Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge

comics introspective volume one

All characters TM & ©2007 Peter Bagge.

G PETER BA GE

As told to Christopher Irving

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comics introspective volume one

G PETER BA GE Words and photos by: Christopher Irving Design by: Rich Fowlks Proofreading by: Laura Hegyi & John Morrow

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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From MAD Magazine, © 2007 Time Warner.

Dedication

To Shaun Irving, my brother and best friend… who seems to always know the right thing to say.

PETER BAGGE Peter Bagge interviews were conducted in Seattle, Washington on April 2, 2007

by Christopher Irving

Published by: TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr Raleigh, NC 27614 www.twomorrows.com ISBN 978-1-893905-83-2 First Printing, July 2007 Printed in Canada Trademarks & Copyrights: Hate, Neat Stuff, Apocalypse Nerd, Founding Fathers Funnies, and all related characters are TM and © 2007 Peter Bagge. All artwork © Peter Bagge, unless otherwise noted.

Spider-Man and Hulk are TM and © 2007 Marvel Enterprises.

Tom Strong TM and © 2007 ABC Comics.

The Matrix TM and © 2007 Warner Bros.

All photos and text TM and © 2007 Christopher Irving Editorial package TM and © 2007 TwoMorrows Publishing From Rich: Special thanks to my lovely and ever-patient wife, Angela.

Yes, NOW I can come to bed on time.

Thank you to Sara Johnson for photograph materials.

The views displayed within are not necessarily those of TwoMorrows Publishing.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

All interviews were transcribed by Steven Tice & Brian Morrison

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PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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, Author s Bio

Christopher Irving sprang from a coffee bean in 1977, and has continued to consume vast amounts of both coffee and comic books. His work as a comics journalist and historian has appeared in The Blue Beetle Companion, Comic Book Artist Magazine, Comics Buyer’s Guide, Back Issue, and others.

He currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his black cat, Elise.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE VOLUME I Peter Bagge TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction by Joe Sacco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Johnny Ryan Speaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 1: Meet the Bagges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 …where the author first encounters the artist and his surprisingly sane home.

2: Feel the Hate! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33 …the trials, tribulations, and life of Bagge’s semi-biographical cipher, Buddy Bradley.

PETER BAGGE

Hate Cover Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27

3: Buddy Gets Animated, or Does He? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 …where Pete learns the ins and outs of making a cartoon.

…a look inside Pete Bagge’s libertarian strips for Reason Magazine.

5: Pete on Pot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 6: Never Mind the Mainstream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 …we hear of Pete’s battles with corporate comicdom.

7: Stuff Blows Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 …Apocalypse Nerd and fighting the post-apocalyptic action hero cliché.

8: Anti-Social Old Dudes in Powdered Wigs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101 …where Founding Fathers Funnies uncovers the true bad-asses of the Revolutionary War.

Music Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109 9: The End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119 …our author and Pete hang in an old bar, and Pete reveals his influences.

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4: Pete Gets Socially Relevant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

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PETER BAGGE

I first met Peter Bagge in Seattle in the mid-’80s when, you could say, I was a Peter Bagge wannabe. I had tagged along with the cartoonist J.R. Williams, a friend of Pete’s, ostensibly to interview the creator of Neat Stuff and the editor of Weirdo for a comics/humor monthly I was co-editing in Portland, but really to get near to Cartoon Greatness and perhaps reveal to Him my own Kindred Genius.

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While John Lennon once claimed the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus”, Hate protagonist Buddy Bradley settles for being bigger than the world. This illo was the cover of The Guide, a UK entertainment magazine.

In those days, among the handful of independent comics titles slowly making their presence felt, Pete’s Neat Stuff was the one I responded to most viscerally. While bratty and punkish, his comic seemed aesthetically related to the great hippie-era undergrounds, which I was too young to have fully experienced and relentlessly pined for.

And Neat Stuff was hilarious. To my eyes, no one working since the old EC Mad comics drew as funny as Pete.

His characters were pop-eyed and rubber-boned, and they sometimes seemed to explode off the page.

But for all his zaniness, there was something very real about the Buddys and the Juniors and the Stinkys that populated his tales and something very meat-and-potatoes about the way Pete told their stories. His plots had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and he never seemed conscious of the nouveau “art” of comics; he simply knew how to make comics work to serve his gut-busting and, often, poignant ends. His approach, his humor, and the sheer spontaneity that oozed off his pages were something I wanted to somehow emulate in my own writing and drawing.

Not that I had yet learned how to write and draw. Because that day in Seattle Peter Bagge gently let me know I wasn’t ready for the Big Time. He looked

over a strip I red-facedly presented about a soldier sodomizing Hitler’s charred corpse, and, bless him, he laughed heartily. Then he made a suggestion or two, which made me understand that the piece still lacked that something that would land it in the pages of Weirdo, or anywhere else, for that matter. But, still, Peter F*cking Bagge had laughed at one of my strips! It was a triumph even if the upshot had been a rejection.

Joe Sacco May 2007

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My work has since moved in a more serious direction, and not without some misgivings on my part, because, damn it, I still want to make my mark as a funny cartoonist like Pete. Perhaps that will never come to pass, but I am not surprised that of all my peers, Pete is the one who most appreciates the humor in even the grimmest of my journalistic pieces. You cannot imagine my ego-bloated delight when he described to me how he had laughed his ass off at my comic book account of two young, war-weary Sarajevans planning to film a “porno tragedy.” Again, I submit with pride that Peter Bagge laughed at this series of panels, but then Pete understands that laughter and tears are forever chasing each other’s tail and that sometimes, even in the worst of circumstances, laughter gets the upper hand. For that reason a number of Pete’s stories from Neat Stuff, Hate, and Weirdo have stuck with me ever since I first read them 10 or 20 years ago. They are that true, that sad, and, ultimately, that funny.

I’ll always envy Pete his abilities. I will always be thankful he encouraged me in my own.

A cast figurine of Buddy clutching a bottle of booze that currently resides on top of a bookcase in Bagge’s studio, flanked by the Hate Zippo lighter and shot glass. Bagge himself is shown below in his studio.

PETER BAGGE

Pete stayed in touch — he diligently answered my every inquiry with a postcard — which made me feel he was somehow on my side as I struggled to find my own voice and gain professional traction. When I finally started my own comic book series, Yahoo, and it was dismissed in its first review, Pete immediately fired off a letter-to-theeditor to defend my effort as good enough to be worthy of encouragement.

It was the sort of intervention that helped steady my fledgling nerves, for what was sniping from the critics’ section next to Peter Bagge’s blessing to go forward—.

Joe Sacco is noted for combining his cartooning skills with those of a journalist, particularly in his comic series Palestine, which recorded his two months spent in Israel and the Palestinian territories during the early 1990s (for which he won the American Book Award in 1996), and his 2000 graphic novel Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995. He is currently working on Footnotes in Gaza, a graphic novel about the southern Gaza strip.

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PETER BAGGE

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“I was living in Washington, D.C. around 1999 and trying to get my comic out there, sending it off to different artists that I liked. I don’t think I’d read any of Peter Bagge’s work at that point, and I was in the comic store and decided to give Hate a shot. It was one of the later issues, where Buddy goes on a date with a girl, which is a disaster, and winds up with him running home through the swamp. It was hilarious, and I noticed in the back pages that Pete would do reviews of little comics that people would send in to him. I sent him a comic and didn’t realize that he’d just wrapped up Hate. I wrote him and went ‘Hey, maybe if you like my stuff you could give it a mention in your book.’

“In a relatively short amount of time, I got an e-mail back from him where he said ‘I got your stuff, and it was great.’ He was very complimentary and excited about it, and said he wanted to pass it off to Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics, but was very encouraging yet not too encouraging: ‘I’ll pass it off to Eric but, you know, they’re into this whole Chris Ware thing and I don’t know if they’ll be as into you. They’re more into arty stuff now.’

“In the meantime, there was a friend of his from New York who was moving to Seattle, a woman named Jenny Nixon.

She was moving to Seattle to do art direction for The Comics Journal, and was going to stay with him for a week or so while looking for a place there. While she was staying with Peter, he gave her copies of my comics to read. She really liked them and e-mailed me, and we started an e-mail relationship. A couple of months later, I came to Seattle and we moved in together. I remember within a few days of my being in Seattle, Pete came by and we went to lunch. That’s the first time I met him….He got me published and he got me a wife!”

Johnny Ryan’s unique brand of sick humor can be found in Angry Youth Comix, published by Fantagraphics.

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Junior #2 Cover Pen and Ink Junior, Bagge’s virginal momma’s boy, stares out at the reader in shock over his headliner status, in this Neat Stuff collection. The casts of other strips share Junior’s horror at having him usurp their page count…except for “some middle-aged guy”, who serves as the punchline to this visual gag. This cover removes the “fourth wall” and forces the reader to participate, albeit in the form of a voyeur.

…where the author first encounters the artist and his surprisingly sane home.

“It became crystal clear that I wanted to be an underground cartoonist when I saw Crumb’s comics, especially the comics where he did all of them from cover to cover. I thought this is exactly what I want to do: a comic book where I have complete creative control.”

PETER BAGGE

who spoke to us on our level. He had to dig the crappiness of growing up through the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations to then kick it with the easy-going Democratic Clinton of the ’90s, just like we did, right?

But Hate wasn’t really about Buddy’s being a Gen X-er: it was about his growing out of being a dysfunctional slacker and developing into a still dysfunctional adult as he finally takes charge of his own life.

The ironic thing about Peter Bagge is that, while he did completely understand the Gen X crowd, he’s a baby boomer with a penchant for khaki slacks, sweaters, and button-down shirts.

On the cusp of turning fifty, Pete has that slight puffiness that comes with middle age, with a fire to the eyes set in his round-ish Irish features.

Pete picks me up in the Baggemobile, a Subaru hatchback; its dashboard and faux leather interior are covered with kiddie stickers broadcasting sugary-sweet messages. They were his daughter Hannah’s rewards for all the doctor visits she had as a kid…now an odd monument to every time she went in for a check-up or a bad cold. The

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Every generation is defined by the pop culture left behind in the wake of their getting older and passing the baton on to the next group: the music, movies, and books that embodied their own bottled rage or optimism are their greatest testament.

As for Generation X (of which this author stems from the tail end), we saw the birth and death of college rock, its death throes culminating in the Seattleborn and soon-to-be commercialized “grunge” movement of the ’90s. Grunge brought a pissiness and skepticism to us slacking Gen X-ers — while early punk had denied authority, we denied having to work hard enough to gain authority.

We had Nirvana; we had the Matt Dillon vehicle Singles, and…

We had the indy comic book Hate.

Coming from the fertile mind of cartoonist Peter Bagge, it starred slacker/ loser Buddy Bradley and his cast of fellow misfits on their misadventures laden with sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll (or a close approximation thereof, courtesy of Buddy’s crazy roommate Stinky and his short-lived band), and even more sex. Bagge, whose style is a hybrid between Harvey Kurtzman and Big Daddy Roth, became a storytelling hero

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In their first appearance in 1981, most of The Bradleys are visually unrecognizable compared to their later Neat Stuff incarnations. Ironically, Grandma’s status as dying invalid was later adopted by Pops in later issues of Hate.

ironic thing, Pete points out, is that Hannah was always a tough kid to take to the doc, yet she’d always managed to walk away with these adhesive wonders.

After a quick nickel tour of the oldest section of Seattle, we settle on the Owl and Thistle pub in Founder’s Square, an old area of Seattle that was going to be torn down in the ’70s but, through the grace of enough vocal citizens, was saved and refurbished. It’s Seattle’s oldest part, and it would’ve been a crying shame to see the cobblestones and metal molding destroyed in the name of progress. The pub had a family get-together in the large front room before the bar and a stage in the back; the icing on the cake was the cute waitresses (oddly enough, two of the three bars we went to wound up having incredibly cute waitresses).

Ordering two shots of whiskey with his

sandwich (our “Happy Hour” specials didn’t wind up being so happy…they were okay at best), Pete chatted with me about this book and life in general.

Pete loves his music, and everything else, with contrast, or a “sweet and sour,” like Lennon and McCartney of The Beatles: Paul’s sweet, harmonic voice a great contrast for John’s rather nasal delivery.

“The core of what I really like is the stuff I grew up on or anything that resembles it: The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Who, and Motown…all that mid to late ’60s pop rock,” Pete said.

“So like anything that is along those lines is going to this day I like…not so much right now, but there was kind of a golden era of bubble gum or teenybopper rock that started like with the Spice Girls and Hanson around ’96 or ’97. It lasted about five years where there was just tons of really good teenybopper rock. An awful lot was disco-y, but whenever it’d be kind of rock and roll-y, it would remind me a bit of the Beach Boys and also like the bubble gum records that came out back then.

Sometimes, it even reminded me of the early Jackson 5 and even new wave. The last time before that, when there was a whole chunk of music that I really got excited about was the punk rock and new wave era, especially in the late ’70s and the early ’80s. And then a lot of my favorite bands either got sucky and pretentious or broke up.”

“He likes a lot of crappy music,” Angry Youth Comix cartoonist Johnny Ryan laughed about Pete’s musical tastes.

“I remember going to his house and we were just sitting around talking. He’d put on this Aaron Carter CD, which had to be the most annoying f*cking thing I’ve ever heard. It was all poppy and stuff, and Pete was singing along to it. It was like a drill to the forehead. It’s not that I hate all popular music, but that particular record was obnoxious.”

Back in the Owl and Thistle, Smashing Pumpkins came on the loudspeaker (a tune from Siamese Dream, the breakthrough album that was, arguably, the Pumpkins’ last good album before they became commercial whores). As it turns out, former Pumpkins’ guitarist James Iha recorded on an album one of Bagge’s friends produced for a band called Movie Madness. Apparently, Pumpkins’ prima-donna lead singer Billy Corgan would go in and re-record the

other band members’ tracks after hours on the old Pumpkins records and behind their backs.

It was, after all, Seattle.

Peter had been giving lectures on comics for a few years at the local library, until the kids started asking more about Manga than American comics. It was sad, but true: many American kids just don’t seem to give a damn about American comics anymore; they’re all gravitating towards the ridiculously large eyes and speed lines of Manga, attracted more to the flash than to the structure and form that may exist underneath. I probably shouldn’t complain too much: after all, when I was that age, I was a huge fan of Todd McFarlane, one of the kings of all flash and no substance.

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An excerpt from Lameness, an autobiographical strip.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

Peter took a jab at Manga in the third issue of his short-lived DC Comic, Sweatshop, a comic about a comic strip studio. When artist Alfred self-publishes his comic book The Peerless Penciller in 2003’s Sweatshop #3, he’s advised at a convention to make his art more Mangaish. “All the women in this comic have big round eyes…” another character, says.

“Don’t these Japanese artists know how to draw Japanese people?” Within the space of five panels, Bagge deconstructs and then abandons Manga as Alfred, in a rage, declares, “I hate Manga!”

On the upside, however, Manga has girls reading comics, a trend that may, within the next decade or two, yield an

injection of even more female artists into comics (quite possibly even into mainstream comics). Pete, however, noted the amount of female cartoonists currently in the field and how he feels their dynamic differs from that of their male counterparts.

“There’s been an increasing number of female cartoonists for as long as I’ve been in this business,” Pete said later in his home studio. “Even when I started out in the ’80s, there were quite a few. A lot of them stuck with it, but — and I suppose you could probably find this to be the case in almost any field — women are also more likely to drop out of it, or to just treat it as a hobby, or an on-the-side thing…The reasons for this seem to be that men feel much more driven to make a career out of it. It’s the only way they can justify doing comics at all after a certain point. It’s like, if you aren’t making a decent living off of [it] at a certain point, you’re almost better off walking away from comics altogether.

“The thing is, once you’ve chosen comics, you’re really locked into it, whether you like it or not. I experience a moment, almost every single day, where I wish I wasn’t a cartoonist, that I wish I was doing something else — anything else, depending on the mood I’m in! Any profession gets boring after a while, no matter how much you might love it. It’s ironic how the more you strive towards something, the more locked into it you feel once you’ve achieved it. But that still seems to generally be a male thing… It’s

very old fashioned, the reasons for it, but women still use marriage as a way to free themselves from being obliged to turn their artistic endeavors into a career, assuming their husbands make a decent enough living, that is. So many women cartoonists I know will just dabble in comics off and on for years, while occasionally dropping it to take up writing or painting or pottery, or any other pastime that serves just as well as a form of art therapy.”

PETER BAGGE

“Once you become a parent, the toughest adjustment is how you have to wipe somebody else’s ass before you can wipe your own ass. That’s the best way to describe it because you have no choice in the matter. Their crap comes first.”

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Aside from his long-delayed miniseries Apocalypse Nerd from Dark Horse Comics, as well as occasional visits to Buddy Bradley and company in the Hate Annuals and his political strips in Reason Magazine…not counting the other projects on his slate, Bagge is far from picking pottery up anytime in the near future. He’s not only a cartoonist, but he also balances that with being a husband and father, two roles that are intertwined with his career choices.

“I think we’re falling into the very traditional roles that, even in this modern society, we have a hard time shaking,” Pete observed. “Like my wife is a great cook, likes to garden; she does all those things and is a great mom, so I’m like, ‘Hell, yeah, I’ll support you.

You make my life so much easier. Of course I’m going to support you and

whatever hobbies and interests you have the time to pursue. Go dabble in whatever you want to dabble in.’ But if you let your career fall apart or destroy it, this is a real turn-off to women. ‘What do you mean you didn’t do any comics or paintings today? That’s what you’re all about. That’s why I married you.’

“That is why Joanne married me.

She thought it was great that I wanted to be a cartoonist. That was always one of those things that she thought was really appealing and attractive. Even before she met me, this was exactly the kind of life she wanted to live, and I was just a pawn — her sugar daddy.

There’s a really strong tendency to fall into this Ozzie and Harriet-type relationship as time goes by.

“My daughter and Joanne come first and the comics are to support them.

But like I said, there are times where I get really burned out on comics and I’d like to do something else, especially if it involves writing. I would always draw, most likely, but drawing is a real struggle for me, whereas writing comes so much easier.”

The Bagges live in a three-story house (including basement) in the Ballard section of Seattle, down an unassuming side-street. Go through the comfortable living room (past the den on your right), and check out the framed comic art on the walls: a Love and Rockets page from the Hernandez brothers (the two are such perfectionists towards drawing beautiful women that, if you look closely enough at the woman in the splash panel, you can see where her face had been redrawn and almost seamlessly pasted over) and a

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caricature of an angry Peter Bagge, drawn by his friend Dan Clowes. Then head down the carpeted steps to Peter’s basement and through a door to his studio. With his art table and computer at the far end, in a corner lined with bookcases, there are bureaus flanking both the left and right walls (one, Peter says, contains his work from the last century, the other his work from this one). A Bagge-drawn poster for Mr. Show hangs on one wall, next to a Hate promotional poster showing Buddy and his Seattle cast on the beach. Mementos are propped up on one bureau (the 20th century one), including a pewter Buddy Bradley figurine, a Hate Zippo lighter, a drawing of Bagge by pal Johnny Ryan, and a Big Daddy Roth model reissue given him by his wife Joanne.

Pete apologizes that his studio isn’t less cluttered or organized, but he points out that at least it isn’t as dusty as it usually is. In all honesty, it just looks lived-in like most studios should.

The Bagge steps to creating a comic are shown to me right off the bat, with Peter using one of his Founding Father strips as an example: First, the script is typed out. Then the panels are hastily scribbled down on paper for the rough draft, which is then traced over and cleaned up with onion skin paper.

