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“Before I met Joe Matt, I figured he was exaggerating himself in his work. . . . Now I know he’s not! If anything, he’s making himself look better.”1 So begins Seth’s two-page strip in the seventh issue of Drawn and Quarterly magazine (March ). During the course of “Some Things I Think You Should Know about Joe Matt,” Seth lays into his “true friend” and fellow cartoonist, condemning him for his crazy ideas, his cheapness and venality, his lack of ethics, his rudeness, general unpreparedness, laziness, and low taste in cinema. On occasion, to bolster his claims, Seth introduces Chester Brown into the strip as a witness, inevitably and only to confirm Seth’s comments . While the strip itself, with its comics monologue format, is simple to comprehend, its significance depends on several linked factors. In order to understand all the different relationships at play in this strip, it is imperative first to recognize the fact that all three people depicted are not only friends but also cartoonists, and, further, that by  they were acclaimed autobiographical cartoonists and therefore likely known to the reader. Second , the strip appeared in Drawn and Quarterly, the flagship anthology from the publisher of the same name. This was the publisher that, by no means coincidentally, published the individual comic book series of Seth, Matt, and Brown at this time and was a market leader in the genre of autobiographical comics in the early s. Third, Seth’s strip, with its small panels , regularized grid (one page is six by six panels, the other is five by seven), lack of background detail, and round, cartoony lines, self-consciously adopts the visual trappings of Matt’s earliest autobiographical works, published in the pages of Snarf and in previous issues of Drawn and Quarterly. Finally, and only in retrospect, it is possible to read in Seth’s parody of Matt’s work  Selective Mutual Reinforcement in the Comics of Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth bart beaty  the origins of a visual style that he himself would adopt in earnest later in his career. In particular, works such as Wimbledon Green () bridge the casual approach to cartooning demonstrated here with a disjointed narrative style influenced by Chris Ware. In sum, this two-page strip coalesces the image of what can be called a Toronto School of autobiographical cartooning that was central to the development of the genre in the early s. It reifies, through a gently mocking critique, the privileged status accorded to the author/character by the comics community of the period. Thus, it serves as a kind of retroactive lens through which the emergence of the second wave of North American autobiographical cartoonists comes into focus. Building a Legacy North American autobiographical comics arose in two important waves, with the second heavily indebted to the first. Importantly, members of the second wave have been highly self-conscious of their status as artists and have actively sought to articulate interpersonal relationships to the cartooning community through their work as a way of intensifying their self-image as artists at the vanguard of a creative movement. This self-consciousness should not be read as a critique or as a new way of organizing related artists into coherent schools or groups. Indeed, such efforts to map the personal and social relationships between cultural creators have been a hallmark of approaches to the artist in a wide range of historical eras, from ancient Greece to English romanticism. These scholarly and popular discourses help to establish a mythology around artist figures that simultaneously heightens their social significance and psychological exceptionalism. I deploy it here not to reify these relationships, but to shine a critical light on the ways the second generation of autobiographical cartoonists not only cite each other but also invoke the influences of their most consecrated forebears in order to establish their own credibility within the field. In creating a self-conscious network of artistic and social relationships out of a small coterie of friends who also happen to be cartoonists, second-generation autobiographical cartoonists struggle to insert their work into a wider field in which their own contribution can be identified as a significant artistic movement. Notably, when pressed to cite their influences, the Toronto autobiographers are remarkably predictable: Chester Brown cites the influence of the first generation’s Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman in a  interview in The Comics Journal, and Crumb...

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