Comic Book Creator #10 by TwoMorrows Publishing

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

No. 10, Fall 2015

$8.95

82658 97073

in the USA

Cover art by Neal Adams

T H E D E F I N I T I V E , O U T R A G E O U S S TO R Y O F T H E C O S M I C B R O A D WAY E P I C

Fa l l 2 0 1 5 • Vo i c e o f t h e C o m i c s M e d i u m • N u m b e r 1 0

About Our Cover

All characters TM & © Peter Bagge. Justice League Adventures TM & © DC Comics.

Art by Peter Bagge Color by Joanne Bagge

Comics Chatter Incoming: Missives touching upon the awesome work of the late Steve Gerber........... 4 The Good Stuff: George Khoury looks at some invincible, superior die-cast figures...... 8 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred remembers when, in the comic strip pages, Mary Perkins shared her stage with super-hero Captain Virtue!............................... 9 Man of Miracles: Cory Sedlmeier discusses the revival and restoration of perhaps the greatest super-hero saga of them all, Miracleman.............................. 10 The Big Red Cheese in 75: As told to FCA’s P.C. Hamerlinck, Captain Marvel reflects on his three-quarter century as the World’s Mightiest Mortal.................... 15 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt takes a look at the Mystery of Rick Geary!............ 17 WARP! SPECIAL section

Peter Bagge’s great apocalyptic cover is actually a parody of the Bruce Timm/Alex Ross collaboration cover of Justice League Adventures #1 [Jan. 2002]. Goes to show you how long Pete has been waiting for yours truly to finally — FINALLY — get ready this issue devoted to the great cartoonist, especially given P.B.’s piece is dated 2006! — Ye Ed. If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

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The Night Broadway Got Warped!: More than four years before Star Wars, an innovative and daring theatrical troupe out of Chicago created a cosmic trilogy of the forces of good versus evil — all inspired by the Marvel Age of comics — that awed audiences in the Windy City… but could the show, now joined by the legendary Neal Adams, make it on the Great White Way?........ 18 THE MAIN EVENT Peter Bagge’s World and Welcome to It: CBC ’s comprehensive interview with one of the great American cartoonists, from surviving suburbia as a kid to his start in the “punk” comics scene, to Weirdo, Neat Stuff, Hate, and to modernday work as a graphic novelist — a remarkably candid and insightful talk............ 40 BACK MATTER Coming Attractions: The indelible mark of the amazing Gil Kane!................................ 78 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Ernie Colón shares his Dark Opal................ 79 Note: With regret, we were unable to include any number of items prepared for this issue due to the respective lengths of both of our two cover features, but CBC with strive to include those articles in future issues. Our appreciation to you patient readers and to all of the magazine’s understanding contributors. Right: Cover detail from the last issue of Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff magazine, #15, April 1989. SPECIAL THANKS: Glenn Whitmore colored our awesome Warp cover. Art is by (of course) Neal Adams!

Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are now available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com!

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Comic Book Creator is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

Comic Book Creator ™ is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Jon B. Cooke, editor. John Morrow, publisher. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $40 US, $54 Canada, $60 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2015 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

This issue is dedicated to the memories of ALAN KUPPERBERG and RICK OBADIAH ™

JON B. COOKE

Editor

John Morrow

Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER

PETER BAGGE Front Cover Artist PETER & JOANNE BAGGE

NEAL ADAMS Reverse Cover Artist GLENN WHITMORE

Associate Editor

Front Cover Colorists

Reverse Cover Colorist

GEORGE KHOURY RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO

Contributing Editors

STEVEN THOMPSON

Transcriber

J.D. KING

CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO

CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON

CBC Illustrator

CBC Proofreader

SETH KUSHNER CBC Photographer in Memoriam

Greg PRESTON

CBC Contributing Photographer

KENDALL WHITEHOUSE

CBC Convention Photographer

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK GEORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO

CBC Columnists

To contact CBC, please email jonbcooke@aol.com or snail-mail CBC, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 2