Peter then takes the thin paper and redraws it on the backside, tracing over his previous drawing. This allows him to check the drawing for any awkwardness before it’s placed down on the vellum, where it is drawn over once more, this time with Peter sliding the figures around for any changes in desired figure placement. The imprint from drawing over the tracing paper leaves a mark on the vellum, which Peter then uses as a guide to ink by; as a result, his pages are sickly clean, with little to no actual drawing done on the physical page. It’s all part of the illusion that Bagge and cartoonists before him, like Toth and Kurtzman, are able to perpetrate: they simply make drawing look easy, when in reality it is all the result of a long and arduous process.

“When I was younger, I liked the idea of being a cartoonist,” Pete revealed the next day. “But until I came across underground comics when I was older, I was getting very disillusioned with what was out there.

Mad didn’t seem as funny to me any

more; what was in the daily papers was getting worse and worse, and I couldn’t see myself doing either of those. I was not inspired, but at the same time, I knew I had to do something for the rest of my life, other than just getting some dumb-ass job. So seeing the undergrounds, especially Crumb’s comics (he is the king of the underground comic), a light bulb went off in my head, and I went, ‘I could do this, too.’ It didn’t all come right away, of course. It’s not like I immediately sat down and drew something that anybody in their right mind would want to publish. And I still had to wait another 10-12 years before I was making a livable wage at it.”

A sample of Bagge’s ardouos work habits: tissue paper tracing from an in-progress Founding Fathers Funnies, for Apocalypse Nerd #6’s back cover.

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Studs Kirby, Bagge’s Republican, whitebred radio show host, evokes a tantrum in this trade paperback cover. Note the parallel in shape between his large nose and looping tongue and his right foot (which is propped upon the soundboard for dramatic effect).

Studs’ oversized head serves as the focal point, angled as to draw the eye down the page.

The Bagges struggled early on in their marriage, even with Pete’s working the obligatory Barnes & Noble gig to make ends meet. Fate took them from New York to Seattle, where they stayed with Joanne’s sister and athlete husband outside of Seattle — in a “suburban wasteland,” that would become the setting of Pete’s “Chet and Bunny Leeway” stories.

Ironically, it was hate that rewarded their love…that is, hate with a capital “H.” “My wife and her sister opened a deli in the Seattle suburbs, and they made decent money off of it. So I was living off of her, for the most part. She was making three, four times, as much as I was. That all changed with Hate. Prior to that, the plan was that I was going to primarily [be] a stay-at-home dad, because it still wasn’t clear that I was going to have any kind of a career where

I could support everybody at the time our daughter was born. For the first two years after Hannah was born, Joanne still had the deli and went to work every day.

I would draw all those early Hates at night and then wake up at six the next morning to take care of the kid.

“But Joanne was getting pretty burned out on the deli and wanted to be home with the kid. So once I started making money, we figured I’d make even more if she stayed home and I could concentrate more on my work and actually get some sleep,” Pete laughed.

“She sold her business, and we’ve been living in this set-up ever since.”

Hate is a success story of independent and pop culture proportions that we’ll touch on later. For now, let it be said that while working on Hate, Bagge evolved from being a throwback to old underground comics of the ’60s into an iconic cartoonist of the ’90s. Once the figures in Pete’s work became more bendy and exaggerated, he hit on the unique style that he has today. Despite the variety of genres he covers (humor, drama, politics…even super-heroes, sort of), he maintains the same basic style each project. An interesting result is that the absurdity of his drawing can sometimes make horrible things that much more effective.

“I still alter and tweak with my style a bit, depending on what it is that I’m working on,” Pete pointed out. “I’ll make slight changes or add crosshatching, depending on whether there’s going to be color added or not, things like that. But that signature curvy elbow thing is still there simply because, for me, it always works better that way. I could make more of an attempt to draw more realistically at times, but in the end it’s not going to be worth the struggle. I used to attempt it somewhat in the early Neat Stuffs, and even before then, where I was always experimenting with my drawing style. There was still a generic, go-to style that I used for the most part, but there are times when I tried to be more stylized, or tried to be a bit more realistic than usual. But if I tried to alter my style too much, it wound up taking up so much of my concentration, and it still might not have worked. It’s just so much more comfortable for me to draw the way I do, regardless of the subject matter, and then let the storyline carry things.”

An early Bagge strip. The pile of vomit by the toothless bum gives him the extra bit of repulsion to justify the shocked couple walking by. Note how they are walking from right to left, a sign of retreat.

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very much like a sitcom family, except that it started, ‘Hey, here’s Dad! He’s drunk again and on a tirade again!’

It was like, ‘what a wacky lovable family!’ only all these typically horrible, dysfunctional things were going on, not unlike my own family. They were the Bagges — but being presented and sold like the Brady Bunch. I found this set-up so amusing that I immediately started writing more stories about them. And whatever I had the teenage boy Buddy doing was something that I would have done as a teen. The very first time I drew him, he was ‘me.’ The Bradleys weren’t exactly like my family, in that I had two brothers, two sisters, which I converted into one each just for simplicity’s sake.

Also, my mother’s personality was pretty different than Mrs. Bradley’s. Ma Bradley is more like many of my friend’s moms than like my own. And I also didn’t intend to make Buddy a stand-in for myself as much as he became later on, but as time went by, Buddy was clearly the one I related to the most. I kept coming up with story ideas for him. All the Bradley family stories that were in Neat Stuff started focusing more and more on him.”

And the rest, as they say, is history… …or simply just talked about in the next essay.

PETER BAGGE

By the early ’90s, Bagge’s writing had developed a sensitivity that blossomed in Hate and was on display in his shortlived title Sweatshop for DC Comics.

“I think that Pete’s probably, if not one of the best writers of comics ever (he might be), he’s definitely up there,” Johnny Ryan said. “He’s a master at writing dialogue, and also of pacing a story in a way that seems almost like he’s very aware of the reader. I’ve noticed, as I would read his stories, as you become a little weary of the scene you’re reading, he’ll start moving on to the next thing.

He kind of knows exactly when to stop and move on to the next scene.”

Part of what makes Pete such an effective writer is his ability to tap into personal experiences that are universal …being jilted by a lover, getting angry at traffic, or trying to hide something from your parents. As some of the following essays reveal, much of it comes from Pete’s personal experiences and his unintentional, almost “method acting” approach to cartooning and writing. While Chet Leeway may have been Pete’s first avatar, Buddy Bradley, star of Hate, is the one that most successfully channeled the essence and experiences of Pete Bagge.

“Around 1980 or ’81, I doodled this one page strip called ‘Meet the Bradleys,’ which presented The Bradleys

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SHUT-INS 2000 Xerox with magic markers Pete revisits Chet and Bunny Leeway (from his Neat Stuff days) in this color guide to a strip. Santiago is the prototypical moocher, much in the spirit of Popeye’s Wimpy J. Wellington, while Chet is an example of a technophobic baby boomer anxious for the assistance of one of the younger, more tech-savvy generation.

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The Bradleys: YouÕre Not the Boss of Me!” 1988 Pen and Ink Mom Bradley’s obviously been pushed by the first panel: her eyes have furrowed down into an angular furrow, but it isn’t until panel four that her teeth turn sharp and, by the next she’s completely snapped. Babs’ contorted, unjointed, increased size in the foreground of panel five not only exaggerates her fear of her mother, but also establishes a distance between the two (indicating the speed with which she is running).

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NEAT STUFF #13 COVER 1988 Bristol, pen and ink, with color acetate overlays

Girly-Girl and Chuckie Boy peer back at the “approaching” viewer, while respectively toasting a dead rat and a marshmallow, each item establishing Girly-Girl’s meanness and Chuckie Boy’s innocence. The frightened look on Chuckie’s face is either because the viewer is not in view yet…or because the viewer is horrific in appearance.

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FELICE Early 1980s Pen and Ink It’s unclear whether Felice is merely a repulsive girl with horrible acne and a big forehead…or something worse.

This drawing was part of an “ugly art show” from 1982, done with cartoonists Ken Weiner and Kaz.

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IN PETE’S OWN WORDS: Ages ago Girly Girl was in development with some Hollywood production company, and someone there came up with an incredibly lame character for the never-tobe-produced show to be part of Girly’s gang: a computer expert named “Hacker Joe.” Years later, someone asked me to quickly come up with some characters for an online cartoon (that also never was produced, thankfully), and not having any other ideas at the time I perversely revived Hacker Joe! I later recycled “Flopsie” for the Carrie character in Sweatshop. I recycle characters a lot. And yes, Flopsie’s name is derived from floppy discs, since this was done back in the mid-’90s.

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ALIEN DESIGNS Pen and Ink The most alien aspect of these outer space high school students are in the eyes. Save for those, they are very human in nature, from their headphones to trademark Bagge slouches. As a result, they have just enough “human” to them to make them endearing.

These “Discman” owning aliens were part of a Sony commission that Pete did for an ad campaign that never gelled.

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HATE #1: PRISONERS OF HATE ISLAND STRIP

1990 Pen and Ink

This satirical strip strands Bagge on an island with Fantagraphics founders Gary Groth and Kim Thompson and serves as Bagge’s self-deprecating commentary on his position as an alternative cartoonist. This strip would become oddly prophetic, as Hate would eventually become a cult classic. Groths’ Jughead (from Archie) beany crown and crate desk (as well as their being stranded away from society) is representative of the isolation of the small press. Courtesy of Mike Benson.

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HATE #2 BACK COVER 1990 Pen, Ink, and Collage Buddy and Valerie have found themselves as paper dolls, playing up to society’s gender roles, most clear when experiencing the dating scene, most ironic when one considers Valerie’s feminist nature, along with Buddy’s non-chivalrous attitude.

Note how Valerie’s dresses overtake the cover, while Buddy is only expected (from his outfits) to be a professional or an athlete.

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HATE #12 COVER 1992 Inks by Jim Blanchard Colors by Joanne Bagge and Rhea Patton Pen and Ink, Color Overlay

Buddy gets ready to confront rival junk collector Yahtzi Murphy over a videotape of Bop Girl Goes Calypso, a 1957 film about white people afraid of the encroaching Jamaican Calypso music craze…much like Buddy decides to not let the advancing (and, because of perspective) larger Murphy invade his turf. Lisa’s defenselessness in retreating with the bag of VHS tapes gives the slant that Buddy has fallen into the primitive “hunter-protector” role, devolving over a piece of junk culture.

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HATE #25 COVER 1996 Layout Pencils Buddy, mowing the grass at his parents’ suburban home in Jersey, is wearing the uniform of a suburbanite, while Lisa has gone “punk” in the big city of New York, her pierced nose and middle finger a sign of her regressing into rebellion.

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HATE ANNUAL #5 COVER 2004

Pen and Ink, Computer Coloring The premiere of the “New Look” Buddy Bradley (a play on the “New Look” Batman of 1964), who resembles an eccentric comic strip pirate over his classic long-haired appearance. His band-aids are crossed over in the classic “x” shape, and his shaved head and the wrinkles around his eyes show him as more a crusty old man than an irresponsible slacker.

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HATE ANNUAL #6 COVER 2006 Pen and Ink The current whereabouts of Leonard “Stinky” Brown, AKA Leonard the Love God, as revealed in this cutaway shot that also displays attributes of other stories present in this annual. Stinky’s distinctive odd haircut, along with his glasses, cements his identity to long-time Hate readers.

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BUDDY BRADLEY DOLL PACKAGING 2004 Pen and Ink This box design by Bagge is for a limited edition vinyl action figure/ doll manufactured by a Japanese company.

Bagge’s design elicits memories of older, more innocent toys of the ’60s…as well as an interesting (and most likely unintentional) reverse Statue of Liberty pose, his bottle of Ballard Bitter Beer akin to the torch.

…the trials, tribulations, and life of Bagge’s semi-biographical cipher, Buddy Bradley.

beach, oblivious to the vat of open toxic waste down the embankment from him.

“It was based on the success of that issue — and on the readers’ seeming preference for full-issue stories,” Pete said. “And I had countless story ideas for Buddy Bradley, so I thought I’d just age him a few years and do a comic book entirely about him.”

Since the adult Bagge now lived in Seattle (as opposed to the teenage Pete in New York City’s suburban wastelands where “The Bradleys” had been set), Buddy became a Seattle resident by 1990’s Hate #1, where we see him hanging out in the apartment he shares with the still-shady Stinky and the paranoid George Cecil Hamilton IIIrd. “Well f*ck your parents!” Buddy proclaims to the reader. “You gotta live it up while you’re still young…Let the old folks do the worrying…That’s all they’re good for…”

Buddy’s a slacker who drinks too much, smokes, and works part-time at a used book store (where he sneaks out more than an occasional free book).

Through the Seattle years, Buddy dates Valerie, a feminist who happens to be the roomie of Buddy’s crazy ex, Lisa, and finds himself constantly stuck in yet

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Hate was a spin-off of Bagge’s semiautobiographical strip “The Bradleys,” the title characters being the epitome of the dysfunctional family featured in Neat Stuff. At first, the situations seemed just a little over-the-top, and it all seemed a tad bland. By the third story, however, the trademark Roth-inspired aspect of Bagge’s art took over and the characters’ reactions matched the absurdity of their situations.

When Pete decided to launch a new title, the teenage slacker Buddy Bradley was a natural subject…making Hate a spin-off more in a ‘Mork and Mindy from Happy Days’ way than in a ‘Joanie Loves Chachi from Happy Days’ way.

A camp counselor by the name of Stinky first appeared in a “Girly Girl” strip in Neat Stuff #13; with his John Lennon shades and squiggle of blond hair topping off his cone-shaped head, he reminds you of a socially inept version of Bert from Sesame Street. When the final issue of Neat Stuff, #15, hit in 1989, Buddy Bradley took over the entire issue in the classic “Buddy the Weasel” story. Starting with the bang of Buddy and Stinky playing with a gun on a polluted beach, it ends with a pathetic whimper as a now out-on-his-ass Buddy finds himself camping out on the same

PETER BAGGE

“When people would see my comic they would think it would just be all surface humor and fart jokes. When I started doing stuff, that’s all I’d almost ever hear from mainstream publications like The Comic’s Buyers Guide, whose reviews of Neat Stuff would read: ‘If you think throw-up and farts are funny, you’ll like this comic.’ Obviously, the reviewer wasn’t reading it. He’d just look at it and conclude that it was mindless crap…”

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Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, from “My Pad and Welcome to it” in Hate #1 (1989).

another of Stinky’s get-rich-quick schemes; the most infamous of which was when Buddy managed Stinky’s band, Leonard and the Lovegods. He was the classic Gen Xer modeled off of the life of a man then in his 30s, a way for Peter Bagge to look back with a more objective and detached eye.

“Around the time I started Hate, I had been married for a while. We had owned a house for a couple of years, and I was finally making a livable wage off of my comics. Also by then, my wife was pregnant, so I was about to become a dad. So here I am: a middle-class, home-owning, married father, and all of this came together like within the last couple of years. Being in that situation, I suddenly was able to look at my previous existence more objectively, from the moment I left my parents’ house and the ten years or so following.

That part of my life was all over. I was no longer living on fried rice, no longer renting, no longer putting up with roommates, no longer working crappy day jobs, no longer being coerced into going to crappy rock clubs…That was all behind me, and I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. So things that used to not be so funny because I was still stuck in the middle of it were now hilarious, like always being broke and having to lug laundry to the Laundromat and stuff like that. Now that I was personally distanced from it, it suddenly all seemed hilarious,

so it was very easy for me to take all of it and turn it into stories. It all became grist for my mill.”

Hate, visually speaking, was a grimy book: The art was heavily cross-hatched, one of Bagge’s ways of creating depth of field and atmosphere. According to Bagge, though, it was also a wink and nod to the classic underground comics of the ’60s that were so influential to him as a cartoonist.

“By then, nobody seemed to be doing comics that looked like an old underground comic, other than the few old undergrounders themselves who were still active,” Bagge said. “And by that, I meant the really cheap newsprint — and all the cross-hatchy stuff that Crumb and Gilbert Shelton always did. I wanted it to have the look and feel of an old Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic.”

A year later, Nirvana’s landmark song Smells Like Teen Spirit hit the airwaves, bringing college alternative rock out to the forefront, letting loose a slew of other Seattle-based bands, and creating the ’90s grunge movement.

Buddy Bradley and his life in Seattle just happened to come at the right time, commercially speaking.

“He settled Buddy in this Seattle milieu and trapped lightning in a bottle, as far as finding a resident contemporary milieu,” Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds observed later. “But one that he could impose his own memories on from his

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The (first) death of Stinky. Stinky’s first appearance from Neat Stuff #13 (1989). Unlike Bagge’s later work, this page features the end of one scene, and the start of another; he would later employ starting a scene on a new page. The Head Counselor’s decision to “rehabilitate” Girly Girl and Chuckie-Boy in the final panel is given added weight via the use of silhouettes and a lack of panel borders.

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Smells like a parody— Buddy is introduced to the band he hesistantly manages with Stinky in Hate #8 (1992); they’re oddly reminiscent of Nirvana, whose “grunge” anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” debuted roughly a year prior.

time of growing up during the punk era in New York. I think it all translated from one period to the next. Then, you read the second long story arc of Hate, the New Jersey years. I reread those, and they’re anything but a Generation X comic. Reading those now, I was struck by how good they were and how they aren’t trapped in a time warp. In a way, maybe the first fifteen issues of Hate (as brilliant as they are) are sort of trapped in this time period in a way that the New Jersey issues aren’t. I think they’re all the better for it.”

“One would think that the whole grunge thing must have contributed to Hate’s popularity,” Bagge, who ironically isn’t a fan of grunge, said of the timing with the movement, “but it also suffered

from the association to some degree.

There were a lot of folks who wouldn’t touch it or take Hate seriously because of it. Once all these terms came into being: ‘Gen X’ and ‘grunge’ and ‘slacker’…a lot of people, especially those who fit those descriptions, became resentful of it, of being categorized. It was as if they became allergic to everything they thought they were supposed to like, or resemble, including my comics.

“While the term ‘grunge’ already existed, none of those bands were household names at the time I started Hate. And yet the first two years I was doing Hate, it was selling great, before all of these catch phrases caught on and Time Magazine was writing about flannel shirts. What changed everything was

When characters have sex, it’s never pretty or even ugly…it’s just morbidly absurd, characters contorting into impossible positions as they’re trapped in the throes of ecstasy. The characters seem to have no joints in their bodies as they strut from one panel to the next, their arms and legs moving like snaked tentacles and the men noticeably slouching. Reactions are always overstated, one panel’s sedate characters being instantly transformed into Big Daddy Roth monsters for the next: tongues becoming lightning bolts, heads growing larger than bodies, eyes twirling in opposite directions, or brows furrowing so low that the bridge of the nose almost meets the upper lip — In the world of Hate, even love and sex are angry and violent.

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Halfway through the series’ run, with Hate #16, Buddy and Lisa wound up living in Buddy’s family’s basement in Jersey. Like a lot of us, Buddy found himself stuck back in his hometown.

Buddy’s Seattle crew (including Stinky) was replaced with his re-introduced high school acquaintances from Neat Stuff.

“There’s a gravitas to (the later Hates) that I don’t think exists in the Seattle years,” Reynolds reflected.

“Partly because in those years, Buddy’s just a young guy. Even though he’s being put through hell and the wringer between crazy roommates and girlfriends, he’s still a young guy and can roll with the punches.

