellent denouement. I loved this to pieces. Much more down-to-earth and personal than Winslow's previous novel, THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE is virtually perfect. I thought this was Winslow's crowning achievement.

That is, until I read THE DAWN PATROL. I wondered why Winslow would write a WWII-era novel about bombers, but this is about a group that goes surfing at dawn. Oh, I get it. The main character is Boone Daniels, a PI who lives very much a free-spirited hippy/surfer lifestyle, beholden to no schedule other than the one dictated by the tide. He and his Dawn Patrol gang get involved in a case involving a missing stripper, and complications ensue. Well, THIS book is Winslow's masterpiece. Everything he had in his previous books is here, in improved form: SoCal life, the drug trade and its effect on SoCal living, surfing, being a little bit different in this modern world, the effects of the past on this modern world, friendship, great dialogue and intrigue, it's all there better than ever before. A tour-de-force extraordinaire.

I am pissed off that his North American publisher is not coming out with the sequel, THE GENTLEMEN'S HOUR in 2010 but has instead opted for SAVAGES, a stand-alone novel that was optioned by Oliver Stone even before publication. While SAVAGES is a fine read, using language creatively and mining similar territory as Winslow's previous novels but with a younger set of characters (early 20s as opposed to early 30s or older). It's fine but didn't quite turn my crank as much as (I hope) THE GENTLEMEN'S HOUR will. Might just have to order the British edition of that one!

Olfactory memories

Funny how smells can be linked to specific memories. Yesterday my wife and I bought some tomatoes, a whole box of 'em actually. The box is in the kitchen. Today I caught a whiff of something as I was getting a glass of milk, and later realized that it was the tomatoes that I was smelling.

Fine, my lousy sense of smell finally registered something, big deal. But as the day progressed, each time I passed by the tomatoes and inhaled their fragrance something in the back of my mind was trying to work its way to my consciousness. At some point I asked myself, "Where do I know this smell from?" And lo and behold, it came to me: Grandpa and Grandma Playfair.

Grandma was diabetic, quite a serious one, insulin everyday. I used to go eat lunch at their house every Wednesday and she always made me Kraft Dinner. Always too soupy, and the milk was always too warm because she insisted that it had to sit on the table for 20 minutes before drinking otherwise it was dangerous. Anyway, Grandma and Grandpa always ate the same thing: lettuce and tomato on brown bread. They always seemed to have many tomatoes on the counter, and their kitchen smelled of them (the rest of the house smelled of mothballs, but I digress...). And that tomato smell has lain dormant in my brain for the last 32 years until today. I've obviously smelled tomatoes in the intervening years but never did I make that link back to when I first smelled them.

What other olfactory surprises lie hidden in my head? Time will tell...