Peter Bagge's Other Stuff - preview

LOVEY “Gender-Bending Hyjinx”.. ....................................................................................... 3 “The Gaggle and the Gimp!” . . ............................................................................... 10 “The Real André”.................................................................................................... 20 “A Party to Forget”................................................................................................. 23 ROCK ’N’ ROLL Musical Urban Legends Presents: “Gnomes are Real”.......................................................................................... 31 “A Winning Formula”....................................................................................... 32 “Dinner with Brian (Part One)”. . ..................................................................... 33 “The Stuff of Genius”...................................................................................... 34 “What Price Love?”......................................................................................... 35 “Dinner with Brian (Wilson, That Is) Part 2”................................................. 36 “Little Richard in ‘Ménàge à Whah?!’”.......................................................... 37 “Kiss My Baby”................................................................................................ 38 “Start Spreadin’ the News!”........................................................................... 39 “A Man With a Vision!”. . ......................................................................................... 40 Murry Wilson: Rock ’n’ Roll Dad in: “Turn Back the Hands of Time” (written by Dana Gould).. ............................ 42 “Helter Skelter My Ass!”................................................................................. 43 “The Meal Ticket”. . ........................................................................................... 40 COLLABORATIONS “Me” (drawn by Gilbert Hernandez)..................................................................... 47 “Go Ask Alice” (written by Alice Cooper)........................................................... 50 “Shamrock Squid, Autobiographial Cartoonist!” (drawn by Adrian Tomine). . ... 51 “The Hasty Smear of My Smile...” (written by Alan Moore; inked by Eric Reynolds).................................................................................. 58 “Life in These United States” (drawn by Daniel Clowes).................................. 62 “Dildobert Joins the Al-Qaeda” (drawn by Johnny Ryan). . ................................. 70 “What’s in a Name?” (drawn by Danny Hellman)............................................... 76 “Caffy!” (drawn by R. Crumb)............................................................................... 80 “Shamrock Squid in Up the Irish!” (inked by Eric Reynolds). . ........................... 87 “The Action Suits Story” (drawn by Jaime Hernandez)...................................... 88 Jim Blanchard in: “Backyard Funnies” (written and drawn by Eric Reynolds).. ....................... 89 “Don’t Knock It if You Haven’t Tried It” (written and drawn by Pat Moriarity).. ..................................................... 89 “Bleachy Blanchard” (written and drawn by Kevin Scalzo). . ....................... 90 “Harassed Citizen” (written and drawn by Rick Altergott). . ........................ 90

Robert Brown in “I’ll Second That Motion”............................................. 93 Wallace “Gloomy Gus” Carothers in “It’s a Wonderful Legacy”. . ......... 94 “Mendeleyev Predicts!”.. ............................................................................ 95 Joseph Priestley in “Phlogiston’s Last Champion!”. . .............................. 96 Major Walter Reed in “Yellow Fever Fever!”. . ...........................................97 Taqi al-Din in “Oh, What a Spin I’m In!”. . ................................................. 98 “So Much Comedy, So Little Time!”......................................................... 99 “East Coast, West Coast, Blah, Blah, Blah…”..................................... 103 “Partying with the ‘Dickster’”.................................................................. 106 “At the End of the Day...”.. ........................................................................ 107 “Stuff I Know About Belgium, by Some Dumb American”................... 108 “What Was Wrong With Us?”.. ............................................................... 109 “Game Day With the Quarterback’s Wife”............................................ 110 “The ‘Expert’”............................................................................................ 112 THE SHUT-INS “Meet the Shut-Ins”. . ................................................................................ 115 “Meet Santiago”....................................................................................... 116 “Pretty Flowers”. . ...................................................................................... 118 “Make the World Go Away”.................................................................... 119 “The Great Indoors”................................................................................. 120 “Withdrawal Symptoms”.......................................................................... 121 “Life Among the Earthlings”.................................................................... 122 “A Short-Lived Recovery”........................................................................ 123 “Our Babies”. . ........................................................................................... 124 “Irrigation Blues”...................................................................................... 125 “The Funeral”............................................................................................ 126 “No Good for the ’Hood”. . ....................................................................... 127 “The Meg Ryan Factor”. . .......................................................................... 128 “Oh, What a Night!”................................................................................. 129 “Taking Stock”.......................................................................................... 130 “Slowly He Turned”.................................................................................. 131 “Rich, Rich, Rich!”.................................................................................... 132 “Dot Com Casualties”. . ............................................................................ 133 “Can I Interest You in Some Fairy Dust?”. . ............................................ 134 ...AND TWO MORE “Crazy Exes”............................................................................................. 136 “Good Ol’ Posterity”................................................................... Back Cover

C ONTENTS

“TRUE” FACTS

INTRODU CTION

With a few exceptions, everything collected in this book appeared in my 1990s Hate comic book series or its 21st century follow-up title Hate Annual, as well as the 1998 one-shot Hate Jamboree.

In the late ’90s we (meaning me and Hate’s publisher, Fantagraphics) expanded the page count of the quarterly comic, creating space to run material by other cartoonists. It also allowed room to run collaborative pieces, usually (though not always) with me doing the writing. None of this work has been reprinted since then. (“Life in These United States” is one of two pieces in the “Collaborations” section that did not first appear in Hate; it was reprinted in a collection of the artist Dan Clowes’s work, Lout Rampage, now long out of print.)

It’s been many years since I’ve collaborated with anyone on anything, which is how I prefer it these days. But at one time I was much more willing and eager to experiment, style- and approach-wise, and collaborating with other artists was one way of doing that. I’d always be shocked and delighted by how someone else would “see” and interpret something I’d written and roughed out, and I’d often pick up a few tricks for my own future use in the process.