Whereas, in the Jersey years, there’s a real weight to it, because he’s approaching domesticity and settling down, really getting the sense that this is the only life he has and that he is not invincible. Every choice he makes has repercussions because he has responsibilities that he didn’t have in Seattle. It all makes for a more potent novel [in the end].”

Was Hate kinder and gentler? Hell, no!

Did that make it better or worse? Better, in this writer’s opinion, as the stories became more adult and sophisticated in

PETER BAGGE

when Nirvana’s album Nevermind came out and became such a monster hit, its first release, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became a mainstream radio anthem.

A lot of these grunge bands became overnight sensations, and Seattle was suddenly flooded with journalists writing stories not just about the music but about our rain and beer and coffee.

All our liquids! It also was a phenomenon in part because it came along during a slow news cycle, so even your mom knew about it. And then just as quickly it became a joke because it was so overblown.

“But the thing was, prior to all that, Hate was selling a certain amount. When the grunge phenomenon happened, the sales didn’t really go up at all. It pretty much stayed the same. You’d have thought — and I certainly was hoping — that because of all this attention, that more people would make a point of searching out and buying my comic, but that really didn’t happen. It goes to show you how there’s only a finite amount of people who are willing to read a comic book at all. But like I said before, there seemed to be a set number of 20-somethings who made a loud point of not reading Hate! It’s a shame, too, since those poor, painfully selfconscious darlings probably would have enjoyed it. Another thing that was a bit of a problem was folks’ assuming I was jumping on some bandwagon and exploiting the whole grunge thing, which wasn’t the case at all. It just was all very coincidental — and as it turns out, very much a double-edged sword.”

“It transcends that stigma that this is the comic from the ’90s for people who listen to Nirvana and pierce their nose,” Bagge friend and fellow cartoonist Johnny Ryan said. “Even more than Robert Crumb whose comics were about the ’60s hippies, I think Pete’s writing is more accessible to anybody, more so than the stuff Crumb was writing about. I think that for any writer stuck in any particular time who does work that you can still read and enjoy…the Hate comics have that aspect to them. Even though it’s about that time, it kind of transcends the datedness.”

While Hate is satirical on the surface, Bagge’s deceptively simplistic and overthe-top, expressive style masks a much more powerful undercurrent of raw human emotion that carries each issue.

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From Hate #1 (1990); through Stinky’s scheme to employ Buddy in a porn flick, Bagge not only establishes Stinky’s shuckster nature, but also Buddy’s dysfunctional relationship with the yet-to-be introduced Lisa, and his ability to outsmart his old friend and roommate.

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nature and Bagge tapped once again into his own life experiences.

“Perhaps if I were smarter,” he confessed. “I would have kept it going the way it was and not age [Buddy] at all. I used to joke Hate was like a dirtier Archie comic, since it had a very similar dynamic set-up, with Buddy in the ‘Archie’ role and with two main male friends: the wise guy friend, Stinky, who’s Reggie; and the weird nerdy friend, George, who’s Jughead. And then there’s the love triangle between Buddy and his ‘Betty’ (Lisa) and ‘Veronica’ (Valerie).

“Also, the most popular comic I’ve ever made was Hate #2. I was actually embarrassed with myself when I drew it: I liked the story, but it was so relationship-y, y’know? It was full of all the most typical romantic comedy cliché’s: boy-meetsgirl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl-back; and with a love triangle thrown in for good measure, while his male friends give him bad advice. It even opens with Buddy having a ‘Cathy’ moment, sweating over his body image. Yet the very people I thought would call me out on all this actually loved it! All these hipsters, these editors of alternative-y indy magazines, they all raved about it like I just reinvented the wheel. It’s funny how even the hippest of the hip can’t resist a good boy-meets-girl story.

“That issue also helped to attract a lot of female readers, which was a rare feat in those days. So I probably could have milked that whole formula for a long time, if not forever, but it was all too silly and I was embarrassed by it right from the beginning. So I sabotaged the whole set-up by having Buddy settle with Lisa, much to everyone’s chagrin.

“I also wanted to start doing deeper stories that were more personal and dealt with crises that were more profound than wondering who Buddy was going to date next, and the best source for that would be Buddy for the immediate family. That was another thing about the early Hates that I was starting to find limiting, is that they were solely about the trials and tribulations of a bunch of 23-year olds. I wanted to get older people and children back into the mix because that would make for story ideas that were deeper and more complex and even more painful…But the only way I could do those is to have Buddy move back to where his parents lived, since I

couldn’t imagine how I would get his parents and siblings to all move out to Seattle. Plus his sister already had little kids, and I wanted to see Buddy dealing with kids, as well as his old messed up acquaintances.”

But more than the setting of Hate had changed: the title was given a huge visual revamp. Bagge’s heavy-handed cross-hatching changed into a cleaner, crisper style that would better hold color, inked by Bagge’s new inker Jim Blanchard. The stories took a more dramatic tone that retained the cynicism and dark humor of the first half of the series. Rather than having three tiers of panels per page, the new Hate featured

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four tiers; Bagge switched his original art size from 11" x 17" to 12" x 14" to accommodate the format change.

“I figured that since the stories would be more painful, it would make them more palpable if they were in color.

Likewise, I thought that it would be interesting to tell these more painful, darker stories by simplifying the artwork more. I would make it look like an old-fashioned humor comic book where the color was very candy-colored, so there’d be that very weird, contrasting mix that I’ve always liked.

“I always liked to touch on some personal, uncomfortable subjects in my comics, but I also liked to draw them in this exaggerated, somewhat moroniclooking Big Daddy Roth style — so that what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. It’s like a clash between shallow and deep, smart and stupid, and I figured this contrast would be even more intense by combining stark stories with bright, garish ‘comic book’ colors.

“The possibility of going full-color in the first place came about thanks to computer technology with Photoshop.

That, combined with Hate’s sales figures, made going full-color economically possible. The economical reasons why underground and alternative comics were always black-and-white were pretty obvious: you simply couldn’t afford it with all the labor involved to publish something in full-color. They also rarely had any ads in them, so color simply wasn’t an option.

Not that I have anything against black-andwhite. I like both! I understand perfectly why an artist would prefer to work in black-and-white, or feel like their work is best represented that way, and I still do work in [black-and-white] myself, usually

by choice. Even the color issues of Hate had black-and-white back-up stories!

But I never thought that indy comics had to be in black-and-white. It was just the economics that made it so. But once color became an option I couldn’t wait to take advantage of it. I thought color would greatly increase the visual possibilities of what an indy comic could be. And it has!”

The reaction to Hate’s going color elicited some cries of “sell out” aimed towards Bagge.

“I’m still flabbergasted that there was such a backlash,” Pete said, “how just the fact that it was in full-color translated into ‘selling out.’ To me, selling out has everything to do with content. And as it turned out, being in color didn’t really help sales at all, much to my disappointment. So the only plus for me going full-color was that it appealed to my own personal aesthetics.”

“I’m sure Peter handled the bulk of the criticism,” Jim Blanchard added via e-mail.

“I was a lowly inker and didn’t hear much opinion, good or bad, regarding the new format — nor did I care to hear it. I think the majority of the feedback was positive, although there was a segment of the alt. comic crowd who preferred the early, black-and-white plus cross-hatched issues — we were staking out new ground, as I saw it. Those color issues have an odd quality to them, sort of a cross between undergrounds and mainstream comics — very hard to pin down. I seem to remember some rather harsh criticism from the Drawn and Quarterly dude regarding the color Hates — so, f*ck that guy!”

“The only logical reason I can make out of that initial criticism was envy,” Pete speculated. “At that time there were a bunch of younger cartoonists who were just starting out getting published

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or trying to get published, doing the Xeroxed mini-comics and what have you. They were still trying to achieve what I had achieved so far, which is difficult enough in and of itself, yet with the color it looked like I raised the bar yet again. Nobody has ever said this to me, but I suspect that the introduction of color would raise the public’s expectations of what an indy comic should be. That’s what I think pissed them off: ‘Will I ever have a full-color comic? And are people going to ignore my comic book because it’s in black-andwhite?’ I could be wrong, but that’s the only sense I could make out of the reaction the color received back then. Younger artists in particular acted threatened by it!

“Ironically, what I thought people would justifiably regard as a sellout about was when we started selling ads in Hate a few issues after the introduction of color, only no one said anything!” Pete pointed out. “We — meaning me and Fantagraphics — started selling ads so we could expand the page count and run color comics by other artists without raising the cover price. Rick Altergott was the first, with his soon-to-be-regular regular ‘Doofus’ strip. Rick knew how to use Photoshop, which was still a fairly rare skill back in 1995, and I was really impressed with the full-color comic strips he had done on it. He also was understandably eager to see his color work in print, but the only way we could afford to include him or anyone else in Hate was by selling ads.

“Well, it was that or raise the price, which I was loathe to do. I was determined to keep Hate’s cover price as low as possible back then, since I associated that with accessibility. A lower price meant someone was more likely to buy it on an impulse, thus making Hate double as a recruiting tool or introductory title to indy comics in general. Which it was to some degree, though I’ve come to realize that it was pretty futile of me to try to make anything published by a company like Fantagraphics cheap and ‘accessible.’

Trying to create ephemera just doesn’t fit into their business model, since it ignores the fact that alternative comics — and at this point, all comic books — are and always will be a specialty item that only appeals to a small subset of the general public. I deeply regret and resent that that’s the case, but I’ve finally realized that there’s no point in fighting it, either.”

A sampling of the process Bagge undergoes for his artwork: shown above is the tissue paper images of Buddy and Valerie for Hate #6, which are then transferred to Bristol board for final inks.

As a result, Bagge’s final art rarely has any smudges or pencil smears.

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An example of Bagge’s mixing of tragedy and comedy in this sequence from Hate #22 (1996). Note the parallels in figure poses from top to bottom panel for both Pops and Buddy, particularly in the close-ups of Pops in panels three and six.

Pete has always said that he separated himself and Buddy Bradley by a decade: it was only natural, then, that Buddy slowly accrue the responsibilities of Peter Bagge a decade back. Part of that was in having Buddy mature, going beyond the 100% certified slacker of the Seattle years, and take on responsibilities like the ones he’d spent his first fifteen issues avoiding.

Buddy and his pal Jay the Junkie (last seen in “Buddy the Weasel”) start a used junk business, and Bagge repeatedly leads us to expect Pops Bradley’s death from his deteriorating health…only to depict Pops’ getting hit and killed by a car while out walking. It seems like Pops’ death was the one event in Hate that started the wheels of change turning for Buddy: the catalyst for the remaining threads of Buddy’s days as a complete slacker to hit the fan.

“I was basing it on my own experience with death, and how it’s not at all like the way it’s always treated on movies and TV,” Bagge said, noting an all-too-eerie instance of life’s imitating art. “When Pops Bradley died [in Hate #22], my father died right after it - and just as suddenly, too. It was a frightening foreshadowing of reality. My father was not a beloved man: he was a

moody, difficult guy, and nobody mourned his passing. There was not a wet eye in the house at his funeral. It’s not like my dad was a total monster, but he was short-tempered, and he hid his own insecurities by coming off like an arrogant know-it-all…I got along with him sometimes and have some fond memories of him, which is more than most people could say, but he also drove me nuts as well. There were times when everyone in my family wanted to kill him.”

At Pops’ funeral, Buddy and Lisa wind up leaving the service early to take Buddy’s bratty niece and nephew across the street to a Pizza Hut (in an understated Bagge one-two-punch that rubs in Pops’ fate, Buddy’s sister chides his nephew for not looking both ways while crossing the street).

“I did the story about Pops Bradley’s funeral right before my father died, but it echoed my dad’s funeral perfectly. Like, there were no touching eulogies, little being said or done regarding why we were all there. Even while you’re viewing the open casket, you’re thinking about how morbid and weird the whole thing is.

Meanwhile, your stomach is grumbling,

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It’s typical in a story to introduce and establish a character in a setting and then, at the end, return that same but newly developed (through the events of the narrative) character to the initial settings to show just how much they have evolved. By having Stinky doing the exact same thing in his final appearance that he had in his first (in “Buddy the Weasel”), Bagge showed just how Stinky hadn’t evolved in close to a decade.

“Stinky’s the type of guy who doesn’t see anything totally through,” Pete said.

“With him everything is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration. That’s why he’d always try to get someone like Buddy involved with his crazy schemes, halfhoping that Buddy will do all the heavy lifting. It’s also why he burns all of his bridges, since after a while everyone’s going to realize that ‘yeah, he comes up with these great ideas, and he’s a great salesman, but then I’m left holding the bag or just having to do all the boring stuff like licking the envelopes while he’s got some other million-dollar idea brewing.’

“I’ve known a lot of Stinky prototypes, and they’re really amusing and magnetic because of their gift of gab and energy.

But at the same time, if they don’t settle down or wise up some as they get older, their whole shtick gets really old, really fast. It isn’t always as charming when you run into someone like that 20, 30 years down the road who’s still talking and acting that way.

“Whenever I travel somewhere on business, and there’s a car and driver sent to pick me up, the limo drivers are almost always this type of guy, full of tall tales and million dollar schemes.

Especially in L.A… They’re in L.A. for a reason: they were going to be a star, or a stunt double, or a big shot manager or

PETER BAGGE

and your new shoes don’t fit, and my cousin’s really getting on my nerves, etc. I remember standing next to my Uncle George, who was my father’s only sibling, yet all he thought and talked about through the entire service was where we were all going to eat once it was over.

‘You in the mood for Italian— If so, I know a good place — Honey, what’s the name of that place?…’ And kids are the most distracted and clueless. They don’t know what’s going on. So I just wrote about what happens at funerals — or at my own emotionally detached family’s funerals, anyway. The kids get crazy and restless. And Buddy, of course, isn’t gonna be a funeral guy. So he’s like: ‘The kids are hungry. What a great excuse for me to get out of here. But I’ll act like I’m doing everyone a favor by volunteering to take the kids to the Pizza Hut.’” Just as “Buddy the Weasel” forced Buddy to shake off the vestiges of his teenage life, preparing him for Hate, the last six issues of Hate had him discarding the elements of his life as a slacker, sometimes in a harsh way. The one tragic farewell to his past life, however, came in the death of the newly-returned Stinky in Hate #28. Playing with a handgun with Butch Bradley and on the same beach from “Buddy the Weasel,” Stinky held the gun to his temple: “Stinky stopped being a regular character once I’d brought Buddy back to Jersey,” Bagge said. “I had gotten a lot of complaints about that, since he was a popular character, but the reason I stopped working with him as much was that I didn’t really know where to go with him. He’s based on the type of person who doesn’t really grow or evolve much and is always going through the same motions, like a gerbil on a wheel.”

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HATE #27 1997 Pen and Ink

Notice how this page (perhaps the most dramatic in Hate ’s entire run), features cross-hatching like the earlier Hate issues.

As a result, the sequence is not only made darker in tone, but also sets it apart from other Jersey issues. The use of close-ups is reserved for the most emotional moments (Stinky’s death on panels seven and eight), while the long shot of Butch in the final panel not only draws the reader’s eye, but also emphasizes his fear.

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“Stinky lacked self-awareness, which makes him lots of fun, but [if] I suddenly had him stop and go, ‘Whoa, what am I doing? I better check myself!’ then he wouldn’t be Stinky anymore. It wouldn’t be very interesting, either.

“A problem with Hate, if you can call it a ‘problem,’ is that it’s not like Peanuts or Beetle Bailey or even The Simpsons, where Bart is 10 years old forever and everything is stuck in time. Instead I took the Gasoline Alley route and had everybody age and change and either evolve or devolve. Stinky was a disaster waiting to happen, so I figured it was about time to have a disaster happen. I’m surprised at how often people ask me to explain his death — not only because of all the foreshadowing I just described, but also because Buddy’s brother Butch explains the whole thing accurately at the end of the same issue Stinky dies in! Buddy says, ‘You were there. What happened?’ And Butch says something like: ‘I’m sure that he thought he’d emptied the whole gun, and that he just wanted to freak me out, and make me pee my pants, only he obviously miscounted the bullets we used.’ But he also comments on how Stinky must not have valued his life much or he would’ve never pulled that trick in the first place. Like, I’m assuming you want to live a long, healthy life, so you wouldn’t dream of pulling that trick on me. Even if you thought you counted the bullets correctly, I still can’t imagine you saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if I made Pete piss his pants by pointing a gun at my head and pulling the trigger?’

“Only a guy who had a suicidal element to him would pull that trick.

Just the mere fact that he was willing to pull that trick shows that he…”

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producer. ‘I invented this new technology that was gonna revolutionize the industry, see, but then this schmuck stole my idea’ and blah, blah, blah. Oh, and their driver status is always ‘only temporary. This is just paying the rent until my new idea takes off. Wanna know what it is? Talking houseplants!’ They’re also half-hoping that you’ll invest in their idea, figuring that if you’re riding in their back seat that you must be some kind of mover and shaker. They’re always amusing, fascinating guys, but they’re also fiftyyear-old limo drivers. I’m also struck by how quickly they’ll walk away from their earlier million dollar ideas. Like ‘let’s show some stick-to-itiveness, pal!’”

When Stinky showed up in Jersey in Hate #27, it started with a crank call and Stinky’s driving up to Buddy’s shop in a “girly” convertible rental car that had an unloaded Uzi affectionately named “Suzi” in the back seat.

“At some point I decided to bring him back in, only he wasn’t going to be the main thrust of the story as far as Buddy was concerned. He was going to be the ‘B story,’ where Buddy would be preoccupied with other woes, yet here comes Stinky to compound his problems. As in having Buddy shaking his head and going, ‘What else can go wrong?’ and in walks Stinky, shouting ‘Hello!’ TV writers call that a ‘hello joke,’ where whenever someone says something like: ‘Who would do such a thing?’ in would walk Urkel or Gilligan or whoever the show’s biggest buffoon is and unknowingly shout ‘Hello!’

Whenever I’ve collaborated on a Hate pilot or movie script (yes, there’s been several), I noticed that Stinky was always the ‘Hello Joke’ guy.

“Only in Hate # 26, I set it up as, ‘Yes, Stinky’s back, and he’s still crazy and wacky — and that’s a bad thing!’ I thought I foreshadowed his death pretty well, because even though he’s still a fast-talking operator, he was also clearly devolving. Like, look at what he’s doing now: selling drugs to kids in a ‘borrowed’ US mail truck. Government property!

And he’s carrying a loaded UZI with him!

Sure, I played it up for laughs, but at the same time… Yikes! That transcended his former ‘wacky’ behavior by quite a bit.

And where is he going to go from there?

It’s either prison or death. He’s going to have to find Jesus or something to derail him from this path he was on, because he obviously never stops and thinks.

Bagge invokes classic Grit Magazine subscription ads, in this retro ad for Hate subscriptions.

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Pete paused and then revealed another odd aspect of Stinky’s death. It wasn’t Stinky’s putting a bullet through his brain, only to be buried in an anonymous grave on a farm: the situation paralleled the cartoonist’s life in a scary way.

“Again, it was a bit of foreshadowing to my own life: right after Stinky died, my older brother Doug passed away, from complications from diabetes.

Technically he died from ‘natural causes,’ but for the last ten (but especially the last five) years of his life, he wasn’t acting like someone who wanted to live.

