His mother encouraged him in this pursuit, having herself attended the Philadelphia College of Art before dropping out to raise her family.
His earliest influences were Charles Schulz's Peanuts and Al Capp's Li'l Abner, which he would collect by clipping the strip out of the daily newspaper.
He started drawing comics in 1987 after getting a job at Philadelphia comic-book store Fat Jack's Comicrypt and doing assistant work for his friend and college classmate Matt Wagner, the creator of Grendel and Mage.
[2] In his autobiographical comic Peepshow, Joe Matt examines his inadequate social skills, his addiction to pornography, his cantankerous and sometimes physically abusive relationship with his then-girlfriend Trish, and the lingering effects of his Catholic upbringing.
Joe Matt's work on Peepshow is part of the autobiographical comics genre, kick-started by the confessional stories of Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb.
In 2004, HBO began developing an animated series based on The Poor Bastard, a collection of stories from Peepshow #1 to #6, produced by Matt and David X.