Michael Swanwick is reporting the death of comic creator Matt Howarth.
If you were a science fiction or comic fan in the 1980s, Howarth was a name to conjure with. Those Annoying Post Brothers was one of those must-read indie comics of the time, up there with Stig’s Inferno, Cerebus the Aardvark and Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. I have a bunch of issues of Those Annoying Post Brothers, along with offshoot Savage Henry, plus a wide variety of one-shot publications (This Is Heat, The Anti-Chair!, etc.) set in his Bugtown universe you had to buy directly from him. Pre-Watchman, indie comics seemed to be hugely important in the 1980s
But Howarth didn’t just make his mark in comics. He seemed to be everywhere in SF in the 1980s, providing art for SF Eye and other zines, and even doing book illustrations, perhaps most famously for K. W. Jeter’s Dr. Adder. (Though, as Jeter noted, “Dr. Adder doesn’t seem like the sort of person to wear a motorcycle helmet.”)
Then, somewhere along the line, I stopped buying comics in favor of spending all my disposable income on SF/F/H hardback books, and I sort of lost track with what he was doing.
I did meet him once at some Worldcon we were both attending (I forget which one), talked to him briefly, and was distracted by the fact that he seemed to have had some of his teeth replaced with small rocks. Never asked about it.
And now he’s gone. Like the overwhelming majority of people in the zine scene of the 1980s and early 90s, he doesn’t seem to have much of a living despite all his furious work. The Internet swamped the zine scene, and the world moved on. Evidently the last issue of Those Annoying Post Brothers was published in 1998.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Note: Comics not to scale.)