He had the ‘bad’ kind of diabetes, Type A, where he had to inject himself with insulin, and he came down with it when he was 12. You have to really watch your diet, too —which he did for most of his life. Well, he was really into drugs off and on, but he didn’t drink at all for most of his life. But then he got in a bad marriage, and after they got divorced he started on this downward spiral. He never could settle on a job that he really liked. He never decided what he wanted to do; he just went from job to job. He would do things like get a truck or bus driver’s license and then never apply for a truck- or bus-driving job. A lot of this was

due to insecurity, which he seemed to suffer from even before he came down with diabetes; he never was a very happy guy.

“But those last five years of his life were really wretched and he was a really unhappy guy. He also resented the hell out of me, because my life was going relatively fine and I was his kid brother. He was really nasty towards me, to the point that I couldn’t stand being around him anymore.

What was even worse was during the last year of his life, whenever he would call me, instead of him ragging on me, he’d get all sentimental and go ‘I love you, man,’ and he never talked like that before.

Gave me the creeps! I figured it had to be because he knew he was dying, but he kept insisting he was fine. But he’d be calling me from a hospital bed, recovering from the umpteenth car accident he’d had that month. And the last time I saw him he was going through two packs of Marlboros a day and drinking hard liquor.

His bedroom floor was covered with empty vodka bottles, and during the evenings he was constantly passing out, then reviving, then passing out again. My ex-brother-in-law and I were constantly dragging his sorry ass, tossing him onto the back of a pickup truck whenever we couldn’t revive him as we went from one friend’s house to another, in this endless search for more of the free pot and booze that the two of them were on. Doug told everyone the fainting spells were due to the diabetes, but he was blind drunk as well when I was with him. I tried to get him to lighten up on the sauce at one point, but he lit into me like you wouldn’t believe, so I just dropped the subject.

“Did you ever see that Crumb film documentary? Well, my relationship with my brother Doug was exactly like Crumb’s relationship with his older brother, Charles. Plus, Doug also lived upstairs in our mom’s attic toward the end of his life. My mother wasn’t allowed up there, and it turns out even his own platonic girlfriend never went up there. He also had five cats living up there with him. He was so paranoid of the cats getting run over that he wouldn’t let them out. So the whole place reeked of kitty litter. The floor was just completely covered with empty cigarette cartons and empty bottles of vodka just all over the place.

“Then a couple years later he faints while making a sandwich in my ma’s kitchen, cracks his head on the floor

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would remain uncollected and forgotten, so it isn’t nearly the time commitment that the regular Hate title used to be.”

Buddy, while still ten years younger than Pete (which would put him at 39), has grown more in the eccentricity department: Now a parent, he still runs the junk store and has bought a house on a former Jersey dump, with a concrete backyard.

“I still kind of relate to him, and I certainly relate to his impulses,” Pete admitted. “But the direction he’s going in compared to me is far more idiosyncratic and eccentric. In appearance alone he’s become a total kook.”

Buddy Bradley’s appearance pushed him further away from that of a younger Bagge, and more into that of a traditional oddball comic character. Gone are the flannel and long unkempt bangs: Buddy’s now rocking out on a pipe, eye patch, and shaved head.

“He’s literally become the Crazy Old Guy That Works at the Dump, right down to the eye patch, even though there’s nothing wrong with his eye.

I recently saw Gilbert Shelton, the Freak Brothers guy, at a Spanish comic convention, and he asked me if Buddy still needed the eye patch or if it was just an affectation. When I told Gilbert it was the latter I expected him to roll his eyes in dismay, but instead he laughed and said, ‘That’s great!’”

“Buddy’s become a thoroughly domesticated creature of habit at this point,” Pete added later. “But he’s still trying to figure out exactly what ‘settled’

PETER BAGGE

and that was that. So, yeah, I think it was a form of suicide, or at least an utter indifference towards remaining alive.

And it was odd that it happened right after I wrote that Stinky story and his accidentally-on-purpose suicide, and then with my brother it was the same thing: an accidentally-on-purpose suicide.”

After thirty issues, Bagge retired Hate, continuing the series in not-quite annual annuals.

“I suppose I could have kept Hate going forever,” Bagge said, leaning back reflectively. “But the sales started to dip, and I didn’t like that trend. Plus, at that same time I was getting a lot of other opportunities. For the first time ever, people were calling me up, offering me fairly lucrative freelance jobs. That was when Hate was at its hottest, and I had several opportunities to develop it for TV — all of which failed, though I made good money off of development fees alone.

“All of a sudden I was making the best money I’ve ever made — before or since, sadly — so why would I want to keep slaving away on this single labor intensive comic book title? I was making much better money not doing Hate! But the idea behind Hate Annual was to just simply keep the Buddy character alive.

It’s kind of like he’s dog paddling (or that I’m dog paddling) just to see if suddenly he can take off again, creatively or otherwise. It doesn’t sell nearly what it used to, but it sells well enough that Fantagraphics is always ready and willing to put it out. I also pad the thing out with various freelance jobs that otherwise

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means and how he wants to live the rest of his life. The readers would much prefer I went back to, like, full-length stories, but with Hate Annual I much prefer doing these eight-, ten-, 12-page stories, these little snapshots documenting how Buddy is slowly turning into a total nut. Not a ‘nut’ in a bad way, but as someone that few people would relate to. How he still is paralleling my own life at this point is hard to say. Maybe he isn’t anymore! Or else I’m in denial of my own idiosyncratic behavior.”

When Hate first hit in 1990, the alternative audience was most likely in their late teens to mid-20s; by the time the series’ wrapped in 1998, most of the readers had grown to their late 20s to early 30s. They, in a fashion, grew up with Buddy Bradley and Lisa Leavenworth.

While, from a literary perspective, it made Hate a book that paralleled its readers’ lives as it came out, it doesn’t necessarily help its commercial shelf-life.

“One major problem with alternative comics is demographics. We like to think that we’re making comics for anyone and everyone to enjoy, but there still is a very core demographic who buy alternative comics, which is people in their twenties who live in downtown urban areas or college towns. What eventually happens to these indy comic fans are what happened to me: marriage, family, mortgages, career, etc…All of which take over your life to the point you don’t have the time to invest in comic books, let alone go out and look for the ones that

might interest you. And once you buy a house, chances are it’s nowhere near any of those rare comic shops that bother to carry alternative comics, so the whole comics hunting experience becomes that much more of a chore. The only way I can keep up at all with alternative comics is when Fantagraphics gives me free copies or if somebody else sends me one.

Otherwise, new titles will come and go and I won’t even know that they exist.

“Also, with Buddy now being a family man, this core demographic who read alternative comics simply doesn’t relate. Hate’s all about old people now. A big reason — the main reason — for the success of those early Hates was that the characters so accurately reflected the people who buy and read alternative comics. The whole title was like a mirror image of themselves and their lives, so of course they loved it. But once Buddy started a business and started to settle down, that’s when I started to lose a lot of readers. They simply didn’t relate to Buddy anymore.”

But for those readers who can still relate to Buddy Bradley and his dysfunctional adventures, Pete continues his occasional annuals. As all things pop culture go, a new appreciation emerges roughly twenty years later, with a crowd too young to remember when those same movies, music, and comics originally came out.

When college kids in 2017 latch on to the music and clothing of the ’90s, Buddy and his pals may find themselves pop culture gods to a new group of readers.

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PRISONERS OF HATE ISLAND 1990 Pen and Ink This cover, more reminiscent of Bagge’s earlier work, features Fantagraphics publishers Gary Groth and Kim Thompson in the background, and an empowered and bloodshot Bagge advancing towards the reader. One can only suppose his publishers met the end of the rolled up issue of Neat Stuff in his right hand. Bagge added that this cover was inspired by a Basil Wolverton sci-fi comic cover.

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HATE #2, page 7 1990 Pen and Ink Buddy, on his first date with the feminist Valerie, has his testosterone extinguished when confronting a Vietnam veteran.

Note Bagge’s alternating use of open, borderless, panels for those shots that involve impending violence and conflict.

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HATE #18 , page 12 1995 Pen and Ink Peter Bagge and Jim Blanchard

Buddy buys his new set of wheels, in this page, a Big Daddy Roth-inspired truck which looks like it has “polio”. The opening panel’s thick character outlines work to create depth, even without the printed color. Bagge also takes a humorous scene that is composed mostly of dialogue and, through varying camera angles from panel to panel, makes it visually arresting.

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HATE # 19, page 4 1995 Pen and Ink Peter Bagge and Jim Blanchard

This scene opens with a wide, establishing panel that details the scenery and the relation between the players. Having set the stage, Bagge then utilizes close-ups and medium shots, bringing the focus more on the characters and their conflict.

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Hate #26, page 8 1997 Pen and Ink Within eleven panels, Bagge establishes the long-absent Stinky’s current situation, and foreshadows alleged zaniness (but, in the end, tragedy) that is to come. Buddy’s probing questions and further doubts about Stinky reinforce his own more adult development since the early Seattle issues.

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Hate! #24, page 8 1996 Pen and Ink Bagge normally begins scene changes at the start of a page. This scene, where Buddy reunites with his Neat Stuff pal Tommy is entirely self-contained. Coming out of the bar, drunk, Buddy is perhaps given his first example of an old friend whose accepted the responsibilities of an adult life. It seems that Tommy’s becoming a policeman is the focal point of this scene, as Bagge has left the panel open, with the characters in silhouette.

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Hate! #24, page 15 1996 Pen and Ink This page is the second of a two-page scene, where Buddy encounters the depressed Lisa. Lisa’s feelings of alienation are well illustrated through Bagge’s reducing the amount of speech balloons in key moments: her breakdown in panel three, and her self-pity in the final panel.

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Hate Annual #6, page 1 2006 Pen and Ink It would seem that Buddy Bradley really has settled down into the suburban, domestic life…But Bagge slaps in the face of any sense of normalcy by presenting a willingly bald and eye-patched Buddy who has moved his family into a junkyard.

…or does he? Where Pete learns the ins and outs of making a cartoon.

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I’m doing the same exact thing with them, only it’s with The Bradleys, so it’s Buddy as a teenager, and I’ve only just got started on it.”

Around 1993, Bagge was courted a few different times about producing Hate as a show or film, particularly by MTV (this was, after all, when Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons were staking their claim in television’s landscape) and, later, by HBO. Despite a positive testing of an animatic (or quasi-animated test short), the one-two punch of a new MTV President and another show’s receiving the greenlight instead killed it.

“For every single television show that you actually get to see make it to TV, there’s probably a hundred different properties that get optioned,” Bagge speculated. “Out of those, only one out of ten reach to where I am. It’s like a rapidly narrowing funnel that I’m still entering, and I still have a long way to go before I come out the other end.

A character from The Mooch. © 2007 Mirari Films.

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Bagge had been flirting with animation for a bit more than a decade. Judging by the recent wave of creator-owned and directed films (everything from Dan Clowes’ Ghost World to Frank Miller’s 300), Hollywood is sinking its vampiric teeth into the jugular of comics for some fresh blood. One would think that Pete would soon be a successful donor.

“As we speak, I’m in the exact same place with MTV that I was ten years ago,” Bagge admitted. “Back then I had a development deal with MTV to turn Hate into an animated TV show. Now

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We were watching Peter Baggedesigned characters, computer generated and possessing weight and dimension, on a television…creator Eric Kaplan did The Mooch as a five-minute presentation cartoon in the hope of having a cable channel pick it up as a regular show.

The main character, a deadbeat computer programmer who quit his job because he wouldn’t work on a video game where the hero is a rapist, is out on the street without any money or a place to live, and he imposes on both his best friend and his friend’s wife. Living on their sofa, The Mooch quickly comes close to ruining his pal’s marriage and finds himself once more kicked out on the street — and knocking on his wanna-be girlfriend’s door.

The characters were Peter’s in form and movement, their bodies moving without any visible joints and the Bagge slouch ever-present as their heads bobbed forward; they even freaked out like Buddy Bradley (with a shade less Big Daddy Roth). There was something almost creepy about them, though, but not exactly in a soulless Polar Express way. The figures had warm, human faces but contorted, Bagge-ified bodies.

PETER BAGGE

A model sheet of a bald Buddy Bradley, complete with bottle of Ballard Bitter.

This was used for the PressPop Buddy doll.

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Models of The Fun Girls, who appeared in an episode of Bagge’s Flash-animated Murray Wilson shorts, based off the manager and father of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. rock ’n’ roll Dad is © 2007 Icebox.com.

“So there’s not only a lot of competition, but animation projects also are relatively more expensive to make than a live action show, and especially a reality show. This is especially true with cable networks, where the budget for an animated show can be prohibitively expensive.”

With CGI’s giving film-makers the ability to convert pages from comics and graphic novels into convincing silver-screen life (particularly in Miller’s past two films), could an iconic indy comic be turned into an indy movie? Bagge’s not a fan of that idea: “Well, first of all, the nature of my comics are so radically different from all these recent successful superhero movies — and even more so from something like Sin City, which is so dramatically stylized. As stylized as Frank Miller’s work is, he still draws realistically proportioned people, so it’s very easy to take live action actors and create the Frank Miller comic book world around them. Whereas with my comic, that would be completely impossible: it would be like trying re-create Peanuts with real actors.

“Whenever someone contacts me to option Hate, nine times out of ten they want to make a live-action ‘indy’ flick out of it. They want to give it the Ghost World treatment. That seems to be the easiest,

most obvious thing to do with Hate, apparently. And it always turns out to be someone who’s basically going around pitching several ideas, just throwing sh*t at the wall to see what sticks, and they want the right to fling Hate around as well.

“I’m not opposed to the idea of Hate as a live-action movie, at least during times when that’s the only thing anyone is interested in doing with it, but I’m not really a movie guy. My stories aren’t exactly novel-length: they’re more bitesized. So I don’t think of what I do as movie material at all. To me, converting them into a TV series, preferably animated, is a natural and obvious way to go — especially something like Hate, where each installment already reads like a half-hour sitcom.

“I think movies are inherently too long, anyway. Whenever I’m watching a movie, I think, ‘This movie could easily be over now.’ But you always get the requisite plot twist two-thirds of the way through in order to justify the movie being two hours long and worth the nine bucks you had to pay to see it.

‘Oh, so he’s the bad guy.’ Yawn,” Pete laughed. “I prefer stories that are a bit more concise. You know, like a TV show! So the only possibilities that come up that I ever get remotely excited about are when something of mine has been optioned for the express purpose of making it into an animated TV show.”

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Model sheets of Babs Bradley, Tommy, and Butch Bradley, for the proposed MTV animated series of The Bradleys.

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Clockwise, from upper left: Murray Wilson, a “Fun Girl”, Terry and the Tykes, and The Fun Boys, from various episodes of Bagge’s Murray Wilson online animated shorts.

…a look inside Pete Bagge’s libertarian strips for Reason Magazine.

“Swingers of the World, Unite!”, Peter Bagge, March 2004 Print Edition

Since 2000, Bagge has contributed occasional strips to Reason, many of which are documentations of Pete’s attending everything from art galleries to political conventions to immigration rallies to, yes, swinger conventions.

Peter’s Reason work serves not only as a solid piece of journalism but also, unsurprisingly, as political satire and commentary.

But just what is a libertarian?

Webster’s Dictionary defines them as:

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In 2004, Pete Bagge walked into the Third Annual “Building Bridges” Conference in Seattle.

“I had no idea what to expect from this gathering of swingers, polymerizes, sadomasochists, transsexuals, and other non-traditional types of folks…” Bagge wrote for a 2004 issue of Reason, a color magazine for libertarians. “And my initial greeting had all of my uptight, traditionalist alarm bells ringing…My awkward reaction — coupled with my oversized press badge — immediately singled me out as an outsider, and from that point on the other attendees were polite yet wary towards me…”

PETER BAGGE

“A libertarian would say ‘If you built a better mousetrap and you’ve got the energy and wherewithal to maximize its profit potential, then, great if you can do it. You didn’t do something bad to become rich. It’s not about how much money you make, or how much money you can make — It’s just all about the freedom to do what you want, including the freedom to just simply get by. If your interests, mind, thoughts and your energy have nothing to do with money, then, fine.”

“A libertarian is someone that,” Bagge defined, “believes government should play as small a role in our lives as possible. The government is the only entity that has the legal right to kill or imprison you, steal from you, take your property, or force you [to] go to some f*cking hellhole like Iraq where you’ll be a human target. If anyone else did such things, it’d be considered a moral outrage, yet governments not only do it all the time, they have the right to do so. When you consider the enormous magnitude of such power, and the horrific results of that power being abused or misused — not just by evil or vindictive people but also by indifferent and/or incompetent people! — it seems obvious to us that the powers we give to any government entity should be as

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Bagge weighs in on the artist’s plight in “Real Art” (August/September 2004).

limited as possible and used in only the most extreme circumstances.”

“A libertarian, to put Reason Magazine’s spin on it, is someone who believes in free minds and free markets, which is also our subtitle,” Reason Magazine editor Nick Gillespie elaborated. “It’s essentially somebody who believes in less government control and more individual autonomy.

We’re often talked about as being socially liberal and fiscally conservative; to put it in the focus of specific issues, we’re in favor of more immigration, getting rid of the drug war; we’re in favor of letting businesses and individuals keep as much of their money as possible and spending it as they see fit. We’re against the draft and, generally, against war except where it’s super-defensive.

We’re in favor of gun rights and gay rights at the same time.”

Yet as with any belief system, Bagge observes, you get a wide array of opinions within the group itself.

“Most people think of politics simply on a left/right, ‘liberal’/’conservative’ grid, but there’s another political sliding scale regarding how much one believes government should be involved in our lives, if at all. On one end, you have

anarchists, who believe in no government.

Then there are so called ‘anarchocapitalists,’ who are anarchists who also believe in private property. From there you start to morph into libertarianism, who do believe in government (people who define us as ‘anti-government’ are technically wrong), albeit a small, limited one. And even within libertarianism you have a sliding scale, with borderline anarchists on one end to, say, self-defined ‘civil libertarians’ who are all for, say, unfettered 1st Amendment rights, yet who also are likely to wish that the 2nd Amendment (the right to own guns) never existed.

“On the opposite end of this grid would be totalitarian regimes, which can be of a communist, fascistic or even religious nature, but where the state attempts to control and regulate every single aspect of both an individual’s private life to the behavior and culture of society at large. It’s a very top-down view of the world, where society and culture is forbidden to shift and morph on its own, lest it stray from the government’s vision of what a perfect world should look like. Libertarians are both dismayed and amused by the way right- and left-wingers will make

From “Swingers of the World, Unite!”

(March 2004).

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look like? Does it mean we all get to be movie stars? That we all get to take turns playing first base for the Yankees?

I can’t act. I can’t hit a curve ball. So who would want to watch me try?

“That being said, I’m often dismayed at how often many more right-leaning self-described libertarians will forget or abandon their supposed core libertarian beliefs when push comes to shove. This was especially true after 9/11, where suspending habeas corpus and starting an unprovoked war suddenly seemed like a swell idea to many of us. I was shocked and disgusted by how many otherwise-intelligent fellow libertarians supported the Iraq war when it started.

This one group of war supporting young libertarians once told me that the concept of a nation’s ‘sovereignty’ (in this case, Iraq’s) is purely subjective and can be ignored if the situation warrants it. By that logic, there was nothing wrong with the 9/11 attacks, either, since the plane hijackers obviously felt that our own behavior warranted the US’ sovereignty to be little more than a matter of opinion as well!”

Pete’s Reason work is more in the vein of a political reporter’s, as opposed to a political activist’s. His strips are usually told in first person and often follow Pete as he investigates the respective subject. But at no point does Pete glorify his opinion; there’s a bias there, sure, but it is presented in a balanced manner that contains selfparody sprinkled over political satire and sound, balanced reporting.

