I was randomly poking around on the internet at work today, killing some time at the end of the day, and stumbled across the news that Matt Howarth has passed away. I’ve been reading his stuff since I was in high school.
I think the first thing of his I saw would have been Changes, which was serialized in Heavy Metal in the early 80s. After that, came Savage Henry and Those Annoying Post Bros.
At some point, I started buying his self-published digital comics. He was way ahead of the curve on the digital stuff. The first digital comic I bought from him was shipped to me on a CD! I just hunted that down, and it appears to have been from 2005.
Since then, I’ve been going back to site every year or so and picking up one or two new books. He never really automated things, so buying stuff from him usually involved a little email correspondence. I never really got into a long email conversation with him or anything like that, but I always thought it was cool that I had some personal contact with him.
I’ve never really understood why he wasn’t more popular. I know he’s not mainstream, exactly, but it seems like so much of his stuff is out of print, and so much of his output in recent years was digital-only and self-published.
I still have a few unread graphic novels from him in the “Matt Howarth” folder in my OneDrive. I should read one of those soon.