The genius work of the gifted cartoonist and expert storyteller of Stinky and of Buddy Bradley’s father depicted This past June, in an episode of Gavin by Peter in the pages of Hate! literally made McInnes’ podcast Free Speech, the host me jump out of my chair. You think it’s all shared with listeners his “touched by ball-bustin’, wacky fun ’n’ games and then God” list of the “Best Cartoonists in the Peter slaps the reader upside the head. World.” In the company of guest Gabe Nothing less than brilliant sez I… Fowler, proprietor of Brooklyn’s Desert Island shop, Gavin (amid rants about the Here’s hoping readers will maintain “abomination” of super-hero comics), an interest in these alternative and revealed that Peter Bagge was his underground comix creator forays. I’ve number one choice, beating out even R. had a passionate and abiding interest Crumb. “Because,” he explains, “storyin all things comic book, and CBC telling is a huge aspect [in determining is looking forward to, as the spirit the best].” Taking issue with his guest’s moves, covering many of those comment that Bagge’s art was “servicenon-mainstream creators who able,” the host exclaimed, “Have you helped build this art form. After ever seen legs more rubbery than Peter our Gil Kane tribute coming next Bagge’s?” Gavin also enthused, “He’s issue, we’re proud to coverwhat got me into comics!” feature the superb comix pioneer The podcaster then hit the nail on Howard Cruse. And be sure to the head, saying, “Don’t you just get this make suggestions and share feeling when there’s a new Peter Bagge comments with us! [comic] that you haven’t seen? It’s like, Well, we might as well face ‘I don’t even want to read this ’coz I the music and share that Ye don’t want it to end.’” Gabe nodded and Ed’s excursion in producing a replied, “Yeah, that’s a good feeling.” magazine about the contemI could not have said it better. I recall porary comics field — ACE, All precisely where I was when I finally Comics Evaluated — suffered purchased that first issue of Neat Stuff. from low order numbers that I can’t say it was then-Newbury Comics proved unsustainable, so we clerk Tom Devlin who recommended I shut the magazine down after buy it… Devlin would go on to alt comPeter Bagge by Ronn Sutton three issues. Brief though it ics fame and glory with his Highwater Books and current role as Drawn & Quarterly’s creative was, the experience was fantastic while it lasted, and I’m damned proud of the work we did, especially the director… but that Neat Stuff #1 had been beckoning material by ACE’s outstanding staff of contributors. me for a few months in that Cambridge, Mass. estabBeing monthly, we prepared material in advance, so lishment housed in “The Garage.” we’ll be folding the leftover ACE material into CBC over Plunking down my two bucks and reading it on the the next few issues (some of it astounding, including way back home via the Red Line… well, it was not unJay Lynch’s illustrated history of his fellow Wacky Pack like the time, when 12 or so, I thumbed through a used Ballantine paperback edition of The Brothers MAD, and Men), so look for it! I am extremely grateful for the support, generosity, and camaraderie of ACE publisher upon encountering “Black and Blue Hawks,” my brain exploded and I was instantly a Kurtzman fan for life. On Robert Yeremian, and here’s to our next project together, Rob! Thank you, my friend. that subway ride, Bagge did the same damage to my poor cranium, with his frantic cartooning and, most of Well, I’m scribing these words just before leaving all, a sublime, natural ability to tell a story expertly. I’ve for this year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego, been a booster of Bagge ever since. where CBC is nominated for an Eisner award as “Best Hey, don’t get me wrong: I love Peter’s artistry, his Comics-Related Periodical.” Hopefully there we’ll find original style of cartooning… but, oh, that heavenly a publisher for the long-awaited Weirdo magazine retwriting. Very, very few comic book writers have elicited rospective (where will appear Peter Bagge’s memories a visceral reaction from me. The ability to surprise in as editor) and get some other projects going. A man’s this field is quite rare indeed, but the respective deaths gotta pay the mortgage, don’tcha know!

cbc contributors Neal Adams Joanne Bagge Peter Bagge Paul Baresh Nick Caputo Fantagraphics Jerry Fortier

Reuben Fortier Rick Geary Cookie Gluck Carolyn Purdy-Gordon David G. Gordon Stuart Gordon

Bruce Guthrie Lenny Kleinfeld P.C. Hamerlinck George Khoury Dean Haspiel Mark Lewis John Heard The Mad Peck Heritage Auctions Russ Maheras Neil Peter Jampolis Newbury Comics Miana Jun Cecil O’Neal

—Y e Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com John Ostrander Greg Preston Eric Reynolds Arlen Schumer Cory Sedlmeier Ronn Sutton Keith Szarabjka

The Time Capsule Christine Torreele Kendall Whitehouse Glenn Whitmore Rob Yeremian Tom Ziuko

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

ROB SMENTEK

It’s all in the Bagge

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Edited by JON B. COOKE, COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics—focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. It’s the follow-up to Jon’s multi-Eisner Award winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine.