PETER BAGGE

excuses for either Fascist or Communist regimes, as well as accuse each other of such sympathies. The root ideologies of both government systems may be different, but in practice the results are identical: a society devoid of freedom and living in abject terror of their own leaders. To choose one or the other is like asking someone how they’d like to be tortured to death.

“Since most of my friends are artist types, they tend to fall into the leftleaning ‘civil’ libertarian camp. They’re strong believers in free expression, yet they also display a shocking disdain (or indifference) towards, say, property rights, or of small business owners’ getting regulated right out of business. It all stems from this socialistic notion that to own something means you’re getting away with something, or that you might have something that someone else doesn’t have. It’s a worldview that sees all the world’s possessions and resources as finite, and fitting on a single pie chart, so if one person’s slice of the pie is bigger, then everyone else’s is bound to be smaller — yet God forbid someone should go bake another pie. Instead they just argue and obsess over the pie they see in front of them at any given moment!

It reflects an obsession with ‘fairness’ that I find infantile, yet it’s also why most left-leaning people also favor more government power. They want the government to enforce ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ between everyone, which is simply impossible. And where would it end? What would ‘total equality’ even

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In this final and unpublished Bat Boy strip from 2005, Bat Boy is recovering from both a cold, and being the victim of eminent domain.

“He fits into the Reason mold where he explains his argument, doesn’t appeal to authority, and doesn’t vanish into some kind of declaration of something,” Reason’s Gillespie observed. “He’s always showing the math of why he feels a certain way or believes a certain thing. I think that’s a generous act of a writer or artist, in general, where they say, ‘This is how I arrived at this decision and you can take it or leave it, but I’m not trying to fool you in any way.’ One of the things that is great about his political work, I think, is that it’s usually heavily reported. His best stuff is when he goes out and talks to people (whether they’re regular people or experts) and involves himself in the story and works through his thoughts about something. The reader gets to see that, and it can be quite exciting and exhilarating and fun. Part of that is that he always first turns his critical eye on himself and his own beliefs. There are very few people who do that, and I also think it’s one of the reasons why he’s not as popular as some of his peers and colleagues in the ’80s and ’90s. They put forth a more polished image, and what I like about Peter’s work is that you can see the flop sweat in it and that he brings you along on the creative [path].

I’m thinking of his political stuff, here, but it’s also true with all of it: he brings you along on the terrors and problems of his

characters (and even of himself) in a way that can be off-putting if you like shiny surfaces and super-slickly told tales.”

The process of coming to a final Reason strip begins with a simple phone chat between Pete Bagge and Nick Gillespie.

“The way that he and I work is that we talk about an idea or set of ideas and walk through the possible plot for something,” Gillespie told. “Then he’ll send an outline, which is usually ten times too long for the space that we have; then he’ll do a rough. With every stage, he’s working off the idea we talked about — but will then take it into something that’s even more new and interesting and different. There are always surprises at every step of the game, always better than the ones we agreed on.”

“My editor likes for me to come up with at least two, three, different ideas for him to ponder and go back and forth on,” Bagge said. “And one very big factor for me is what ideas will provide the most visuals. There are some issues where it’s so nuts-and-bolts, and where so much legalese is involved, that it’s hard to come up with any imagery for it.

As it is, all the outlines I first submit to Nick read like long-winded college essays, and a lot of what has to be left out are all the hypothetical arguments that simply can’t be drawn.

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“Reason Magazine is technically a libertarian magazine, but it’s not strictly so. They’re not ideologically rigid, which means that they give all their contributors a certain amount of wiggle room and [do] not have to worry about straying from the party line. They understand that no two people are going to agree on everything, so as long as your opinions don’t contradict basic libertarian principles, then they’re fine to run with it.”

Any given issue of Reason will present articles on anything from the founder of Wikipedia to a libertarian’s guide to the upcoming Presidential election.

Around the fiftieth page, Bagge’s fourpage color strip gives the issue’s dose of his unique viewpoint. Since the magazine is aimed at a niche political audience, it’s not surprising that Pete’s work, particularly concerning issues he feels strongly about, has occasionally generated a degree of controversy from the regular readers, “I don’t think everything I’ve done for them is libertarian in the truest sense,” Pete admitted. “I did one strip — it was just a one-pager, years ago — that many of the more radical libertarian types had a problem with because it dealt with intellectual property rights and my own problem with people being allowed to do whatever they wanted with a creator’s copyrighted material. Thanks to the internet, enforcing a copyright has become almost impossible, especially among younger people who not only now view everything as being for free but also as raw material for their ‘mash ups’ and other such worthless abortions. I certainly don’t favor the way that RIAA is addressing this problem. The music industry is being very heavy-handed in part because they’re not keeping up with the changes in technology fast enough and are too slow to come up with new business models. They’re being reactive rather than proactive. Both they and other corporations sometimes overreact to copyright infringement to such an extent, by ‘setting an example,’ that they do their cause more harm than good by generating a lot of ill will. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong in principle, or that the people they go after are always purely innocent martyrs. That being said, I

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also have trouble with people assuming that anything goes — that simply because something’s so easy to get away with, that also makes it perfectly moral and fine to do so.

“Plus I have my own ‘intellectual property’ to protect, and I’m less than thrilled to see someone appropriate my life’s work to say or promote something that I don’t like or believe in at all, and I’m flabbergasted that anyone thinks I have no right to feel this way or to be able to do anything about it. They’ll always use a big company like Disney as an example, but in many cases both me and the Disney Corporation are in the same boat. The fact that they’re a big multinational corporation and I’m just me is totally beside the point. Our concerns are the same, and our rights in the matter should be the same.

Conversely, neither Disney nor Little Tommy Anarchist should be allowed to ‘appropriate’ other people’s work at will, either!

“So this comic I did for Reason was about this old hippie underground cartoonist who was all about peace and love, and vaguely believed that ‘property= theft’ in his youth, so he passively allowed people to do whatever they wanted with his art work for band posters and whatnot. But soon his art is being used on the covers of corporate record sleeves, and on his deathbed he sees his images on a Franklin Mint plate. So by doing nothing and believing he shouldn’t care, he completely loses control over his own creation, but it’s, like, way too late for him to do anything about it.

“Some libertarians argue that the difficulty in enforcing copyright laws alone should render them null and void. They also point out the seeming absurdity of the notion that someone can ‘own’ an ‘idea.’ An interesting point in theory, yet in my case Buddy Bradley is a lot more than a mere ‘idea.’ He also represents decades of investments in sweat, labor, promotion and negotiations — as well as money.

A simple idea is useless if you don’t do anything with it. Also, libertarians are very protective of property rights in general, so why wouldn’t that concern extend to intellectual property? But especially with people who lean more towards the anarchist side and who tend to be younger: they have a hard

Bat Boy encounters the typical “American” family, their gluttony and materialism most displayed in the overweight children in panel five.

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Again, not to the point of compromising what he’s talking about. He’s a delight to work with, in a way that is extremely rare among writers and even more rare amongst illustrators or artists. He manages to squeeze out something new and different.

“I think that, like all great artists, Peter is informed on all ideas but is first and foremost a creator. When he’s writing a political essay for Reason it’s one thing, as when he’s doing Hate or Apocalypse Nerd. I think, rightly so, that he subjugates politics and ideology to the art. Where I do think that there’s a consistent overlap between Peter’s politics and creative impulses is that he’s very what I’d like to call ‘antinomianism,’ which means that he’s always suspicious of power and established order — and about the status quo. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t ever buy in to some of that, but he’s also very skeptical about it, and his first attitude is to kind of mock, deride and question authority. That comes through in a lot of his work: to not only have fun with political or intellectual authority, but also the conventions of everyday life and the stereotypes, clichés, and the stock characters of the comics and society in general.”

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time generating sympathy for my side of this debate. Their feelings are driven in large part by envy and resentment, in my opinion.”

Looking at the fact that Pete built his career off of Buddy and spent years developing the character into an underground cultural icon, one can understand his protectiveness over both Buddy and his own ability to further profit from his work, particularly when one considers how corporate America may have appropriated R. Crumb’s infamous “Keep on Truckin’” for use in advertisements. Seeing Buddy turned into a pissing window sticky lodged on rear windshields of redneck mobiles everywhere would dilute and undermine his status as an underground icon…kind of like when Nirvana went from being a great alternative band to an unwilling bridge into the musical mainstream.

In the end, according to Gillespie, it’s Pete’s established work ethic that stands above anything else.

“One of the things he’s great to work with is in terms of deadlines,” Gillespie noted. “He has a definite vision, but, like most creative people, he is incredibly collaborative, and he takes editing and suggestions well, as opposed to being a complete jackass.

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Angry Thoreauan #27 cover detail Pen and Ink, computer coloring Inks by Eric Reynolds This ‘zine cover shows the competition faced by the US Postal Service, and their supposed retaliation against Fed Ex, Airborne Express, and UPS, playing upon the term “going postal”. Note the addition of “-ed” to the Fed Ex truck in the background.

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“Just Say No To Intellectual Property!”

2003 Pen and Ink

This strip abounds with Robert Crumb references: From the “Cheap Thrill Trucking Co.” album covers in panel four (Crumb illustrated covers for the 1968 album Cheap Thrills, from Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the cover features a “Keep on Truckin’” type figure), while Zap soda in panel six is named after Crumb’s iconic Zap Comix. Panel eight features another “Truckin’” reference. Crumb, in 1976, had lost the rights to his ubiquitous cartoon, and it has since been exploited and appropriated in bumper stickers and corporate ads.

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, “Now That s Entertainment!”

2001 Pen and Ink, Computer Graytones In Pete’s first Reason strip, he takes a stab at the Oscar Awards, a ceremony more rife with politics and the faux social concerns of celebrities. The punchline to this strip— Bagge’s cameo of an apparently drunken and high Bob Dylan, a singer apparently well past his prime.

“I don’t smoke pot. I don’t much care for it, to tell you the truth. Being high isn’t a plus for me. I don’t hate it, but it’s like, ‘Okay, now I’m high, but the way I was five minutes ago was just as fine.’”

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smoked pot, and millions of us do it every day, yet the only difference between them and the ones in jail for it is that they got caught. Therefore, they must be ‘stupid,’ and not deserving of our sympathy.

That’s how we justify the reasons other people go to jail for committing the same crimes that we do. That and ‘they can’t handle it,’ like getting caught with pot is the equivalent of not being able to ‘handle’ it. We’ve also become so accustomed to micromanaging the lives of our poorer and less-educated citizens that we look upon them as children that need to be given ‘time outs’ for naughty behavior – and many of these people have internalized this mentality. Not just the poor, but almost everybody! ‘I have no control over my own life and behavior! I’ve been bad!

Give me a spanking! But please, somebody take care of me!’ The nanny state has created an entire nation of infants!

“The thing is I think that pot should be completely legal, and what I originally wanted to write for Reason was a piece about people who had been busted for mere possession, or for selling small amounts to friends. I didn’t want to write about the medical marijuana issue at all, but everybody I talked to, including my editors, kept relentlessly pushing me in that direction. Not that I wasn’t sympathetic, but it seemed almost too easy, and I felt like I was being used by medical marijuana activists to push their agenda. I was being used! But the thing is, if it’s such an easy sell then why are we still sending these sick people and the people trying to help them to jail?

What clearly is an outrage to me obviously

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“As soon as you say someone is dependent on illegal drugs, it dehumanizes them to some degree. We’ve been conditioned to think that anybody, whether they take drugs or (especially) sell them, have sacrificed some of their humanity, and thus are deserving of pain and punishment. So who cares what happens to them? This has always been the case to varying degrees, but lately the drug war has completely warped the way we view how and why someone else chooses to alter their mental state.

“The last thing I wanted to do was to just make this guy (in the Reason comic) out to be a martyr, like St. Francis with arrows going through him. I showed him the way he was: he was kind of a doofus, and I found his religious beliefs – he’s a recently converted ‘Messianic Jew,’ which is a form of Christian fundamentalism that both looks forward to the end of the world and is trying to make it happen – rather appalling, though I never told him so, since it was besides the point.

He’s really not a particularly bright guy, and a big part of the reason he keeps getting in trouble is because he’s kind of stupid. I didn’t want to sugarcoat him, but rather tried to get the point across that just because he’s kind of dopey doesn’t mean he deserves to go to jail.

“Unfortunately, our jails are full of stupid people. Stupidity is a bigger common denominator among the incarcerated than being a sociopath or prone to violence, I think – though economic status is by far the biggest factor.

But most American’s do think stupidity is a crime, in the sense that most of us have

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isn’t much of an outrage at all to most people. Well, it is when they stop and think about it, but they’ve become so immune to the relentless ‘drugs bad!’ sound bites they hear all day that they accept all the excuses for it, which is basically that medical marijuana clinics make it too easy for the non-sick to get their hands on pot.

Heaven forbid! And like they can’t get it anywhere else! But even sympathetic prosecutors I spoke to feel that the risk of healthy people getting their hands on it just to get high trumps any sick person smoking it to help them stay alive. It’s a horrific distortion of reality that we’ve all become conditioned into believing.

“So I realized that if the public still isn’t convinced that our medical marijuana laws are an outrage, how was I going to convince the unconvinced that it should all be legal, for any reason? And while it’s rare that anybody goes to jail for simple possession, you still get caught up in the system with an asterix next to your name, and go through all that community service and counseling crap, which in itself is very humiliating and paternalistic.

“Making any drug illegal ruins people’s lives more than the drug itself.

It drives up the price ten-fold, which contributes to crime and economic hardship. It also contributes to lower or bad quality, which in the case of a drug like heroin is not only the source of almost all the health woes and fatalities attributed to it. And then there’s going to jail itself.

Drug warriors love to say that illegal drugs ‘destroy families.’ Like sending mommy or daddy off to prison doesn’t?!? Even if you avoid going to jail, the court costs alone will bankrupt you. So much for junior’s college fund! Say goodbye to your home! What a great benefit to America’s

families the Drug War is!

“Also, nobody dies from pot; it has no negative health effects. Even when you’re actually inhaling smoke, the nature and chemical makeup of the smoke is completely different than cigarette smoke.

The only unhealthy element involved is the paper, but if you smoke with a pipe, it doesn’t do any damage to the lungs. If it did we’d be hearing about it and warned of it constantly, yet even as prone to lies as the government is about pot, they never claimed that it’s carcinogenic.

“Still, the amount of lies that our government tells about pot, on a daily basis, is unbelievable. It’s all because you can’t copyright pot: it’s a weed and if they made it legal, then everybody would just grow it in their back yards. But since nobody can copyright it, nobody can claim the rights to it and therefore, no corporation can make huge profits from it. Drug companies are constantly trying to come up with these other drugs that can help cancer and AIDS patients with their nausea, but nothing works nearly so well. They’re desperately trying to come up with a synthetic form of THC that they can then patent, but they’re also obliged to come up with a product that no one can get stoned off of, which is both pathetic and hilarious. It’s like trying to invent a form of alcohol that won’t get you drunk, yet they claim that’s what the patients want, though I’d imagine that getting high is the least of their concerns. ‘They can’t drive or go to work when they’re high!’ Perhaps not, but they accomplish even less when they’re puking their guts out. But God forbid anyone should get high on pot. That’s the worst outcome of all, even worse than death, according to our own government!”

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“A Menace to Society”, page 2 2005 Pen and Ink, Computer Coloring In this sequence, Bagge illustrates the trials and tribulations of a medical marijuana patient.

PETER BAGGE

Batboy strip

Pen and Ink 2004

The Batboy strip merged political satire with the media frenzy that accompanies celebrity status, especially in Batboy’s appointing a group of divas and pop stars to his cabinet.

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Batboy strip Pen and Ink, computer coloring 2005

Batboy, despondent over not being able to marry Beyonce Knowles (whom, it is revealed, is part Sasquatch), decides to raise his Presidency to a Kinghood, and turns America into a fascist state. Meanwhile, Beyonce and Lindsay Lohan spark a “diva crime spree”, akin to the LA riots sparked by the Rodney King case.

…we hear of Pete’s battles with corporate comicdom.

“I’d love to be able to come up with something like Hate again, where it’d be some character or characters that I can always come up with story ideas for. The main thing is, can I do that and have it become something that would sell?”

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DC had zero expectations for it. But right after the second issue came out, [DC Comics’ Publisher Paul] Levitz pulled the plug on it. It was very strange, because we both wondered why Levitz ever agreed to do the book in the first place if he had absolutely no intention of keeping it going. I suspect he was doing Joey a favor — a little bit of indulgence after that Bizarro book he edited did better than anyone thought it would, but man, what kind of a ‘reward’ was that? ‘All right. Favor granted. Play time’s over. Now get back to work on The Flash!’” Pete laughed.

Sweatshop is just one example of Bagge’s newfound dealings with the mainstream after two decades of being a stalwart indy artist. While working for “the other” of the Big Two companies, Marvel Comics, Pete (notorious for not being a fan of super-heroes), took on Marvel Comics’ corporate icon SpiderMan for the one-shot comic The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man. Under the direct influence of Bagge, even Spider-Man — perhaps the most flexible of super-heroes — gained new flexibility in both content and rendering.

However, when one looks at the unconventional take on the Spider-Man mythos, it becomes obvious that Bagge was given a high degree of freedom on the book. In Bagge’s hands, Peter Parker becomes a self-centered corporate hack, then a politically-charged recluse. What sets Parker off on this change? The

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After Hate had taken its final bow as an ongoing series, Peter Bagge wrote a new ongoing series for DC Comics in 1999, Yeah!, drawn by Love and Rockets creator Gilbert Hernandez. This all-ages comic followed an outer-space rock group made up of three girls, and only lasted nine issues. Pete’s impetus for doing it: to have made something for his daughter, Hannah (then nine), to read.

Following it up, also as an ongoing at DC, was Sweatshop, coming out in 2003 and featuring unscrupulous cartoonist Mel Bowling, creator of “Freddy Ferret,” and his bullpen of young artists. Assisted by artists Johnny Ryan, Stephanie Gladden, Bill Wray, and Jim Blanchard, Sweatshop balanced the innuendo of Hate with a tone more generally audience-friendly than any of Pete’s underground work.

“By the last three issues, I was really happy with the way it was coming out. I had a regular group of collaborators who were all working out great — Johnny Ryan was one of them, and I don’t know if you know Stephanie Gladden? She’s mainly an animator and works at the Cartoon Network in Atlanta. She can draw anything and is very easy to work with. Plus I had a million ideas for the cast of characters I’d come up with for the series.”

Unfortunately, two issues into Sweatshop’s run, word from on high came to kill the series after the sixth issue.

“My editor, Joey Cavalieri, told me it wasn’t even selling all that bad, considering

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The shoe is on the other foot this time: from J. Jonah Jameson’s to Peter Parker’s, in this sequence from The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

newly-uncovered fact that his late Uncle Ben was apparently a shady character shakes him to the core, causing him to question his reason for being Spider-Man. It was a parody of a mainstream super-hero comic with the heart of an alternative one.

“Believe it or not, there was an autobiographical element in that story,” Bagge admitted. “The way I told the story of Peter Parker, he starts out as Spider-Man and he’s trying to save the world, and I related to that only to the degree that he’s working really hard at something, trying to do ‘good work’ and make a name for himself, just as I had to plug away at my comics for ages with little or no reward.

