Author: Matty Boy

This post is for the benefit of my general audience. I haven’t been productive for a long time now and I figured one or two of you might like an explanation as to why.

Out of consideration for my own mental health, I have decided to officially focus on quality over quantity. Sometime in the early 2000’s, when I was an award-winning Newgrounds user and was actively competing with websites like Doodie and Something Awful, I made the mistake of convincing myself that I could provide quality content on a daily basis. I saw other websites doing it, and, without a moment’s thought regarding whether they were run by more than one person, decided I could keep up.

In the beginning this wasn’t a terrible idea. I have a backlog of pre-written comics, hundreds of pages and strips that could be posted daily for a substantial period of time. I conditioned myself to create at least one solid idea or gag a day. But little by little, I made myself crazy. Okay, crazier. I set myself up for failure at the starting line.

If a day goes by without producing something creative, my self-hatred increases and my sleep schedule is decimated. If a week of days passes with no solid output, I grow despondent and miserable. I don’t expect anyone to understand this.

Some very blessed people pay to access the “good stuff” on my Patreon here. There are times where I feel overwhelmed with guilt because I should be cramming this site with material, when in reality long periods pass with nary an update. I don’t understand why I can’t just pour material out of myself as rapidly as I can think it. Take a look at the About page of my Bands I Useta Like website (now in its 10th year). Contemplate the absolute mania required for one person to create that amount of stuff. And it doesn’t even include the decades of daily/weekly editorial cartoons I was doing, at the same time.

I languish in confusion because I comprehend and trust other people even less than I ever did before. Even for an artist, I am alienated and dejected. For the better part of fourteen years, I created weekly Ceaseless Fables pages, first and foremost for myself, but now I struggle for a reason to continue. I feel like everything I have created has been for nothing.

Look at the world around you. Look at the people around you. Do you find anything that inspires? Does anything spark your imagination? Does anything give you hope for a better future? Does anything make you believe there will be one?

Lastly, if my latest article on the BIUL site disturbs you, or makes you consider withdrawing your support, consider the fact that for some time now I have been watching one of my dearest friends suffer and slowly die, thanks in no small part to conditions in this country that people who should god damn know better want to continue for another four years. I haven’t mentioned this because it’s not your business. My household has lost two pets this year and is infested with cockroaches. My eyesight is diminishing and two of my teeth have fallen out in the past six months. I have not set ink to paper since May (though I have been animating, largely out of obligation to the massive monthly fee required for the software).

I hope this helps everyone understand the extremity of my emotions, although I am simply being consistent with who I’ve always been. Thank you sincerely for your time and support.

Hello all- just a brief briefing since I kind of went radio silent for a week there:

1. I currently have a gig working in downtown Atlanta weekdays from around 8 am to 6 pm.

2. Thanks to income from this particular gig I can afford to initiate just about everything I’ve been trying to get off the ground in the last four years of grinding poverty.

3. As expected my time is limited. This will improve slowly over the next few weeks.

Thank you for your understanding, patience, and most of all, your support.

Love,
Matty Boy Anderson

Hey, who’s fifty-two years old, underemployed, flat broke and gazing bald-eyed into an existential abyss? This guy!!!

Holy shit everybody. I know that it’s difficult to explain my inability to distinguish life outside of my own sensorium of perception, but as far as milestone headtrips go, fifty-two is a major one. At 52, every year of your life now corresponds to a week in a year. (Or if you like, a card in a full deck.) We often instinctively understand the number 52 on a subconscious level, because of how early in life we understand seasons. At this age, a new clarity of hindsight automatically installs in the brain’s hard drive.

Here’s where, if I’d been able to keep up the schedule ceaselessly over the last couple of years, I’d be crowing about my whole “do a comic page a week” thing, but let’s be real, I’ve barely even managed a page every two weeks. So I’ve been pretty hard on myself for some time now. I literally lose sleep over not being able to produce enough real work, because my time is consumed by taking odd jobs to get by. Ironically, this is a productive struggle creatively, because it offers a lot of raw material for stuff like, say, One Hundred Percent American. As long as I can get the ideas down in a sketchbook, I can refine them later, but I still need more time to render the finished work. If I get it planned out in advance, then I can take a day and ink my brains out.