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Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview, with plenty of amazing artwork! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; MARK WAID interview, part one; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; classic cover painter EARL NOREM interviewed, a new ADAMS cover, and more!

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RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others! Plus we examine the supreme artistry of JOHN ROMITA, JR., BILL EVERETT’s final splash, the nefarious backroom dealings of STOLEN COMIC BOOK ART, and ascend THE GODS OF MT. OLYMPUS (a ‘70s gem by ACHZIGER, STATON and WORKMAN)!

SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

BERNIE WRIGHTSON interview on Swamp Thing, Warren Publishing, The Studio, Frankenstein, Stephen King, and designs for movies like Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters, and a gallery of Wrightson artwork! Plus 20th anniversary of Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror with BILL MORRISON; an interview with Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre’s BATTON LASH, and more!

The creators of Madman and Flaming Carrot—MIKE ALLRED & BOB BURDEN— share a cover and provide comprehensive interviews and art galore, plus BILL SCHELLY is interviewed about his new HARVEY KURTZMAN biography; we present the conclusion of our BATTON LASH interview; STAN LEE on his final European comic convention tour; fanfavorite HEMBECK, and more!

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The Broadway sci-fi epic WARP examined! Interviews with art director NEAL ADAMS, director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, playwright LENNY KLEINFELD, stage manager DAVID GORDON, and a look at Warp’s 1980s FIRST COMICS series! Plus: an interview with PETER (Hate!) BAGGE, our RICH BUCKLER interview Part One, GIANT WHAM-O COMICS, and the conclusion of our STAN GOLDBERG interview!

Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery. Also, our RICH BUCKLER interview conclusion, a look at the “greatest zine in the history of mankind,” MINESHAFT, and Part One of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview!

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Howard the Destroyer Duck! Remembering the talent — and supreme chutzpah — of writer Steve Gerber Michael Mead Write to CBC: jonbcooke@ aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 This page: While the writer was scribing a Savage Dragon/ Destroyer Duck one-shot [Nov. 1996] over at Image, Steve Gerber was offered the opportunity to return to his signature character in the pages of Spider-Man Team-Up #5 [Dec. ’96]. What did the clever writer do? To the ultimate dismay of Marvel editors, Gerber created an unofficial cross-over, where he audaciously had Howard and Beverly freed from the Marvel Universe, swapped with Leonard and Rhonda Martini (see faux cover, next page).

at how many times Len seemed to take issue with the supposed predictability of Moore’s plots. Comparing Wein I think you got it spot-on with the title of your editorial for and Moore is sort of like comparing NBA basketball players Comic Book Creator # 6, “Love, Envy and Bayou Beasts,” Derrick Rose and LeBron James. One is good, the other is because, in many ways, those words sum up my experience great. Sometimes it’s better to be gracious and just accept of reading your 196-page (I counted the covers) monument that someone else is better, and that it doesn’t necessarily to perseverance and quality. Your love and the creators’ take away from your achievements. love for their characters underpins the issue. There’s been Reading the original “bayou beast” story, “It,” I was so many years trying to get this book out and you finally did ready to be wowed, but, in the end, I was underwhelmed. it! The most inspiring thing about that is your will to express Sturgeon’s story kind of sweated a little too much pulp yourself about a subject that, even for mainstream comics, sensibility. I’m glad I read it though. The Steve Bissette is a bit of a backwater — the muck-monsters of the bayou. interview on his swamp beast run made me want to go and The desire of creators of all types to express themselves re-buy all those issues (why, oh why, did I sell them way is what drives the readers’ interest. Reading that interview back then???)! I wonder in the more secular climate of 2015 with Steve Gerber, seeing how his life and emotions played whether the “Swampy-Jesus” issue would see print? As a out in his art, was moving. More than most writers, Steve liberal Presbyterian (this is not an oxymoron), I have to say lived his art, he didn’t seem to be interested in any kind of the story seemed pretty straightforward and inoffensive. I “professional” distance between himself and the characwish it had seen print at the time. ters. He lived through them. The end of CBC #6 thrilled me because I saw my name You mention “envy” in the title of your editorial and in print! I can understand why the article I submitted didn’t that is the emotion I felt another 1970s swamp-monster make the final cut given the pressure on space and the kind writer exhibited in your pages, Len Wein. Len, who can of content you had in the issue, but thank you for listing me lay claim to co-creating large parts of both Swamp Thing with all the other contributors! and Man-Thing, seemed unable to handle the fact that his [You’re welcome, Michael, and thanks backatcha for all of own achievement on Swamp Thing had been eclipsed by your support for CBC and ACE magazine! You’re our favorite Him From Across the Ditch, one Alan Moore. Professional New Zealand reader! — Ye Ed.] jealousy between writers is de rigeur, but I was surprised Spider-Man, Gambit, Howard the Duck TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Savage Dragon TM & © Erik Larsen. Destroyer Duck TM & © the Estate of Steve Gerber.

