He met and befriended fellow cartoonist and Pratt student Daniel Clowes during his college years.

[1] Altergott's first published work was in the early 1980s, but he didn't really settle into the comics world until late in the decade, when he contributed regularly to the humor magazine Cracked.

Throughout the 1990s Altergott published the small-press comic Douche Bag Dougan (the titular hero of which later made an appearance in Fantagraphics Books' Zero Zero anthology.

)[2] Altergott's work has also appeared in Fantagraphics' Duplex Planet Illustrated and Hate, where Doofus was a long-running backup feature repeatedly promoted by Peter Bagge.

Altergott resides in Pawtucket, Rhode Island,[3] with his wife, fellow cartoonist Ariel Bordeaux.