Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge by TwoMorrows Publishing

comics introspective volume one

G PETER BA GE

As told to Christopher Irving

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.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

…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

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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.

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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.

…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

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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…”

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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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COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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:

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

…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?”

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

PETER BAGGE

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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