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Joe Frank Some weeks back, I was stuck at the car dealer — six hours — for repairs. Turns out my decision to bring the double-sized Swampmen issue of CBC couldn’t have been more opportune. Had I only needed a new battery or window tinting, I probably could have finished it in one sitting. I tremendously enjoyed the issue despite, in all candor, not caring overly much for the genre. Enjoyed the Wein/ Wrightson Swamp Thing at the time of release, because it was so touching and well-done in both writing and art. It had a heart to it. But I was never was crazy about ManThing, what little I read, mostly because I don’t recall any of the art being in the same stellar league as the competition. Plus, I prefer the protagonist to have some manner of control over his actions and fate. Regardless, my favorite part of this issue was the Steve Gerber interview. I may not have been a unconditional fan of Man-Thing, but I loved his Howard the Duck, especially when he teamed with Gene Colan. Those issues I thought were a riot; some of the best work either man ever did. Howard, much more to my taste, took such an active role in his stories and had such a hilarious viewpoint and facial expressions. Never would have believed I’d enjoy it as much as I did. Even subscribed to an out-of-town newspaper for some months to get their comic-strip version. That’s what I particularly enjoyed about the interview. Man-Thing was just a starting point. You covered Steve’s thoughts and opinions on a wide-range of topics. It’s why the extra space you utilize is always appreciated. For many of the subjects, it allows them to go off-topic and onto something more personal and informative. Here you questioned Steve about his influences in intelligent writing and, out of the blue, it’s a discussion about Steve Allen. I’d never have guessed but was delighted to find out. Same with Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. It wasn’t all Swamp Thing. It was about their aspirations, frustrations, achievements and disappointments. In a way, it’s almost better than listening in on some convention panel as there’s no ticking clock and we can absorb the information in our own sweet time. Or, as need be, reread it to clarify some aspect. I’m glad this one finally made it out after — what? — a ten-year wait? Well worth it. Sadly, with Steve Gerber gone, I guess this becomes the final word on the subject. But other interviews exist and his own words, in the comics, are out there to read and enjoy at any time. [A few weeks later, Joe found the time to take in the following issue, and he shared another LOC…] Enjoyed the continuation of the Bernie Wrightson interview in CBC #7. Though my immediate association with him is Swamp Thing, he obviously did far more, which you covered nicely here. Oddly enough, the aspect that instantly intrigued me was the puzzling matter of why he deleted the “e” in Bernie and eventually added it back. That was always a curiosity and now no longer a mystery. Great to see the wide range of his art on display: from horrific to amusing; all beautifully stylized. It’s amazing to see how his style blossomed based on his his first fan club entry published in Creepy. Who could have known? Yet, for once, my interest was actually slightly more focused on something which was not the cover-featured interview. I got such a kick out of the Batton Lash reminiscences about what it was like to collect comics early on. I could identify, to some extent, but felt envious that he started five years earlier than I (based, naturally, on him Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

