On the inside, looking outside, looking in: Joe Matt’s Peepshow

Features Hagai Palevsky | October 14, 2026 “When a person says he’s ‘just being honest’… this is a good time to start looking for the exits. Especially a potential romantic partner. People who put great priority on ‘just being honest’ … that means they’re about to harm you in some very essential way. Not just that they’re going to screw you over and cheat on you — they’re really gonna find the vulnerable part and get to it. Because it gives them pleasure. That’s how they get their pleasure. And so they say to you, ‘Hey, you know, I just try to be an honest person.’ Oh, my friends … locate all the places to run in a fire in that kind of situation.” — John Darnielle Joe Matt makes me sick. I don’t mean that as a moral judgment; that part comes later. No, I mean it in an immediate, physical way: Joe Matt makes me feel ill. Specifically, I think of the first time I encountered his work, in the excerpt from Peepshow #14 included in the Chris Ware-edited issue of McSweeney’s. The issue, which opens on Matt’s cartoon stand-in masturbating, reaching orgasm, and then declaring, to himself and his reader alike, a new record — twenty orgasms in six and a half hours — is a perfect encapsulatio...