This is exactly what I’m doing on my birthday. Even though the only success story I can recall is Chris Ware and his Acme Novelty Library (which I presume is still an ongoing animus, I could be wrong, which might obscure my point here), I decided at the tender age of 18 to become a human publishing imprint, a lifelong creator of comic strips and comic books that inferred the existence of a tangible creative universe, inhabited by characters whom readers carry with them over decades of their lives, or return to after long periods of malaise for a nostalgic refresher. Once I got my hands on the necessary software, I decided to add animation to my roster, a field that is widely known to tear souls and lives asunder and turn regular people into ravenous monsters (myself included). As Evan Dorkin once told me in an email, probably 20 years ago, “a hard road, that [animation].” I don’t know why I flagellate myself for getting by on donations, when there are no examples I’m aware of independent/underground cartoonists doing any better right now. A lot of the cartoonists I revere are now dead. Some didn’t even make it to 52. In most cases I’m still grappling with their passing.

I’m glad and grateful to be alive and for you to be alive reading this twaddle which I have based my life around, much in the satire-art method of Zappa but with comics instead of music. I am especially grateful to those of you who have supported me for years, whether just here on Patreon or independently donating, no matter how small, you’d be surprised how far it goes with me. Even the Bands I Useta Like website is now ten years old, but “2014” doesn’t feel that long ago. That’s how long some of you have been on board. That means a lot.

Hell, some of you have been supporting me since my movie was screened, and that was fifteen years ago folks! That’s a long time! Some of you are POGs from The Before Times of ’91, and that’s thirty-three years! That’s the length of the life of Christ!!! Do you know how humbling that is? Wouldn’t you continue creating work, given that there is precedent of monetary validation that goes back over thirty years? The definition of “vintage” on eBay is twenty-five!

I will probably check in on social media later because my birthday falls on Memorial Day this year, and I expect most folks will be busy with that, plus there will probably be a lot of happy birthday wishes, more than I can read, so I get really ashamed about it and go offline for a brief period. I feel bad that someone thought of me and I might not get to see or know about it. My mind has developed over the past 25 years in ways that are both ascendant and occupationally hazardous, simply due to the compulsory obligation to be a content-producing presence on the internet (initially as a means of promoting and selling my work on a global and digital basis). When you draw even a paltry income from a website or channel, you come to realize that there is always some way to sell your work online. Hell, you could go one farther and say there’s always a way to make money online, which is true, but despite appearances I am more interested in selling and promoting my work than simply “making money”. This is both good and bad. But I always, from day one, established a web presence for the purpose of selling my comics. That is almost always the reason I am talking.

I am fighting a massive internal battle regarding my place in the world, and my artistic compulsion to continue creating work of increasing quality until physically unable to do so, which in truth I consider to be an obligation. Not to get all hoity-toity on everyone, but if you possess God-given talents, you are obligated to use them as you see fit to enlighten the world. Am I wrong? You draw out of aesthetic improvement, at least in some small way, right? It’s a positive obligation.

Thank you sincerely for being there as I cross into the New 52. Let’s get weird.

These projects are in varying stages of production as of 2024:
-issue #6 of Bands I Useta Like magazine
–Made In Georgia, a series of portraits of notable people born in Ga./ATL
–Midnight Special, the first episode of the animation anthology
-more What’s The Deal? segments, not necessarily focused on John’s Arm mythos
–Curse of the Death Stallion, the second current-era Ceaseless Fables volume
-“Ceaseless: The Legend of Matty Boy Anderson” documentary serial
–Five Fingers of Fate

All of the above productions will be viewable or free to Patrons in the future. Also I put stuff on my Patreon that would be unsuitable for sharing on social media (typically boobs).

If you made it this far, and just feel like tossing me a few bucks, I literally can always use it. I frequent food pantries at this point. And hey, it’s my birthday.

The quickest way to get money into the Mike The Pod coffers is via PayPal. It goes directly onto a card I can use.

My Venmo is @Matty-Anderson-1. Please note that Venmo takes longer because it has to go through my bank, but do not let this discourage you from donating if it is convenient. I have had no luck with Zelle or Apple Pay. When I do I’ll just add those links here.

Much obliged for putting up with me all these years and supporting what I do. It means the world to me.