Few comic book series can claim to have influenced a generation of cartoonists, comics fans, and comedians the way Joe Matt’s Peepshow did during its fourteen issues from 1992 to 2006. With an often alarming and always hilarious compulsion to confess, Matt found no aspect of his life that wasn’t more grist for the humor mill: his dysfunctional (and sometimes abusive) relationships, his Catholic repression, his horrible social skills, his addiction to pornography, his masturbation habits, etc. Yes, the character Joe Matt was usually an insufferable outsider, but in the hands of Joe Matt the writer/artist, his life was depicted with an eye and ear for human folly that rivalled R. Crumb, as well as an entertainer’s instinct and sense of comedic timing to rival Larry David, and it made Peepshow one of the most essential reads of its era. This book collects for the first time the entire original fourteen-issue series in one hardcover volume, as well as the posthumously-published fifteenth issue from 2024 (detailing Matt’s move to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue an ill-fated HBO adaptation of his work), each presented as painstakingly-restored facsimiles of the original issues. This definitive Joe Matt collection also includes other art and ephemera from the artist’s personal archives, including a hand-written introduction to a complete Peepshow collection that at the time was purely hypothetical and was only discovered after his death in 2023. Peepshow is rounded out with an insightful afterword by Diana Schutz, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame comics writer and editor, and longtime friend of Matt’s (and sister of Trish, Matt’s ex-girlfriend and key player in Peepshow’s cast).