So I related to what Parker was going through, while constantly questioning whether it was all worth it…

“Then I had Parker turn into sort of a ‘sell out’ by going corporate — like I was doing by taking on work from the likes of Marvel! And the motivation was mostly all based on the bottom line, just doing it for the money because nothing else really seems to matter, when push comes to shove. I also had Parker turn into a parody of one of his co-creators, Stan Lee. I’d read that Parker was vaguely based on Lee back when he was a young sensitive nobody, but I thought it’d be amusing if Parker evolved the same way that Stan did once he achieved some success, as sort of an arrogant, fast-talking huckster. There are these urban legends about Stan Lee forcing some guy, like an inker, to lick his shoes. If somebody wanted more work, Stan would go, ‘Sure,

if you lick my shoes.’ And the guy did it, which Stan thought was hysterical. So much power! I have no idea if that story is true or not, but it certainly made for a great visual gag. I even sexualized it somewhat, just to make the whole thing that much more distasteful.”

Spider-Man was created in 1963 by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko for Amazing Fantasy #15, soon launching into his own successful title: The Amazing Spider-Man. While Lee has been a high-profile media figure for some time, the under-rated Ditko is a highly charged Objectivist who has spent the past few decades using his comics as a political and intellectual forum. Lee’s snappy dialogue, coupled with Ditko’s moody, atmospheric artwork, created an unlikely hero born from two unlikely and diametrically opposed parents.

“With Peter Parker as Stan Lee, he suddenly comes off as a blowhard who winds up alienating everyone, specifically his girlfriend. I even had Parker express the kind of the more selfish ‘me first, get out of my way’ aspects of Objectivism (as well as libertarianism) that people often criticize both philosophies for, like when he’s telling his girlfriend how much he hates the UN and that he’s basically all about making a buck — only my point is that he doesn’t really get it. His success has gone to his head, in that he thinks money and success is the only thing that matters.

“I can even relate to that to a tiny degree because, at the end of Hate’s run, I

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The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man, page 6 2002 Pen and Ink This sequence is the turning point in Spider-Man’s life: he realizes the folly and lack of profitability in fighting crime.

With Spider-Man drawn on the right side of every panel, it feels as if he’s just out of place from each event, and finally removed enough (notice how he is given more white space in the final panel than in others) to develop a more objective view. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

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The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man, page 15 2002 Pen and Ink Bagge reverses camera angles in the first two panels, as Peter goes to the answering machine. The close-ups in panels two and three pull back with Peter’s reactions, settling on a full body shot for the most dramatic/comedic (and, arguably) important panel. Jameson’s final panel exclamation is a reference to Daily Planet editor Perry White, in the 1950s Adventures of Superman television show. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

Hulk goes crazy in a biker bar in the unpublished Incorrigible Hulk one-shot. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

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“Critics of libertarianism (which Objectivism is closely related to, politically) say it’s all just about making money,” Bagge notes. “That it’s solely about self-interest, like a way for rich people to justify their wealth. I’ve actually met very few rich libertarians, myself.

Many of them are dirt poor. Steve Ditko, from what I understand, doesn’t have that much money. He’s not obsessed with making money, and neither are most libertarians or objectivists I know.

Money often has nothing to do with why they believe what they believe.”

Bagge, an active libertarian, finds himself at odds with Rand and her philosophy. “She’s very problematic, and

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went through this bubble where a lot of things were possible. I had the TV deal and I was getting these lucrative advertising jobs the likes of which I’d never been offered before. And while I don’t regret taking these jobs on, I also was doing work that was designed to express myself at that point. I didn’t feel bad about that because I honestly felt like I had nothing left to say through my work! So why not just go for the money! But I certainly never became the monster that I portrayed Parker as.

“Then in the comic I had Parker go through a bit of a crisis where he suddenly realized: ‘This is all wrong, too. I was second-guessing myself early on about what to do, but here I wanted everything, and I got everything, and I’m still not happy. I’m as confused as ever.’

“The third chapter was more of an epilogue, where he turns into a Steve Ditko type: the shut-in who just reads books and is not obsessed with money at all. He’s simply interested in his own intellectual pursuits — and being left alone.”

Ditko is known to rarely leave his apartment, where he regularly corresponds and writes his statements on Objectivism (a philosophy started by libertarian author Ayn Rand) and his perspective on comics history. There have been stories (some of which may be unfounded) of Ditko’s doing everything from slicing up old pages of original Spider-Man art to turning down royalty checks. His low profile has made Steve Ditko one of the most mysterious, criticized, and unique personalities in comic book history.

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I’m somewhat reluctant to associate myself with her too much,” Bagge said.

“Even though her politics were libertarian, she herself hated libertarians. She was very eccentric, very stubborn and selfrighteous, and very unforgiving.

Everything with her was ‘my way or the highway,’ and she got worse as she got older. The reason she hated libertarianism was because she thought it reached the wrong conclusions, especially regarding aesthetic matters. To her it wasn’t ‘okay’ for someone to prefer rock ’n’ roll over, say, classical music. Anyone who came to that conclusion was morally flawed, and needed to re-examine all of their beliefs until they came to the ‘correct’ conclusion, such as that classical music is clearly superior to rock music.

“She politicized everything, right down to the ‘correct’ way a water pitcher should be designed. She strongly believed in the concept of form following function, which is why she loved steel and glass skyscrapers and hated ornate, old world cathedrals — which is something I totally disagree with her about! It’s ironic that she calls her philosophy ‘Objectivism,’ since it’s anything but [objective]. I think the reasons behind her tastes were totally subjective, since skyscrapers represented everything new and exciting and modern and American, while gargoyles and excessive décor reminded her of Mother Russia and the old world she escaped from. It was a gut-level reaction, even though she despised the very

notion of people thinking with their ‘gut.’

“Libertarians also say you can’t legislate morals, and that’s part of why we want the separation of church and state, because you just simply can’t legislate morality.

It’s impractical. But she insisted that her world view was totally morally based — which is ironic since people who are critical of her see her as completely immoral. They always describe her politics as the politics of selfishness, as if that’s all she’s really advocating. She was advocating freedom more than anything else, which is what I very much admire her for, but to someone with a more socialistic or statist worldview, ‘freedom’ and ‘selfishness’ are somewhat interchangeable.

“She’s probably the most famous ‘libertarian,’ since her work is required reading at many schools, and it’s more engaging than other libertarian authors and philosophers. Her novels were entertaining, if somewhat repetitive and overblown. But it’s unfortunate that she’s the most well-read proponent of the libertarian worldview, since it means that I’m frequently asked to explain or justify her own very personal brand of craziness!”

Bagge followed suit with The Incorrigible Hulk, a follow-up one-shot intended for 2003 release. Basically, Marvel was so in the red that they were willing to give anything a shot. Marvel editor Axel Alonso, fresh from recruiting alternative artist Mike Allred to draw an X-Men title, brought more alternative artists into the fold, including Pete.

In The Incorrigible Hulk, Bruce Banner and a female colleague are working on a “psychoactive serum” that tends to act like either Viagra or Prozac on the Banner and Hulk personas, respectively, with either Banner being a complete lecher or the Hulk being overly sensitive.

“The plan was to give The Hulk the ‘Bagge’ treatment like I did with SpiderMan,” Pete recalled the conception of the still-born comic book. “The only difference I had in mind was to be a bit less personal and more over the top, visually and humor wise. I wrote a story that was approved by the editors, but by the time I started drawing it, Marvel’s ownership changed hands. The new owners paid a fortune for it, and the new board of directors’ attitude reflected this by being overly protective of their valuable ‘brands,’ including The Hulk. My editor did his best to make sure the story met their approval, but we had to make

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of ‘potentially actionable’ things each day in the scripts that were submitted to them. They were just inventing work for themselves — or simply trying to justify their jobs’ mere existence.

Otherwise, they’d have to find a job as real lawyers, God forbid!”

At one point, so Pete had heard, the editor of the Space Ghost Coast to Coast comic book (licensed through Cartoon Network, which is also owned

by Time-Warner/AOL) decided to have Batman appear in an issue as a guest on Space Ghost’s talk show. The script, naturally, went to the lawyers, and hilarity ensued: “The lawyers went through the script and said, ‘You can’t have Batman appear in a Cartoon Network comic book. DC Comics might sue.’

“She [the editor] pointed out that not only are both imprints owned by the same company, Time Warner, but the people editing Batman comics were right down the hall from her! She jokingly suggested that she go ask them if they’d sue, but the lawyer said, ‘It’s not their call.’

‘Well, whose call is it, then?’

‘It’s my call.’

‘Wait — are you saying you might sue yourself?’

‘Yup.’” Pete paused while I was busy laughing, then continued.

“So she said, ‘What’s with this ‘might’ stuff? If you’re the one who’ll be doing the suing, why don’t you just tell me now if you’re going to sue or not?’

But the lawyer said, ‘I can’t make that decision now. I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it, but I’d rather not come to it. So take Batman out of the comic, just to be safe, okay?’

“It was complete madness, like something out of a Lewis Carroll novel,” Pete laughed.

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one absurd compromise after another.”

One of those compromises involved changing the word “drug” into “serum” because the heads at Marvel felt that taking a non-prescription “drug” would reflect badly on the desperate Dr. Banner and anti-social Hulk.

“Eventually the entire comic was finished, and I was paid in full for it, but the board refused to release it. Even after all the hurdles we jumped through, and the money they spent on it, they still to this day — five years later — refuse to release it. I have no idea what the problem is, either, other than the fact that they can’t stand their own property being satirized on their own dime. I guess they never heard of Not Brand ECCH! [a classic Marvel book of self-satire and parody]. I’m still told it’ll be released one of these days, though...”

The irony of the situation is that Marvel axed Pete’s comic for fear that it would reflect badly on the Hulk movie, which turned out to be one of those comic book adaptations that everyone likes to sweep under the rug, hoping to forget the money wasted on theater admission (or the lost two-and-a-half hours of their lives they’ll never get back).

On the DC end of things, however, Pete got a better feel of the corporate mindset from the company owned by the Time-Warner/AOL conglomerate: “A funny thing about working for DC — well, ‘funny,’ as in ‘terrible’ — is that they have an in-house legal team,” Bagge revealed. “They have full-time lawyers who have become the company’s de facto censors. The Comics Code Authority never told me to change a thing while I was writing Yeah! and Sweatshop. Yeah!’s editor, Shelly Bond, even tested the CCA one time, just to see what we could get away with on an all-ages title. We put the word ‘concubine’ in one of the scripts, even though we had no intention of using the word ourselves, since we ourselves thought it was a little too seedy a word for a kiddy comic. We just left it in the script to see if The Comics Code would say anything. And they didn’t! They never suggested a single change. I doubt they even read our scripts, whoever ‘they’ are.

“But the DC lawyers were always going, ‘You can’t do this, can’t do that, someone might sue, someone might take offense,’ usually over the silliest, most inane nonsense. It was as if they had a quota, like they had to find a set number

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THE MEGALOMANIACAL SPIDER-MAN, cover rough 2002 Pencil Bagge’s original concept thumbnail for the Spider-Man cover features Spider-Man, holed up in an apartment ã lá his co-creator Steve Ditko, but now overweight and washed out. The logo is that of the classic “Amazing Spider-Man”, as opposed to the one-shot’s final. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

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THE MEGALOMANIACAL SPIDER-MAN, cover 2002 Pen and Ink Note the differences from the rough to the final: Spidey’s eyes are open and tired looking in this version, whereas they were “x”ed out in a classic drunken or unconscious manner originally, and there is also the a handgun by his left hand and resting head, adding a suicidal slant to the piece. As a result, this takes the original pathetic concept, and makes it tragic. Resting on the bed is a copy of Reason magazine, on the floor under his desk is a laundry ticket (at one point in the story, J. Jonah Jameson brings Peter his laundry), further down on the floor is a bound copy of Jameson’s anti-Spidey editorials. Pete gives a nod to Bill Griffith’s cult comic strip Zippy the Pinhead : a strip is pinned to the bulletin board. In the final version, Spidey’s eyes were filled in white, and the copy of Reason was obscured by a UPC code. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

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The Incorrigible Hulk, page 15 2003 Pen and Ink, Computer Coloring In this sequence from the unpublished Hulk story for Marvel (a follow-up to The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man ), Bruce Banner has been drugged with a “serum” that intensifies his libido and, when he hulks out…wackiness ensues. The opening splash panel, of Hulk holding both a light post and telephone pole (while exaggerated) display the Hulk’s large scale from the start, while the three panel sequence with the Hulk’s love interest Trashy serves as the unexpected punch line. One can only wonder what would’ve happened next had this not been a Marvel comic… © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

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The Incorrigible Hulk, page 17 2003 Pen and Ink, Computer Coloring This page, though two later, provides an interesting contrast in the splash composition: Hulk and Trashy’s apparently post-coital talk (the impressions on both pillows, as well as Trashy’s semi-undressed state are testimony enough) has the Hulk viewed in a more diminutive manner. The word balloons in the splash bring the eye around clockwise to the second panel, and along. While the concept of Hulk crying in his Fruedian milk is funny enough, the “cute little puppy” detail is the clincher, conjuring up a parallel to Lenny from Of Mice and Men. © 2007 Marvel Enterprises

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Sweatshop #2, page 2 2003 Pen and Ink Inked by Bill Wray The boys of Mel Bowling’s sweatshop have their lunch interrupted by Carrie, their camaraderie splintered with her arrival.

While they hold their heads at chin level through Nick’s impersonation of their boss, they instantly blush and tilt their heads at awkward angles when a girl their age starts talking with them, inferring a lack of experience with the opposite sex.

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Sweatshop #5, page 21 2003 Pen and Ink Neil Gaiman concludes his Sweatshop cameo in this sequence, having had his pants set aflame by a twisted admirer of Carrie’s.

Carrie and Nick’s apathetic attitudes lend more humor to panel five, where Neil is mostly off-panel, chiming in with a cry of pain.

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SPANISH VERSION OF GQ 2000 Pen and Ink, computer coloring The grandfather in the center of this image, his fists curled up in defiance of his unruly brood…is simply trying to get a sports game in.

“I do not hear anything!” he proclaims (he is, as the hearing aid in his right ear attests, already hard of hearing), as his wife calls them a “gang of animals” from the kitchen in the upper left, and a son claims the sport “makes him thirsty” as he chugs a beer.

Sweatshop #4 cover 2003 Pen and Ink, computer coloring PETER BAGGE

Mel Bowling reveals an updated version of his character Freddy the Ferret, one wielding twin automatics, the collective shock shown in the staff’s shared word balloon and airborne feet. The bending of the poster serves a visual device, bringing the eye down to the feet, which finish the arc started with Bowling’s figure.

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Sweatshop #6 cover 2003 Pen and Ink, computer coloring

This final issue reunited Mel with his estranged bum of a son, and his ex-wife. The looping and rubbery arms on Mel and his fleeing ex exaggerate Mel’s anger and her fear, while the union of their failed marriage is sitting, interestingly enough, right between the two.

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TOM STRONG’S TERRIFIC TALES #12 (Jan 2005) Pen and Ink Alan Moore (writer) with Peter Bagge (pencils) and Eric Reynolds (inks)

This two-page sequence features Moore and Bagge’s alternate version of Tom Strong meeting a washed-up pop culture icon, who is undoubtedly the Kool-Aid Man (cleverly disguised, via the advice of DC Comics’ lawyers, by dark shades and a change of color). When he first appears on panel two, his pitcher-head is fully exposed like his progenitor. As the sequence progresses, and K-Dog becomes progressively abusive, his jacket starts to creep up above the lower part of his “face”. Note his Humpty-Dumpty like plunge…the use of sound effects for his landing, along with the skull and crossbones icon to denote a “death rattle” gives the sequence a dark, comedic twist. The punch line is in K-Dog’s significant other coming onto (and being taken up on) by Tom Strong who (as evidenced in his paunch, receding hairline, and unshaven face) has also become washed up.

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THE COMICS JOURNAL #106 COVER 1985 Pen and Ink Peter Bagge and Robert Crumb

This “jam” cover between both artists, featuring juvenile versions of the two artists, showcases both of their mutual interests; drawn on their own sides but without a solid dividing line, their art blending seamlessly together.

DETAIL: BAGGE SIDE

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With a figure of Big Daddy Roth’s Rat Fink perched on the crate, Bagge’s side includes a television, copies of Screw (a pornographic magazine that Bagge did comics for in the ’80s), Crumb’s own Zap Comix, Not Brand Ecch!

(Marvel Comics’ parody comic) and DC Comics’ short-lived Sergio Aragones-helmed Plop! (the PLOP! Sound effect is put to much use in all of Bagge’s work, particularly in Hate).

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DETAIL: CRUMB SIDE

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Note how the dress mannequin in the background is built like Crumb’s ideal woman: wide-hipped and with a large butt.

A stack of books on an old footlocker (including Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle), copies of funny animal comics Pogo and Mighty Mouse (Crumb is noted for using anthromorphic funny animal archetypes in his early underground work), and a stack of old 78 records. In the foreground is a crank-operated record player from the early 1900s.

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GQ OFFICE PIN-UP Pen and Ink While the focus of this illustration is the central figure, almost out of his mind in the boring office environment with bloodshot eyes and hands clasped on his head…the garage band and party posters in his cubicle indicate him as a social figure, one who finds the insular nature of an office cubicle his personal hell. However, each cubicle’s inhabitant displays the office as a microcosm of society: there’s a suicidal office worker in the upper left corner (a bullet wound in his head, gun laying by him) who is reflected in the Dilbert strip pasted in the foreground cubicle. The foreground inhabitant is, perhaps the most interesting in her eclectic tastes: her musical tastes include oldies like The Who and The Animals, as well as modern girl group Bewitched (all in line with Bagge’s musical preferences), yet her love of comic strips include the over-rated and badly drawn Dilbert, as well as the innocuous Cathy.

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THE MATRIX, 1999 Felt Tip Pen, computer colors Peter Bagge and Johnny Ryan The main character in this one-panel strip is reflective of many who saw the ground-breaking Matrix: confused at the abstract concepts presented in this over-rated action flick, but not wanting to admit it. The non-speaking audience members are dressed in the garb of Matrix villain Agent Smith (indicating that they have been assimilated into the false world which the movie is set in). The protagonist’s white glasses and grimace draw attention to him, setting him apart from the world surrounding him…ironically like the main character in the film. © 2007 Warner Bros.

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CARTOON NETWORK #10 Kids Next Door strip Pen and Ink

Tom Wharburton (writer) with Peter Bagge (pencils) and Eric Reynolds (inks)

The subject of this strip, with his trademark #2 on his classic football helmet, has pulled the old “bait and switch” on his anticipated attackers. Note how the baited bag reads “Burgers”, while the real back reads (appropriately) “Real Burgers”. The method of using labels to tell the story adds to the child-like charm of this strip.

…Apocalypse Nerd and fighting the post-apocalyptic action hero cliché.

“He ain’t no take-charge guy, no Mel Gibson or Kurt Russell, ready and able to kick anybody’s ass.”

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more. Can we follow somebody else around instead?’

“In other words, the protagonist is never like this Perry guy in Apocalypse Nerd,” Bagge elaborated. “He ain’t no take-charge guy, no Mel Gibson or Kurt Russell, ready and able to kick anybody’s ass, you know? It’s always the guy that just goes around kicking ass. And they never show where he goes to the bathroom. Or where he gets food and water from. Like, what is he living on? Rats? They don’t cover that at all. It just shows them getting into fights and hooking up with a hot babe.”

