Quill & Quire reviews Fair Weather
Updated August 20, 2003
Quill & Quire: Canada's Magazine of Book News and Reviews
January 2003
Emotional geography
Joe Matt's autobiographical Peepshow was part of a wave of groundbreaking North American alternative comics in the early 1990s. Matt's unflinching and unflattering portrayal of every sordid of his catholic-guilt-ridden psyche earned him a reputation as an uncomprimising artist that helped to lead other comic artists to begin their own autobiographical works. He gave them permission to be brutally honest because, after all, they couldn't be as bad or just plain petty as Joe Matt.
Matt eventually explored his childhoos in Fair weather, now collected for the firsttime. The bold simple lines contrast the intense, contradictory emotions and complex relationships of childhood. Matt effectively uses a slowed, steady pacing to navigate the reader through the emotional geography that make's up a boy's world--his mother, his sister, his sole friend Dave, rides on his bicycle, his neighborhood, his comics collection. But this is no sentimental journey. matt shows himself as a manipulative, selfis outcast alienating himself from everyone, and his clever use of metaphor--such as kids' comics trading as a commentary on the nature of capitalism--allow for multiple readings.
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