Mat Brinkman

Mat Brinkman (b. 1973) is an American artist and cartoonist who pushed comics toward the boundary of abstraction — creating densely hatched, wordless or nearly wordless pages in which creatures navigate geological environments that seem to grow, calcify, and evolve across the panels. His work is closer to landscape painting or geological illustration than to conventional narrative comics, and his association with the Fort Thunder collective in Providence, Rhode Island, placed him at the center of the most important movement in American art comics since the 1960s underground.

Fort Thunder

Brinkman was a founding member of Fort Thunder, an artist collective and performance/living space housed in a former textile warehouse at 30 Elbow Street in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence. From 1995 to 2001, Fort Thunder — which included Brian Chippendale, Brian Ralph, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, and others, many of them connected to the Rhode Island School of Design — became legendary for its fusion of comics, noise music, installation art, screen-printed ephemera, and communal living.

The collective’s aesthetic was maximalist, handmade, and willfully difficult. Events at the space featured ear-splitting noise performances in rooms densely layered with screen prints, paintings, and sculptural installations. The comics produced by Fort Thunder members — distributed as minicomics, tabloid newspapers, and hand-printed zines — shared this density: pages were packed with obsessive detail, printed on cheap newsprint or photocopied, and distributed through underground networks.

Fort Thunder was demolished by its landlord in 2001 to make way for a shopping plaza — an event that became a cause célèbre in the Providence arts community and that, paradoxically, cemented the collective’s legendary status.

Comics Work

Brinkman’s comics pages are the purest expression of the Fort Thunder aesthetic applied to sequential art. His panels are filled with obsessively cross-hatched environments — caves, tunnels, rocky landscapes, underwater spaces — that seem to exist independently of any narrative purpose. Small creatures navigate these spaces, encountering other creatures, obstacles, and spatial transformations, but the “narrative” operates more through exploration and spatial logic than through plot, dialogue, or character development.

The experience of reading Brinkman is closer to the experience of exploring a landscape than reading a story. The eye moves through the panels the way a body moves through space — encountering textures, surfaces, barriers, and openings. The work is simultaneously comics (it uses panels, sequences, and the spatial logic of the page) and something else entirely — closer to the abstract comics of Abstract Comics: The Anthology (2009) or to the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy than to any narrative comics tradition.

Teratoid Heights (2009, Picturebox) collected his major comics work and was immediately recognized as one of the most important art-comics publications of its decade. Multiforce (2010, Picturebox) continued in the same vein. Both books exist at the boundary between comics, illustration, and abstract art.

Music and Other Work

Brinkman is also a musician, performing as part of the Providence noise music scene that overlapped extensively with Fort Thunder. His sound work — dense, textural, built from layers of feedback and organic sound — shares the same aesthetic principles as his visual art: density, immersion, and the abolition of the boundary between signal and noise.

Themes and Critical Standing

Brinkman’s significance is less about what he produced — his output is modest in volume — than about what he demonstrated: that comics could function as pure visual experience, independent of narrative, character, or text. His work proved that the formal properties of comics (panels, sequences, page layouts) could generate meaning through spatial and visual relationships alone.

He is part of a lineage that includes the later Gary Panter (for the post-underground density), Yuichi Yokoyama (for the prioritization of spatial movement over narrative), and the European art-comics tradition of abstract and semi-abstract work.

Key Works

• Teratoid Heights (2009)
• Multiforce (2010)

Collecting Brinkman

Fort Thunder-era minicomics and self-published tabloids are the primary collectibles — hand-printed, extremely small-run items that are genuinely rare and bring $50–$200 depending on condition and provenance. Teratoid Heights (Picturebox, 2009) brings $30–$75. Multiforce (Picturebox, 2010) brings $25–$50. Picturebox Inc. — the publisher of both books — ceased operations in 2014, making its publications increasingly scarce. Brinkman’s original art is sought in both the comics and fine-art markets.