Not the case with Apocalypse Nerd, Bagge’s six-issue miniseries that started at Dark Horse Comics in 2005 and is drawing out over a period of two years. When computer programmer Perry and his drug-dealing pal Gordon head back from a weekend of camping in the mountains, they find out that Seattle has been nuked by the North Koreans. Sure, they can go back to the cabin and live “off of the land,” like books, the Boy Scouts, and movies tell us we can…or can they?

Like all post-apocalyptic stories, the inspiration was a combination of

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Here in America, we’ve always been scared of our stuff blowing up. Despite the short lull between the Cold War and the supposed “War on Terror,” the concept of post-apocalyptic America has been ingrained in our collective mind for decades, whether in The Road Warrior or Planet of the Apes.

Fact of apocalyptic, cinematic life: if society is on the brink of extinction because the proverbial red button was pushed on the other side (read: by communists or terrorists), it’ll take a dashing hero with Mel Gibson’s good looks or Charlton Heston’s damn dirty elocution to save us all.

“Everybody’s fascinated by this whole idea of the post-apocalyptic world,” Bagge observed. “But whenever such a world is dramatized, you always follow a guy, like the one guy out of a hundred million who could not only survive anything but thrive in that environment. They never have a panic attack or get shot in the c*ck because, if that would happen, they would immediately stop being the ‘hero.’ Nobody wants to follow or identify with the guy whose d*ck just got shot off. You’ll go, ‘All right, I don’t want to pretend to be him any-

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the political climate at the time and the author’s own worst fears: “At the same time the Bush Administration was building a case for going to war with Iraq, I was listening to a news reporter on NPR quoting a spokesman for the president of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, saying they had the technology to nuke Seattle. I presume they mentioned Seattle because it’s the closest city, geographically, to North Korea. Yet here I was, sitting in Seattle as I’m hearing this, wondering if maybe we’re going to war with the wrong country,” Bagge laughed. “As crazy as Saddam was, he never came close to ever saying anything like that.

Yet everyone, including the media, was so focused on ‘getting Saddam’ that this overt threat got no play at all.

Nuts!

“But it also made me think about what if the North Koreans did nuke my hometown. Well, of course, I’d be annihilated, since I live in Seattle’s city limits. But what if I was way out in the boonies, way beyond where you would suffer from any of the immediate negative effects of the blast? In fact, I once saw a map showing where the ‘safest’ parts of the country are in case of a nuclear attack, and the northern reaches of the Cascade Mountains, just a couple hundred miles from here, was one of those ‘safe zones.’ So once I conceived of the Apocalypse Nerd story, I decided that would be the perfect place for the protagonists to be at the time of an attack, since they wouldn’t have to contend with radiation sickness, at least not right away. And instead I could just focus on the hilarity of them having absolutely no idea how to live in the woods.”

Pretty is something Apocalypse Nerd isn’t: The Bagge-drawn “cartoony” characters create an initial false sense of comfort, disarming the reader into thinking it’ll be mere dark comedy — until Perry blows the head off a wounded deer at point-blank range or Gordo kills a man in front of the man’s own family. Apocalypse Nerd earns its merit as a human drama.

“It’s that mix that I keep talking about, that sweet and sour combination,” Bagge observed. “The cartooning, to me, makes it palatable and makes it easier to get through some of the more grotesque things that are happening in the comic.”

“When you read the whole thing — once it’s all done, that is — the story keeps taking darker turns, where the protagonist keeps doing what he has to do to stay alive, but it’s extremely unpleasant. You know how when you watch the news, watch what’s going on in Baghdad, and they talk about how some young guy just drove a truck full of explosives into a marketplace, and you think, ‘How the hell can anyone do such a thing? What brought him to such a low point?’ Or, ‘What’s wrong with those people?!?’ as if they were made up of some completely different genetic makeup than our own and that we would never perform something so despicable, regardless of the circumstances. But then, I guarantee you that when that guy was a kid his ultimate dream wasn’t to blow up a bunch of innocent people while they’re busy buying vegetables! Even as an adult, if he had any real options he wouldn’t be blowing people up. ‘Hey pal, how’d you like to be a life guard on a nude beach on the Riviera?’ ‘No, thanks, I’d rather to be a suicide bomber instead.’

“My point is, I think almost all of us are capable of doing truly awful, despicable things, depending on the circumstances, and if we feel like we had no choice. The desire to remain alive can override pretty much anything, and that’s what I wanted to show in this story.”

Think about how the Internet has provided hypochondriacs with yet another way to misdiagnose their hangnails and how people tend to believe everything they read. Perry falls into a similar trap with a copy of

A writer who had survived the Great Depression once told me that “two pieces of bread and ketchup made a sandwich” for him in those days. That generation suffered when the few amenities in their lives were suddenly taken away from them: many barely survived. Yet they had no airconditioning or television, no DVDs or online escapism. Imagine what you would do if everything crashed down around you at once…if you’re like this author, you might get sick without airconditioning or go nuts without checking your e-mail twice a day.

What would that loss turn you into?

Maybe, just maybe, not too far from what Perry, the Apocalypse Nerd himself, becomes in the end.

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How to Survive Alone in the Woods.

Bagge is commenting not only on our tendency to mindlessly believe anything we see in print, but also on the rather pampered state of modern society, where amenities have become categorized as necessities.

“I thought it’d be funny for him to come across this book, which actually does have good, practical information.

But the advice is essentially what kind of bark you can or can’t eat, what kind of plants, fungus, mushrooms…all this gunk that’ll keep you from starving to death. It would keep you alive, but, then, if that’s all you did eat, you’d probably want to die!” Bagge laughed.

“I mean, who wants to live on bark?

“Also, a guy I know told me about how he and three other friends all went on a long hunting trip. They wanted to be like real frontiersmen, so they agreed to just eat whatever they hunted or gathered while they were out there. Of course, they were all either too lazy or ‘manly’ to do much fruit gathering, so they just shot tons of deer and basically lived off the deer meat and little else. Only two weeks of this all game meat diet wreaked havoc on their digestive system, and they all couldn’t stop cutting the most vile-smelling farts imaginable, making the cabin they were staying in uninhabitable. I love stories like that, since they remind me of what a foolhardy endeavor it is to be a ‘survivalist,’ no matter how romantic the notion might be at times.

“But Perry and especially his friend Gordo indulge themselves of that notion at first, only to have the reality of the situation come crashing in on them like a ton of bricks, forcing them to conclude that anything, even living in a radioactive police state, might be better than a life of farts and tree bark.”

That “anything” takes Perry and Gordo to a commune, where a raiding group of bandits brutally end their fun…and their friendship. Perry is forced out on his own in this unforgiving environment by the end of the fourth issue. Apocalypse Nerd #6’s cover features a hooded Perry with a smoking rifle and a van of supplies turning over on a windy mountain road, the tires blown out by the nowbearded, shady-looking wimp.

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APOCALYPSE NERD #2, page 13 2005 Pen and Ink, computer graytones The top panel contrasts the vastness of Perry’s isolated surroundings, with the largeness of his cry. His humorous and pathetic attempt at suicide in the last panel by lying diagonally along the panel, brings the reader’s eye down to the bottom right-hand corner of the page. The irony is that, in his despair over being alone, Perry sees the approaching vehicle as a means of ending it all…as opposed to potential companionship.

…where Founding Fathers Funnies uncovers the true bad-asses of the Revolutionary War.

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“Say, Thomas, what’s with that Rogue’s Gallery hanging behind you?” Alex Hamilton points to the three portraits hanging behind Jefferson’s desk.

“Relatives of yours, perhaps?”

Jefferson, frustrated as he feverishly scrawls out a note with a feather quill, points out that “Those ‘Rogues’ happen to be Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton — the three greatest minds the world has ever produced!”

“Ahh,” Hamilton concurs.

“I look upon them for inspirations whenever I find myself battling Obstinate foes,” Jefferson points out. “Like you for instance,” he mentally finishes his statement.

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Thus starts one of Bagge’s Founding Fathers Funnies, his equivalent of a stuffy classroom history text — but without any stuffiness or the all-ages approach. Sections are broken down into panels with trademark Bagge figures wearing powdered wigs and colonial dress. Bagge’s versions of the Founding Fathers (John Quincy Adams and Benjamin Franklin, to name two) merit story titles like, “Tom Paine in the Ass: A Condensed Biography of a World-Class Troublemaker” or, “Let’s F*ck Sh*t Up!” (the story of the Boston Tea Party).

But just what are the Founding Fathers Funnies? Education? Satire?

Entertainment? A bit of all three: by focusing on the imperfections possessed by these virtuous historical figures, Bagge (a self-professed [in a Reason strip] “Founding Father fetishist”) isn’t so much making fun of (although he is) or misrepresenting history. Rather, it’s an attempt to bring these historical gods down to an identifiable human level, making them more sympathetic than any textbook can.

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“Those ‘Founding Father’ stories in the back of Apocalypse Nerd have been more well-received [than the book itself],” Bagge revealed, sitting back in his studio armchair. “I like to think that for people who don’t know that much about them and happen to read these comics, that by making the strips really engaging and entertaining, it will generate some more interest in the Founding Fathers.”

The Founding Fathers Funnies are yet another example of Bagge’s interests in comics of all subject matters and genres. Although, truth be told, one

wouldn’t initially think of Bagge as a historian in comics form (historical comics, after all, are mostly associated with the blandness of Treasure Chest or True Comics), the interest goes back beyond the past couple of decades: “Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with early American history, especially during and after the Revolutionary War…I’m a bit of a history buff in general, but I’m still fascinated with that particular time.

And right now there are so many books and documentaries coming out about the Founding Fathers. Every time I go back to it and read up on that period, I’m amazed at how you had this collection of brilliant people in such a remote part of the world — and the fact that these guys managed to win the war against overwhelming odds. It’d be a totally different story if they’d lost; we’d have completely different people’s faces on our money, and we’d all be calling them all traitors instead of patriots.”

With Bagge’s tendency to have the Founding Fathers be their own comic relief, one would think he might not take them seriously. Quite the contrary, he says.

“I admire all of the Founders that I’m writing about in these comics to varying degrees,” Bagge admitted.

“They’re all heroes of mine, so to speak, but what I also love about them is that they’re all flawed human beings as well, with all these weird quirks. A lot of their quirks are a natural result of their being such eccentric geniuses, of course. And they were constantly clashing with each other, since they all had such strong personalities and such passionate, intense beliefs. They’d all take turns being best friends and allies to being mortal enemies, and then back to being best pals again, depending on the situation. These clashes are also very funny, which is what inspired me to make comic strips about them in the first place. So I just wanted to show them, warts and all.”

Apocalypse Nerd #4 features, perhaps, the most satirically titled Founding Fathers strip yet: “Let’s F*ck Sh*t Up!” The strip documents the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, a protest against England’s giving a British tea company a tax-free monopoly on imported tea. On that day, the Sons

This first page of “Let’s F*ck Sh*t Up!” establishes the spin-doctoring employed by the Founding Fathers.

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they’d slowly push these huge wooden monstrosities towards the center of town, knowing that the other gang was coming towards them with their float, both of which were all decked out with effigies and phantom creatures and the like, waiting to be set on fire.

It was much like how Big Daddy Roth and his friends would spend the course of a car show constructing a customized car out of spare parts, only to destroy it by driving into a wall or blowing it up at the end of the show.

“Eventually they’d collide and demand that the other gang get their float out of the way. No one would budge, of course, so they’d all wind up beating the crap out of each other and destroying each other’s floats, while all the normal people would run into their houses and lock the doors, with their fire buckets on hand, just in case. Eventually a little kid got killed in the melee, which lead to a lot of guilt and hand wringing. That was when Adams stepped in, told the lads they better get their act together, and began drilling them on the common grounds like they were his own private army — which they became, eventually!

“Sam Adams personally wasn’t a hooligan or violent at all. He went to Harvard and mostly associated with

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of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians and poured an estimated 90,000 lbs. of tea overboard of an incoming British tea ship. It was one of the events that sparked the Revolutionary War. “The guy who was like the real gang leader (the godfather, if you will) of all the rebels in Boston was Sam Adams,” Bagge said. “He was really the puppet master more than anybody else was. And basically, like the Sons of Liberty, to a large degree they were terrorists. You know, they terrorized people into leaving town or not squealing to the Brits, and they’d been doing this for a good five years before the war even got kick-started. But as nasty as that all sounds, they never killed or seriously wounded a single soul — which is just amazing, considering how heated the political situation was at the time. The Revolutionary War was also a civil war, but unlike most civil wars it never got particularly ugly, as far as neighbors killing neighbors was concerned.

“With ‘Let’s F*ck Sh*t Up,’ I wanted to just show how opportunistic and manipulative these American heroes could be, particularly Sam Adams.

Especially now that we’re all obsessed with terrorism, yet these guys also employed various forms of terrorism to get their way. They may not’ve been murderers, but they sure terrified people into thinking that they were, or at least could be. The aforementioned Sons of Liberty were simply hooligans before Adams organized them, and their ritualized North Side vs. South Side gang wars were progressively getting more and more violent until Adams took over and organized them.

All politics aside, they were mostly just stupid guys who were looking for a fight — drunken semi-literates who ‘hated’ the Brits not only because they forced them to pay taxes, but the British soldiers stole all their women, since they were so impressed with their scarlet uniforms!

“Every fall the Bostonians celebrated their own morphed version of Guy Fawkes Day — which like Halloween serves as an excuse to stay out all night and raise hell. Each gang would construct these huge ‘floats’ that they’d spend weeks working on. Then

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James Otis goes ape sh*t in this sequence from “LFSU”.

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the town’s upper class, though he also was a terrible businessman, owed everyone money and walked around in threadbare clothing. But he also was a natural politician and befriended people of all walks of life — such as Paul Revere, who was the unofficial leader of all the tradesmen in the town, and who, like Adams, was a ‘joiner’ and belonged to every club and organization, secret or otherwise, that would have him as a member. They also both always knew where everything and everyone was, how to get something from someone and pass it on to the right person, etc. It’s like they never slept and were continually conspiring and sneaking out of town to gather

and spread news and information all over New England.”

Three years earlier, on March 5, 1770, British troops had gotten into a fight with American civilians, the type of fight that led to muskets offing five Americans in what became known as the Boston Massacre.

“Even though the Yanks started the fight, none of the Brits got killed, just a handful of American rebels did. And the guys that got killed were mostly the as*holes who were deliberately provoking a fight. They got sh*t-faced and then picked a fight with a bunch of armed soldiers. Brilliant,” Bagge laughed.

“Revere and Adams completely whitewashed the story they told the rest of America. It was pure propaganda. They were total spindoctors. Revere would fly all the way down to Philadelphia and back on horseback, telling everyone along the way their own version of events before a more accurate account would reach them, handing out blood soaked engravings and broadsheets with screaming headlines and getting everyone all worked up in the process.

They made Rupert Murdoch look like an amateur in comparison!”

A big part of what Bagge does with the Founding Fathers is give people like George Washington more than just wooden teeth: he also gives them feet of clay, partially coming out of his realist’s mindset in portraying character rather than dry biography.

“In researching these stories, I would read, say, this big John Adams biography, in which the author would delve so deeply into John Adams’ life and psyche [that he or she] would wind up adopting Adam’s attitude towards his contemporaries. As a result, the biographer would matterof-factly describe, say, Alexander Hamilton as little more than a vain, self-centered, Machiavellian backstabber. He may have been smart, but you had to watch your back with that guy. It’s a terribly unfair characterization, but it’s what Adams thought of him, so eventually so did the author…

“Meanwhile, Hamilton’s biographers wind up giving Adams the same sort of short-shrift treatment, since the feelings between Adams and Hamilton were pretty much mutual. In fact,

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their mutual hatred is what destroyed their party, the Federalists, before they even got started, what with their two leaders taking pot shots at each other all the time.

“Another problem with most of these bios,” Bagge continued, “is that they’re all written by academics who feel obliged to get bogged down in all the legal and political details, terrified that their peers will point out some minute point regarding The Federalist Papers that they failed to address.

They can’t help glorifying their chosen subject, since they want to sell the books, as well as make it sound like a book that had to be written. ‘At last, the real story of Alexander Hamilton has been told!’ the dust jackets always exclaim. So they want to make the person sound grand — and in so doing, they downplay or ignore all the flaws and foibles of their chosen subject. Again, in a Hamilton bio I recently read, the author casually mentions in passing that Hamilton’s sister-in-law was also his mistress for ten or so years, before moving on to even more endless yammering about those g*ddamned Federalist Papers. As a reader, you naturally go, ‘Whoa! Let’s hear more about that, please! I’m awake now! And why are there no pictures of said sister-in-law?!?’” he laughed. “That’s another thing these bios could use — more pictures of hot babes. I mean, there had to be some living back then!”

One of the more amusing (and surprisingly grounded) aspects of Founding Fathers Funnies is seeing historical figures tell each other to “F*ck off,” like normal, modern, human beings. Bagge cited the romanticized film versions of these figures as the antithesis of his less pretentious interpretation: “All the actors [in historical movies] talk in that ‘important’ sounding ‘period piece’ voice, as if people knew they were making history while they were making it and talked accordingly. Yet for all we know Hancock might have insisted on signing the Declaration first simply because he had to take a piss really bad. Also, in real life almost all the early Americans were physical wrecks, with a million ailments: notoriously bad teeth, gout, faces disfigured with

smallpox scars…

“Severe mental problems were rampant, too. Travelers and diarists often made casual references to people they saw having a ‘fit’ in the street, which could have been anything from an epileptic fit to dementia or a nervous breakdown or schizophrenia, where the person would be rolling around in mud or cow dung, screaming like a loon and mutilating themselves. In those days all of that stuff fell under the onesize-fit-all category called a ‘fit.’

Many women were permanently locked in their homes — just like the ‘mad wife’ in Jane Eyre — after going mad from losing a child or who knows what else, and since there was no real

Mercy Otis Warren gets her time in the spotlight; Bagge plans to pursue biographies of more historically important female figures.

PETER BAGGE

A page from “The Odd Couple Go To Paris”, starring John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

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effective treatment for it, they rarely got better. They only got worse!

“So everyone was a physical wreck back then to some degree, though you’d never know it from watching a dramatic reenactment of those times on TV. Just as well, I suppose! Who’d want to watch it?

“They were all in physical misery.

So there’s no way George Washington, with gout, could stand like this next to his horse. Everybody was a wreck back then.”

Once Apocalypse Nerd wraps, Bagge is planning on pursuing more biographical comics, perhaps beyond the Founding Fathers Funnies. It’s a far cry from his more underground work of the ’80s and an interesting step in his evolution as a cartoonist.

“I was thinking of doing comic book-length biographies of various historical figures,” Bagge said.

“Perhaps choosing three biographical figures from American history and do three comic books on each, and then collect them into a book that would form a sort of theme. Somebody like Margaret Sanger [an early nineteenth century advocate of birth control and founder of what is now Planned Parenthood], who led a truly colorful, bizarre life, and she’s still a very controversial figure. Depending on the author’s political or religious point of view, everything you read about her makes her out to be either a saint or the devil. It really comes down to how you feel about birth control.

Still, I have to laugh at the thought of seeing a bio of Margaret Sanger on a comic book stand, in between the latest issues of Hellboy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like, ‘Ooh, this is REALLY gonna sell!’”