In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that so many accomplished artists quickly and easily agreed to work with me for what wasn’t much money (I’m sure they’re all equally amazed as well, in retrospect). I obviously had some pull back in the day, and I’m glad that it didn’t go to waste, since all of these collaborations turned out wonderfully (in my opinion, anyway). Not one of these guys “phoned it in,” that’s for sure. A few of these might need explaining, so here we go…

“Me”: Direct quotes from various friends and acquaintances through the years. Artist Gilbert Hernandez not only changed the original speakers’ appearances from the rough strip I gave him, but even some of their genders, making them all completely unrecognizable. Now even I can’t quite recall who said what!

“Go Ask Alice” originally appeared in Spin Magazine. It technically is a “collaboration” since Alice Cooper wrote (or told) the story, but I never dealt with him directly. An editor simply provided me with a script.

“Shamrock Squid: Autobiographical Cartoonist!”: Shamrock Squid was a character that Dan Clowes has gotten credit for creating, though I believe he first appeared in Doug Allen and Gary Leib’s excellent Idiotland series. I was told he was free to use by any artist for any purpose (much like an earlier generation of underground artists had shared a character named “Pro Junior”), and this bit of info saved me from having to invent a character from scratch, even though “Shammy’s” persona isn’t the least bit Irish in this instance (as opposed to the short Shammy story I did with Eric Reynolds, also reprinted here). The inspiration behind this was to satirize the huge wave of autobiographical alternative comics that were suddenly cluttering up the stands, and in re-reading this I’m taken aback by the glee with which I threw even some of my favorite cartoonists under the bus to make my point. Yet the artist, Adrian Tomine, never balked for a second at the script I sent him, and even threw in a few barbs directed at himself in places.

“The Hasty Smear of My Smile...”: Comics writer Alan Moore would frequently tell me he wanted do a strip about the Kool-Aid mascot as far back as the late 1980s. He had no idea what it would be about or why it needed to be done. He just knew it had to be done, and that I had to draw it. His living in the UK (where Kool-Aid wasn’t available), and his intentional lack of access to the internet meant I had to do the research for him — made easy by my discovery of a plain text website accurately entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Kool-Aid Man.” So I printed it out and then faxed (remember faxing?!?) him all 50 pages. This strip was the result, along with a huge overseas fax/phone bill.

“Life in These United States” originally appeared in Weirdo Magazine in the late 1980s.

When I first moved to Seattle my wife and I lived in the suburbs with relatives for about 18 months. This story is a rather cynical take on various dinner parties we attended during that time. I wanted it to have a faux-dramatic, 1960s comic book look to it, which I thought Dan Clowes could pull of better than I ever could. Ironically, he quickly gave up in that endeavor and instead rendered it in this much more stylized, big-head approach. Weird yet effective!

“Dildobert”: While hardly a fan, I actually don’t hate the comic strip Dilbert. The inspiration behind this strip was simply my response to the average American’s paranoid over-reaction to the 9/11 terror attacks, and that a passive worker bee like Dilbert would make for a perfect “unlikely” terrorist (actually, he struck me as a very likely terrorist). At the time, cartoonist Johnny Ryan was also frequently lampooning 9/11 hysteria in his Angry Youth Comix series, so I figured he’d make for a willing collaborator on this strip.

“What’s in a Name?” was never intended as a yuckfest, but simply a bittersweet recollection of the one real conversation I had with Harvey Kurtzman, the late, great creator of MAD Magazine. I originally asked cartoonist illustrator Drew Friedman to illustrate it, since not only is he a first-rate caricaturist but he also appears in it. Not surprisingly Drew passed, due to the time and lack of money involved, but thankfully another excellent illustrator, Danny Hellman, was more than up to the task.

“Caffy!”: An obvious spoof of the daily comic strip Cathy, which had already been around for decades and thus a bit overripe for ridicule — only the idea struck me re-imagining her as a character from an R. Crumb comic, with a big ass and graphic sex to boot. So naturally I asked Crumb to draw it himself. Crumb wanted to read my script and see my roughs first before he committed to doing it, but before I heard a yes or no from him the finished art had suddenly arrived in the mail. He chose to illustrate it in a very unlikely yet effective cross between his own style and that of Cathy’s creator Cathy Guisewite. He also padded the dialog considerably (which surprised me, only because he used to urge me to be more concise with my dialog) and changed the name of Caffy’s boss to “Mr. Pishocks” — Yiddish slang for “an insignificant nobody,” he told me, though I’ve never heard that term used before or since, unless he was combining “pisher” with “hock” or something. A funny name, regardless. He also re-christened her boyfriend “Elton,” solely because Crumb’s daughter Sophie was listening to a lot of Elton John music at the time.

The various small Jim Blanchard stories (one of which appears below) were a tribute to the artist who inked the last 15 issues of Hate — all done by mutual friends recounting various Jim stories from through the years. Jim was flattered, though he insisted that all of these stories were 100% false.

The Action Suits were a band I was a temporary member of (and who featured another occasional collaborator, Eric Reynolds). Like his brother Gilbert did with the “Me” story, Jaime Hernandez took huge liberties in the way he chose to draw the real-life people featured in this ad, though I must say that his portrayal of me was eerily accurate.

At this point I must credit my most frequent and longest-running collaborator: my wife Joanne.

She’s colored most of my work for the last 15 years, thus freeing me from my least favorite part of the comic making process. She’s also simply much better at it than I am. Thanks, Jo! The solo material in this collection all originally appeared in such a wide variety of publications that I’m not sure I can source them all accurately! But I’ll give it the old college try at the beginning of each section. (“Good Ol’ Posterity,” on the back cover, originally appeared in Artforum, and “Crazy Exes” in the Spanish GQ, whose editors provided the concept and captions.)

—Peter Bagge, Seattle, January 2013

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