My first foray into the world of publishing came at an early age when I created a sports newspaper page in grade four to specifically highlight the athletic exploits of my circle of friends on the schoolyard (but mostly my own). Then in grade eight, I opened the weekend comic section of the Toronto Sun to find my submission had been chosen for the newspaper’s emerging cartoonist feature. The adrenaline rush of seeing my own work on the printed page — seen by thousands of other readers and appearing beside the likes of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County — cemented my desire to work in the world of comics, storytelling, and publishing. In high school I was a visual arts major in the Claude Watson School of the Arts at Earl Haig Secondary School where I also published comics in the yearbook and school paper.
In 1993, I decamped for Ottawa to study journalism at Carleton University where I landed a gig at The Resin as the student paper’s editorial cartoonist and began the comic strip 50 More Pounds. I transferred back home to Toronto the following year to attend Humber College’s J-school where I continued to draw the comic for the campus paper, The Et Cetera.
After leaving college, I had to find new outlets for my cartooning ambitions. Starting in 1998, I used my off-hours from work to moonlight as an independent cartoonist, drawing a collection of wry and semi-autobiographical comic strips under the alias m@b (pronounced “Matt B”, my childhood nickname). I initially handed out photocopied and hand-folded issues to just my friends and work colleagues. While the beginnings were modest with a print run of maybe 50 copies, the comic quickly turned into a second career.
Using the publishing skills developed in journalism school and the mainstream media, I was able to create tremendous buzz in the comic world for my unique and persistent approach to marketing and promotion where thousands of copies of each m@b issue were picked up at comic and music shops across the city. After four years of publishing, I compiled the 15 issues released from 1998-2002 into a cohesive collection called Wide Collar Crimes (in honour of my love for 1970’s disco-era clothing).
LEFT: Window display for Wide Collar Crimes at Soundscapes on College St., 2003
RIGHT: In New York City at Soft Skull Press during Wide Collar Crimes book tour, 2003
I partnered with the organizers of the inaugural Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) to share the kickoff of the event with the launch of his book. Coincidentally, the Toronto alt-weekly Eye was also looking for a new comic strip and approached me about publishing m@b weekly. The timing worked out perfectly: I appeared on the cover of Eye in March 2003, promoting the release my book and my role as one of the featured cartoonists at the inaugural Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and the beginning of my comic starting in the back pages of the weekly, all on the same day.
Peter Birkemoe of The Beguiling and founder of TCAF said this at the time: “What always impressed me most about Blackett was the unique way he got his work out there. This consistent model of promotion for comics hadn’t been done before. In a world with lots of cartoonists doing work and struggling for a following, he’s doing something unique. And it works.” He calls Blackett “the perfect guy to anchor this festival. We wanted a big event,” Birkemoe says, “and he can carry it off.”
I did two books tours for Wide Collar Crimes in 2003 and 2004 as part of the Perpetual Motion Roadshow. The first tour followed directly after the release in March 2003, where I travelled with two other authors promoting their books to Montreal, Boston, New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago. The west coast tour took place in the winter of 2004, hitting up Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Ashland, San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.
Read the feature article “Toronto Toons In”
Over the next two years, Matthew went on east coast and west coast promotional book tours across Canada and the United States, appearing at numerous comic and alternative press festivals as a featured comic artist discussing the his unique approach to independent publishing and the success of Wide Collar Crimes. He published weekly m@b comic strips for four years in Eye and travelled North America as a featured comic artist at numerous alternative press festivals. He brought the comic to an end when Eye transitioned into The Grid in 2007.