Down the Tubes reports that cartoonist Matt Howarth died sometime before October 5, after complications from a triple bypass. He was 72 years old. His friend and fellow cartoonist SMS says, “Matt would like it to be known that DOGE and ICE compromised his healthcare. He’d also like a funnier and wilder write-up than this.” Active since 1969, Howarth was best known for creating Those Annoying Post Bros., Savage Henry, Star Crossed, and Bugtown. He was also a music critic, who reviewed releases in both comics and prose format.
Born in 1954, Howarth started self-publishing his own comics aged just 15. Some of his early work included comedic strips for the International Star Trek Conventions in the early 1970s. His comics reviews of music ran in Heavy Metal magazine in the early ’80s, along with Those Annoying Post Bros. The latter, which followed two troublemaking brothers capable of interdimensional travel, ran in its own series at various publishers from 1985 to 1998.
Savage Henry ran from 1987 to 1994, and followed the adventures of a guitarist from another reality. It featured authorized “guest appearances” from various real musicians, including The Residents, Moby, Foetus, Hawkwind, Nash the Slash, Yello, and Conrad Schnitzler (an original member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster). Howarth and Schnitzler would collaborate on other projects, like cover art, and a comic strip for one of his albums.
Star Crossed, which told the love story of a genetically engineered woman and a sentient asteroid, ran from DC Comics imprint Helix in 1997. Other work for DC included illustrations for Transmetropolitan, and a pair of issues of the TV show tie-in comic Justice League Adventures in 2002 and 2004. Howarth was also associated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, having penned the first-ever review of the comic for Heavy Metal, and wrote and drew two installments of it in 1991 and 1992.
Howarth had begun to make a resurgence in recent years, with Cosmic Lion Productions releasing The Termite Mound, A Slice of Spy, and Scoundrel respectively in 2024, 2025, and 2026. Before his death, he was working with SMS on a two-part comic called The Flip, which Cosmic Lion will release posthumously sometime later this year. You can browse these and more at their official store. No information on any survivors was available at the time of writing. For more on his various projects, visit his official website.