Now, as described in Peter’s own words, we present the Founding Fathers…

WARTS AND ALL: Bagge’s guide to the Founding Fathers

GEORGE WASHINGTON First President of the United States of America 1732-1799

First US Treasury Secretary Co-Author of The Federalist Papers Founder of the New York Post Founder of the New York Stock Exchange 1755-1804 “This guy was practically an orphan from the Virgin Islands, came to America alone as a teen and worked his way up from nothing. He was the quintessential Smartest Guy in the Room and always made sure everyone knew it — unlike someone like James Madison, who was equally sharp, but who would gauge what the intellectual level of the other people in the room was, and then would adjust his attitude and speech so that everyone understood him and felt comfortable talking to him. So nobody ever walked away from a conversation with Madison — whose IQ was somewhere in the stratosphere — thinking, ‘Man, what a stuck-up know-it-all he was!’

“Hamilton was a stuck-up know-it-all, and he probably behaved that way as a reaction to his humble and questionable origins. His enemies referred to him as ‘That Bastard’ a lot, partly because it never

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ALEXANDER HAMILTON

PETER BAGGE

“Like Adams, George Washington also would perpetually chide himself over his weaknesses and imperfections. But unlike Adams, Washington’s efforts at self-improvement were mostly successful! He was a firm believer in never letting people see you sweat and did a great job of hiding his bad temper.

“He also hated bad reviews. People were always printing up and distributing anonymous political pamphlets in those days, in which the authors would criticize their political opponents to a hair-raisingly libelous degree. Washington was a frequent subject of these anonymous tracts, since he was so generally beloved that no one dared criticize him openly while he was president. So he would just sit alone in his office with a pen, underlining inaccuracies and shouting, ‘Lies! All lies!’ and barking out obscenities while he scrawled away.

“Other than that, Washington was such an honest, honorable man and presented such a flawless, imposing figure, both in private and in public, that it makes him a rather boring person to write about. He was like his own work of art, in his endless efforts to be the Perfect Gentleman. And he pretty much succeeded!

PETER BAGGE

failed to enrage him. And unlike Madison, or his fellow New York lawyer and rival Aaron Burr, Hamilton was a terrible politician. As brilliant as he was, he sucked at communicating well with his constituents and as a result couldn’t get elected as dogcatcher. Once, and against his friends’ advice, he volunteered to address an angry crowd of New Yorkers who were opposed to some bill or levy that he was in favor of. He was convinced that they’d all simmer down and listen to his reasoned arguments, since, after all, he’s Alexander Hamilton! War hero, confidant to the president, and co-author of the Constitution! But he barely got a word out before someone hit him in the head with a rock, after which Hamilton just lost it. ‘You mindless rabble! You curs!’ And yet he wondered why he never got elected to anything.

“He had the same problem with Congress when trying to explain his plans to get the new US government out of debt. He had an extremely sophisticated grasp of finance and economics, and once his plans were implemented, he did a miraculous job of making the federal government financially solvent. However, most of the congressmen, especially the Southern planters, couldn’t get their heads around his plans at all. To them it was all ‘witchcraft’ and ‘bankers’ tricks’ designed to pick their pockets clean. And trying to explain it to them really tested his patience. When it was suggested that he could get some of them to agree if he offered them certain political favors, he would then walk up to them and say in front of everyone, ‘I understand that I could buy your support in return for favors. So let’s cut to the chase. Tell me what you want.’ This tactic only made matters worse, since it only embarrassed and then angered the person he was addressing. But Hamilton hated playing games. To him the biggest sin in the world was wasted time!”

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Alexander Hamilton gets back at Princeton for not admitting him, in “Dear Old Princeton”.

JOHN ADAMS First Vice-President and Second President of the United States 1735-1826 “Adams wrote a lot, practically his every waking thought, which is what makes him such great subject matter,” said Bagge. “He was a lot like your typical autobiographical indy cartoonist, the way he would totally beat himself up. He second-guessed everything he did. He was vain and had a big ego, but he was painfully aware of it and ashamed of it. He also had a short temper, and he was very opinionated, which was more cause for self-flagellation. His diaries were full of admonishments to himself, like, ‘Keep your big mouth shut. Keep your ego in check.’ Not that these attempts at self-improvement did much good. Hey, if you’ve got a big ego, it’s going to come out!

“Adams was also a world-class hater. He often would waffle between admiration, then envy, and then hatred towards his more famous and accomplished contemporaries like Franklin or Jefferson, even Washington. His envy fed his hatred! And then he hated himself for being such a hater! But all of these broiling thoughts also spurred him on to accomplish many things — and all from behind a mountain of books for the most part, since he was the ultimate workaholic bookworm.”

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ACADEMY RECORDS AD 2007 Pen and Ink The tall stack of records on the turntable indicates that the noisy punk-loving roomie is in it for the long haul, much to the chagrin of his more studious counterpart in the next room. The loud roomie is dressed identical to Buddy Bradley, with a plaid shirt and blue jeans, while the bookworm’s black slacks apparently mark him of the clean-cut “preppy” variety.

Bagge snuck in a plug for his band The Action Suits, behind and to the left of the musical roomie’s head.

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FIERY FURNACES ILLUSTRATION 2004 Pen and Ink, computer coloring A brother and sister indy rock duo, this illustration is for the band’s sophomore album, Blueberry Boat. Their arched and imposing stances lend to the atmosphere of this image, yet the dog in between them manages to give the image that ounce of cuteness needed to keep it from taking itself too seriously.

SONGS ABOUT CHICKS! ALBUM COVER 1997 Pen and Ink, colored Inks by Eric Reynolds

The boy in this compilation CD’s cover is holding a literal “Dear John” letter. One can only guess how long before he starts playing that electric guitar resting on his knee.

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THE ACTION SUITS LP COVER Pen and Ink, spot coloring Inks by Eric Reynolds

The Action Suits is a side project of Bagge’s, along with Eric Reynolds and Andy Schmidt. The pop band, for which Bagge plays drums, has released various EPs over the years, culminating in an album in 2006.

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PETER BAGGE

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THE FRINGE ELEMENT AD 1999 Pen and ink The listener in this advertisement is the classical idiot figure: complete with beany propeller hat and lollipop, his draw drags along the floor, and his tongue is rolling out like a red carpet. While the crossing eyes indicate an absence of thought, the large ears draw attention to his at least listening to the show.

PETER BAGGE

A Trogg’s tribute double LP from the late 1980s.

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A 45 record sleeve from 1991 for Washington State based “garage band” label Estrus records.

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THE STRANGER (Seattle Weekly magazine) illo Pen and Ink 2000

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GIRL TROUBLE 45 COVER 1991 Girl Trouble is a Washington-based rock/indy band who have been active for twenty-five years. The absurdity of this illustration (aside from the obvious) is in the nun’s stance on the motorcycle: is she bouncing along…or just floating?

Unused CIRCUS PUNK DESIGN Pen and Ink, Computer color

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GLORYHOLES LP BACK COVER 2002 Pen and Ink The prototypical rocker…reduced to wearing nothing more than a barrel, a classic cartoon sign of absolute poverty, a fact supported even further by his rebus-like loss of money and “Will rock for food” sign.

…our author and Pete hang in an old bar, and Pete reveals his influences.

“See you later, Scamp.”

PETER BAGGE

“He’s a perceptive guy and a great listener,” Reynolds later noted. “You’ve probably noticed that, when you’re telling him a story, he’s intently listening and filing it away, and you’ll find him repeating stories you’ve told him to other people. He’s not only a naturalborn storyteller, but a natural-born story receptacle.”

“This is where I pictured myself when I drew the book’s cover,” Bagge admitted on our way out the door and to drop me off at the airport. When I reviewed the pictures later, sure enough, I found one with a glass placement almost exactly the same as in the cover drawing.

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The Viking is the type of bar that you’ll find in every neighborhood: the local drinking hole with a dog tied up to a tree outside the door and the same bartender who probably started there when he was a college kid just a few years ago. With wood paneling and a line of mirrors over the bar, it even has faded black-and-white photographs of The Viking’s past life as a newer establishment.

We not only bumped into Pete’s friends John and Diane, but Eric Reynolds (who, apparently, lives nearby) also caught up with us, splitting a pitcher with Pete. Pete came alive, animated and amusing, recounting our weekend working on the book: everything from the loser-slacker barista hipsters at his friend’s coffee shop and our roast beef sandwiches that took ten minutes to come out despite the lack of other customers, to this author’s staying up late and getting up early to scan artwork in his basement studio (and scaring the bejeezus outta Pete in the process), to this author’s tendency to know about old and dead cartoonists, which lead into a discussion of a lame and simple comic book presentation given by a local community college teacher.

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From a pin-up collection called “Private Stash” (Bueanaventura Press).

One red-eye flight from Seattle to Richmond later, poring through stacks of Bagge comics, I had to wonder: Where does Pete Bagge fit into today’s comic book field?

“It’s a sh*tty time for humor-oriented comics,” Johnny Ryan stated. “Most people seem to be into a more high-brow, arty thing. I reserve some kind of hope that things will turn around in the future and people will recognize Pete and other humor cartoonists as being important.

“What’s going on is that the alternative comics scene is so desperate to become literature that they’re completely neglecting the fun and humor that comics used to have. Anything that has that sense of fun, humor, wackiness, and insanity is looked down upon. It’s kind of depressing.”

If one is to categorize each generation of alternative cartoonist, perhaps it can be argued that the Robert Crumbs and Art Spiegelmans brought a daringness to the field with their underground comics that featured icons of childhood (or archetypes thereof) engaging in adult situations. When Pete came around in the early ’80s, coming to fruition as an alternative cartoonist in the ’90s, he brought, perhaps, a certain sophistication to the

table, his characters seeming more flesh and blood adult (yet still engaging in the aforementioned adult situations, with grotesque and comedic results). This indy crowd of the past decade-and-a-half is bringing an arguably more sophisticated approach to their storytelling, one that relies more on atmosphere and less on action.

“There’s a very prevalent style or approach to alternative comics that you see these days — slower pacing and more panels with little or no dialogue.

Whether the art is simple or crude, or very accomplished, there’s still this more sensitive, gentle approach to the storytelling and very little of the more aggressive, cynical, and/or nihilistic comics that were more prevalent on the early ’90s — like my comics,” Pete laughed. “I think a lot of the newer artists are very talented, and I like their work, but as a group, there’s an undeniable ‘sameness’ that I find both weird and off-putting. I mean, if this is all about self-expression, then how is it that so many of them are expressing the same things — and in the same way? And when I meet them, a lot of them would say, ‘Hate was the first alternative comic I bought. It was a big influence on me,’ but when I see their work, I wonder, ‘How can that possibly be?’” he laughed again. “You can see how Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Chester Brown, and Seth might have influenced them, and the Bros. Hernandez maybe, but I rarely see any trace of me in their work.”

Pete is friends with many members of this ‘Introspective’ crowd, particularly Clowes, one of those few cartoonists who have also successfully made the transition to motion picture director. An Adrian Tomine page hangs in his living room, while Clowes’ work pops up periodically on the walls of the Bagges’ house.

“There’s just so much information within every single panel, and it’s all so charged,” Pete says of Clowes’ work.

“Even if it’s just a guy looking at the viewer or pointing at somebody or just simply thinking, you can tell he’d redrawn that face countless times to get just the right expression and emotion.

You know, like just trying to get the eyebrow right. Something else that he does that I doubt anyone else does — and that I’ve certainly never done (though I probably should) — is redraw some of

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inspired and influenced by both the cartoons and live action movies of Frank Tashlin, who since he made comedies never concerned himself with moody, shadowy downward angles and such.

Every shot was pretty much at eye level, only he’d cut from wide shots to intense close-up reaction shots and back again — which is something I do myself all the time, yet no one would define what I do as ‘cinematic.’ Instead, they describe Tashlin’s flicks as ‘comic book-y’!”

Arguably, Tashlin’s most successful film was 1967’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? with Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield, part of a wide-ranging body of work that also includes Jerry Lewis movies and Looney Tunes short cartoons.

Bagge also parallels Tashlin in that sense: his body of comic book work is just as wide-ranging. But while Tashlin is largely forgotten by the mainstream, it’s more than possible that Pete Bagge the cartoonist will be remembered, and quite possibly emulated from the next wave of indy cartoonists, for some time.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

the faces of a comic that’s already been in print before they’re reprinted, or gathered in a book collection, simply because he was never quite happy with the way he originally had done it.

“For example, in the Ghost World strip, there was a shot of Becky, the blonde-haired girl, where she and Enid were stalking the devil-worshipping couple in the supermarket, and Enid told her, ‘You have to look in their shopping basket, you’re not going to believe it.’ So Becky goes to look and there’s a bunch of ‘Lunchables’ in there. Dan originally did a funny reaction shot of Becky where the expression revealed what she was thinking, like, ‘Oh, my God! How hilariously ironic and pathetic!’ But then, when the book came out, he redrew her face, and her expression was completely blank — which may have been more realistic, since we’re all more inclined to maintain a poker face when the person we’re making fun of is still in eyesight, but I preferred the original face, since it was funnier and allowed the viewer to get in her mind more. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘Oh, the first version was too over-the-top. I had to fix it.’ But needless to say, I personally love ‘overthe-top.’”

A major trend in alternative comics today (such as with Seth, for example, or in Jason Lute’s work) is to approach comic book storytelling more as a film director would, creating still-frames that (much like the assemblage of images in a movie) create a mood based on details and lighting.

“But when someone says a comic is ‘cinematic,’ they’re referring to a specific style of film, specifically a ‘film noir’ look. Like Frank Miller’s Sin City, which was deliberately noir-esque,” Pete observed. “Or where the artist is paying homage to someone like Stanley Kubrick, who was so impressed with his own vision that he (in my opinion) lingered on most of his shots way too long — so that everyone can have plenty of time to marvel at it and comment on what a genius he is.

“Yet not all movies are ‘cinematic.’ In fact, most aren’t at all. For example, if a cartoonist deliberately copied style and facial expressions of a movie like Porky’s or The 40-Year Old Virgin, you’d have something more along the lines of Angry Youth Comix, which nobody’d ever describe as ‘cinematic.’ I myself am very

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THE COMICS JOURNAL COMICS: A YOUNG MAN’S GAME? 2001 Pen and Ink Peter Bagge contrasts his work habits and ethics between his earlier days to his current. His younger self is unkempt, unshaven, barefoot, and with bloodshot eyes, while his current self is softer, well-dressed and downright lazy. Note the sharp angles at use in the younger Bagge sequences (from the cast lighting to the construction of Pete’s face[s]). A nice parallel is in the peanut butter sandwich in panel five to the wine in panel six. Also note that each strip can be read top to bottom, as well as in the traditional manner (left to right, top to bottom), and still flow effectively.

Celebrate JACK KIRBY’s 100th birthday!

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BRICKJOURNAL #48

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #17

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

KIRBY COLLECTOR #72

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

THE WORLD OF LEGO MECHA! Learn the secrets and tricks of building mechs with some of the best mecha builders in the world! Interviews with BENJAMIN CHEH, KELVIN LOW, LU SIM, FREDDY TAM, DAVID LIU, and SAM CHEUNG! Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and undergrounds), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: The 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, STEVE SHERMAN & MIKE ROYER panel, WALTER SIMONSON interview, & unseen pencil art galleries! SIMONSON cover inks!

FIGHT CLUB! Jack’s most powerful fights and in-your-face action: Real-life WAR EXPERIENCES, Marvel’s KID COWBOYS, the Madbomb saga and all those negative 1970s Marvel fan letters, interview with SCOTT McCLOUD on his Kirby-inspired punchfest DESTROY!!, rare Kirby interview, 2017 WonderCon Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by DEAN HASPIEL!

ONE-SHOTS! We cover Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., MANHUNTER, ATLAS, PRISONER, and more! Plus MARK EVANIER and our other regular panelists, rare Kirby interview, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Oct. 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Winter 2018

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Summer 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Fall 2017

REED CRANDALL Illustrator of the Comics

From the 1940s to the ’70s, REED CRANDALL brought a unique and masterful style to American comic art. Using an illustrator’s approach on everything he touched, Crandall gained a reputation as the “artist’s artist” through his skillful interpretations of Golden Age super-heroes DOLL MAN, THE RAY, and BLACKHAWK (his signature character); horror and sci-fi for the legendary EC COMICS line; Warren Publishing’s CREEPY, EERIE, and BLAZING COMBAT; the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS and EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS characters; and even FLASH GORDON for King Features. Comic art historian ROGER HILL has compiled a complete and extensive history of Crandall’s life and career, from his early years and major successes, through his tragic decline and passing in 1982. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, a wealth of RARE AND UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK, and over EIGHTY THOUSAND WORDS of insight into one of the true illustrators of the comics.

(256-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 • (Digital Edition) $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-077-9 • SHIPS JULY 2017

It’s

GROOVY, baby!

Follow-up to Mark Voger’s smash hit MONSTER MASH!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

From WOODSTOCK to THE BANANA SPLITS, from SGT. PEPPER to H.R. PUFNSTUF, from ALTAMONT to THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY, GROOVY is a far-out trip to the era of lava lamps and love beads. This profusely illustrated HARDCOVER BOOK, in PSYCHEDELIC COLOR, features interviews with icons of grooviness such as PETER MAX, BRIAN WILSON, PETER FONDA, MELANIE, DAVID CASSIDY, members of the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, CREAM, THE DOORS, THE COWSILLS and VANILLA FUDGE; and cast members of groovy TV shows like THE MONKEES, LAUGH-IN and THE BRADY BUNCH. GROOVY revisits the era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, MOVIES, ART—even COMICS and CARTOONS, from the 1968 ‘mod’ WONDER WOMAN to R. CRUMB. A color-saturated pop-culture history written and designed by MARK VOGER (author of the acclaimed book MONSTER MASH), GROOVY is one trip that doesn’t require dangerous chemicals!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-080-9 • DIGITAL EDITION: $15.95

SHIPS OCTOBER 2017 • Free preview online now!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

Every generation is defined by the pop culture left behind in the wake of their getting older and passing the baton on to the next group: the music, movies, and books that embodied their own bottled rage or optimism are their greatest testament.

As for Generation X (of which this author stems from the tail end), we saw the birth and death of college rock, its death throes culminating in the Seattle-born and soon-to-be commercialized “grunge” movement of the ’90s. Grunge brought a pissiness and skepticism to us slacking Gen X-ers – while early punk had denied authority, we denied having to work hard enough to gain authority.

We had Nirvana; we had the Matt Dillon vehicle Singles, and…

We had the indy comic book Hate.

Coming from the fertile mind of cartoonist Peter Bagge, it starred slacker/ loser Buddy Bradley and his cast of fellow misfits on their misadventures laden with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll (or a close approximation thereof, courtesy of Buddy’s crazy roommate Stinky and his short-lived band), and even more sex. Bagge, whose style is a hybrid between Harvey Kurtzman and Big Daddy Roth, became a storytelling hero who spoke to us on our level.

He had to dig the crappiness of growing up through the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations to then kick it with the easy-going Democratic Clinton of the ’90s, just like we did, right?

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

ISBN 978-1-893905-83-2 $16.95 in the U.S. COMICS INTROSPECTIVE, VOLUME I: PETER BAGGE takes you beyond the comics page and the studio…and into the HATE and APOCALYPSE NERD mastermind’s head. Journalist/editor CHRISTOPHER IRVING takes you on a tour of Bagge’s studio, home, and through Bagge’s Seattle stomping grounds. Featuring an introduction by PALESTINE’s Joe Sacco, original photos, and an art gallery, COMICS INTROSPECTIVE takes you on a trip like no other.