Riding Fandom: Man’s Marvel-ous mosaics boost demand for his Shattered Comics

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Granite Staters are harnessing the power of their comic book fandom and creative hobbies to start small businesses and side hustles. 

Between Free Comic Book Day (Aug. 14) and Granite State Comic Con (Sept. 18-19), Manchester Ink Link will be showcasing these entrepreneurial nerds, who have opened comic and toy shops, started selling aftermarket comic books and collectibles or offering professional photography that specializes in cosplay, to name a few.


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Matt DiMasi started making murals from shards of tile and eventually turned his hobby into a comic art business. Courtesy Photo

DUNBARTON, NH – About eight years ago, Dunbarton resident Matt DiMasi decided, on a lark one day, to create an impromptu mosaic of Captain America on a wall in his mother’s house. 

He drew an outline of the character and filled it in with big pieces of tile. 

“It was a kind of crude method back then,” DiMasi recalls. 

Little did he know then that the diverting project would become an artistic career that would lead him to recreate scores of classic comic book covers in large, mosaic form, and have some of those real-world mosaics converted into printed variant covers on limited-run comic books.

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Matt DiMasi uses cut tile pieces to recreate comic book cover art. Courtesy Photo

At first, DiMasi started out small. He did some custom backsplashes behind the kitchen sinks of a few homes, depicting things like a dolphin, a bear, a golden retriever and the Old Man of the Mountain.

Somewhere in there, DiMasi made another comic-book-themed mosaic, this time of the X-Men hero Wolverine, on a four-foot-by-three-foot frame built by his brother-in-law. And he brought it into Double Midnight Comics in Manchester to show co-owner Brett Parker.

After that, he was encouraged to do more. He refined his craft, using smaller tile pieces he cuts himself using tile nippers, and focused on replicating classic comic book covers of noteworthy issues. He scans the original art, recreates it as a grid on a large frame, and freehands the linework. After assembling the tile pieces together and filling the gaps with grout, he has the frame professionally painted.

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A variant cover for The Incredible Hulk created by Matt DiMasi in mosaic tile, then photographed.

He started the company Shattered Comics LLC, and has been making mosaics ever since.

“I think I’ve now done, I would say, between 25 and 30,” DiMasi said.

The first one he did was a replica of Detective Comics #27, which was Batman’s first appearance. DiMasi said he would post his work on Facebook and started getting attention from folks in the comics industry. 

Batman artist Kelly Jones in California reached out to him online and expressed interest in DiMasi’s work, he said. He made Jones a mosaic of Detective Comics #651, and in exchange, Jones gifted him an original drawing of Batman and his nemesis Bane.

Later, he gifted mosaics of Spawn to creator Todd McFarlane and of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns to creator Frank Miller.

He’s also sold a few mosaics for between $10,000 to $20,000 apiece. 

“I’ve only sold a handful. I still have most of them,” DiMasi said.

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The original Incredible Hulk mosaic.

Around 2017 or so, DiMasi teamed up with Josh Jeppi, son of comic distribution giant Diamond owner Steve Jeppi, to rep his art though a spinoff company called Diamond International Galleries (DIG). The two did a television interview in Baltimore, which garnered the attention of the editors at Marvel, who offered a deal to make Shattered Comics store variants.

Variants are comic books with alternative cover art, usually by different artists, often printed in limited runs for collectible value. While most variants are commissioned by the publisher and created in a work-for-hire model, DiMasi makes “store variants” which he pays for and distributes through a third party.

At first people didn’t realize that the Shattered variants were based on a real-life mosaic, and not computer-generated.

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Matt DiMasi shows off his original mosaic alongside the finished product, a variant cover for Spiderman No. 1.

“I have a photographer that comes to the house and she will do high-res image in outdoor light,” DiMasi said. “And then that image is sent to Marvel to do the comic book.”

He said they generally print a minimum of 3,000 issues per variant cover and sometimes smaller runs of different color variations.

For the most part, the books are sold and distributed to stores by Connecticut-based The Comic Mint.

DiMasi said he does a couple of these each year. The latest to drop was last Sept. 1.

“We just put out Ultimate Fallout #4 which is the first Miles Morales,” DiMasi said of the facsimile book of the 2011 original.

DiMasi said he’s been a fan of comics since the 1970s in Beverly, Mass., when his cousin got him into it. 

“Comics I’ve been into since I was a kid,” he said.

He briefly owned a store in Concord called Shattered Comics from 2015 to 2017.

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“It was more to get the art on the wall. And I wanted to sell vintage comics but I didn’t want to do the new comics and the games,” DiMasi said. “I was doing it more for the enjoyment of it.”

Today, he has an appointment-only storefront in Campton.

He still buys and sells vintage comic books through eBay and through his friend Peter Swain’s store, RePetes Comics in Belmont.

DiMasi said the demand for old comic books has “exploded” recently, which he attributes to a perfect storm of 1990s nostalgia, speculation investment from other sectors like sports cards investors, and growing curiosity in source material as once-obscure characters like Ant-Man and Groot enter the public consciousness through Marvel movies and Disney Plus shows.

DiMasi used to bring some of his mosaics to big comic conventions like New York Comic Con, but stopped doing it because of the logistic headache (they each weigh about 70 pounds).

But he hopes to someday do a complete gallery show with each mosaic beside its original comic. 

“I think it would be neat to have them all in one location,” DiMasi said.


 

About this Author

Ryan Lessard

Ryan Lessard is a freelance reporter.