Ezra David Mattes is a fiscal year 2024 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.










Ezra David Mattes is a writer and graphic artist from Minneapolis. His work on the self-published first chapter of his upcoming graphic novel A Terrified Child Played by Jeremy Strong earned him a 2024 Minnesota State Arts Board grant for Creative Individuals, in addition to a 2024 Comics Advocacy Group mini grant and the Athenaeum Comic Art Spring 2023 microgrant for early career cartoonists.

His short comic Primavera or How I Broke Up with My Mother was a runner-up in autobio & nonfiction at the 2023 Mini Comic Awards, and his memoir debut, I Dream of Tom from Succession, was a breakout bestseller at the Bluestockings NYC Digital Comics Festival in 2022.

Ezra lives with disabling chronic illness and is known for making singularly surreal comics that ask questions about obsession, identity, and how to remain in love with a world that might annihilate you.

“Over and over Mattes not only remarks on his own on-page rearrangement of the self but on the very artifice inherent to the Aristotelian notion of a fixed self (fixed in gender, in presentation, in the very core of one’s identity), forcibly confronting the reader with the limits of their preconceptions. In Mattes’ world, the material is the spiritual, both transient. It starts out as understanding. If you’re lucky enough, over time it becomes believing, too.”

-Hagai Palevsky on A Terrified Child Played by Jeremy Strong for SOLRAD

Easy links:

Look at a broad selection of his work on instagram!

Read the first chapter of A Terrified Child Played by Jeremy Strong in your browser!

Download his comics for free!

Find comic drops and other art goods for sale in his store!

Check out exclusive content, including works-in-progress and personal essays on his Patreon!

You can find copies of Ezra’s work at Source Comics and Games, Eat My Words Books, and Odd Mart in Minnesota.