A college in Toronto did a special section on zines and zine culture. They used Matt B and m@b to profile an indie publication.
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Personal Publishing
By Kim Sinclair
Matthew Blackett arrives inconspicuously for his interview. No groupies or paparazzi in pursuit of the m@b creator, the urban comic growing in profile and recently recognized as zine of the month for September in Broken Pencil magazine.
He arrives by the phone booths outside The Brunswick House in jeans and running shoes, with a tattered backpack and a friendly grin. He looks more like a boy scout ready to help an old lady across the street than to deliver a rigid, condescending interview about the complicated culture of zines, and his growing success within it.
Straight from work, forgoing dinner or rest, he sits in a side street coffee bar and talks about his zine and the underbelly of the zine world.
Proof that life after Humber does exist, Blackett nurses a beer in the smoky candlelit atmosphere of The Green Room and explains the lengthy strides he has taken since his successful days as a Humber journalism student. Winning several notable awards for his work, redesigning the school newspaper, and being asked to teach at Humber right after graduation were only some of his many student achievements.
All were small steps that led to his present double life where by day, he fills the role of Art Director at The Hockey News magazine, and by night he is the humble one-man-show behind his zine m@b, and Web site mattbcomic.com.
"I started drawing these comics because I just needed to draw. The first zine of m@b came out, and it was more or less about me, my roommate, and a couple of friends," Blackett said. "It was for a group of about 20 or 30 of my friends. They passed it on, and people started asking me when I was going to do another issue."
Nine issues later, Matt seems genuinely flabbergasted at the success of m@b.
"It's massive now. The people that read it are about 75 per cent people that I don't know. I have subscribers now. From my standpoint it's nuts," he says. "Once a week I get a cheques in the mail for $20 or something because somebody wants my back issue package. It's crazy, it's really crazy."
The little mouthless Matt in the cartoon is the "thinner more svelte" version of his creator Matt Blackett, and his daily run-ins with his landlord, his ex-girlfriend, or the crazy person on the bus, are all real life experiences that have made their way to the page. The cartoon has a distinct humour to it, and the humour stems from the truth behind the captured moments of human experience. Most of these experiences happened to Blackett after moving from North York to downtown Toronto.
"I have a comic in one of these that says, 'I never knew how crazy people were until I took public transportation regularly'. And it's because you see the underbelly of life, and you really see the make-up of the city," Blackett said. "I'm not the only one that sees these things.
"These things happen to everybody and that's why people identify with it."
He doesn't think he's the only one to ever see a man on the subway stare intensely at another man's crotch for the entire length of a subway ride, or witness a homeless man announcing that he wants to "fuck America up the ass" to a bus load of commuters. All amusing m@b material that may have never come to life if Matt had remained in the habitat of North York.
"If I still lived in the burbs, no fucking way. This is a 100 per cent urban comic," he said.
The m@b is quite comfortable holding his place in the zine community, and will likely never see his way to mass syndication.
"I submitted my stuff for syndication and they turned me down because they said they didn't believe they could do justice to my efforts," Blackett said. "There's swearing, I talk about discovering that one of my friends is a lesbian, there are references to drugs, and there are anti-establishment references. They may be subtle, but they're still there, and people get nervous about anything that1s not safe, right?"
A beer and a few apologies later for what he thinks have been excessive rants on politics and activism, it becomes clear that m@b is a much needed outlet for the less than straight-laced Blackett.
He's not a normal cartoonist (is any cartoonist normal?) and his animation when reliving his trip to the WTO protests in Washington, his experiences with his politically active friends, and his admirable shame when admitting to occasionally buying lunches in styrofoam containers all allude to the unconventional frame of mind behind Matt Blackett's unconventional comic. And that's what zines are ultimately about: individuality for the sake of itself, whether that means a readership of five or 500.
"Zines are not about becoming popular. They're accessible, democratic, and there are no limitations to what you can do. I could write a zine that had 30 pages with the word fuck on them, and no one would stop me from doing it," he said. "I wouldn't do it, but I'm for it."