being five years older). We share the same fondness for the artists and characters; he just plucked better issues off the newsstands than I did. Had I known I’d be reading reprints of all the stories as an adult, I’d not have sweated that I missed the first five years of the Marvel super-heroes as a kid. I thought the older brothers of my friends who, like Lash, read the stories I was then missing had to be the coolest, luckiest guys ever. In actuality, I was the one who lucked-out. I didn’t have to ever worry that I’d be reading Sgt. Fury from a foxhole in Vietnam. But perhaps the most important lesson learned here was one of perseverance and self-determination. Lash was dissuaded in his comic book aspirations by both mentors Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. I doubt it was to be mean but just their honest assessment at that time. Regardless, he forged ahead anyway and made a name for himself. So, it’s not what others think or suggest but what the individual sets out to do and works to achieve. Talent can take time to manifest itself. It’s nice when others believe in you but, even in the absence of approval or encouragement, if someone believes in himself and works at it, he can pleasantly surprise all his misguided fortune-tellers.

Above: Last issue we featured a small version of Miana Jun’s lovely portrait of the Kushner family before the high-resolution version arrived. Here’s (from left) Terra, Jackson, and the late Seth Kushner in a photo from last year. Thanks, M.J.

[Thanks, Joe. Much appreciate the insight. We should mention that the monthly magazine yours truly helmed earlier this year is no more. Due to dismal order numbers, ACE is finito. C’est la comics. — Y.E.] 5

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Order online at www.twomorrows.com COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7-8 (spotlighting 1970s Marvel and 1980s indies), plus over 30 NEW PAGES of features and art! New PAUL GULACY portfolio, MR. MONSTER scrapbook, the story behind MARVEL VALUE STAMPS, and more! New MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover! (224-page trade paperback) $24.95 • ISBN: 9781893905429

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more! Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

STAN LEE AND ROY THOMAS discussion about Marvel in the 1970s, ROY THOMAS interview, BILL EVERETT’s daughter WENDY and MIKE FRIEDRICH on Everett, interviews with GIL KANE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE PLOOG, STERANKO’s Unknown Marvels, the real origin of the New X-Men, Everett tribute cover by GIL KANE, and more!

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#6: MORE MARVEL ’70s #7: ’70s MARVELMANIA

NEAL ADAMS interview about his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s from AVENGERS to X-MEN, unpublished Adams covers, thumbnail layouts for classic stories, published pages BEFORE they were inked, and unused pages from his NEVER-COMPLETED X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! Plus TOM PALMER on the art of inking Neal Adams, ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK CHECKLIST, & ADAMS wraparound cover!

Definitive JIM WARREN interview about publishing EERIE, CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and other fan favorites, in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren art, plus unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and more! BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

More on DC COMICS 1967-74, with art by and interviews with NICK CARDY, JOE SIMON, NEAL ADAMS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, IRWIN DONENFELD, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GIL KANE, DENNY O’NEIL, HOWARD POST, ALEX TOTH on FRANK ROBBINS, DC Writer’s Purge of 1968 by MIKE BARR, JOHN BROOME’s final interview, and more! CARDY cover!

Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, FRANK BRUNNER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-beforeseen pencil pages to an unpublished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! Cover by FRANK BRUNNER!

Featuring ’70s Marvel greats PAUL GULACY, JOHN BYRNE, RICH BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, DAN ADKINS, JIM MOONEY, STEVE GERBER, FRANK SPRINGER, and DENIS KITCHEN! Plus: a rarely-seen Stan Lee P.R. chat promoting the ’60s Marvel cartoon shows, the real trials and tribulations of Comics Distribution, the true story behind the ’70s Kung Fu Craze, and a new cover by PAUL GULACY!

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

Major independent creators and their fabulous books from the early days of the Direct Sales Market! Featured interviews include STEVE RUDE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DAVE STEVENS, JAIME HERNANDEZ, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, DON SIMPSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, MIKE BARON, MIKE GRELL, and more! Plus plenty of rare and unpublished art, and a new STEVE RUDE cover!

Interviews with Charlton alumni JOE GILL, DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, DENNIS O’NEIL, ROY THOMAS, PETE MORISI, JIM APARO, PAT BOYETTE, FRANK MCLAUGHLIN, SAM GLANZMAN, plus ALAN MOORE on the Charlton/ Watchmen Connection, DC’s planned ALLCHARLTON WEEKLY, and more! DICK GIORDANO cover!

Career-spanning SIMONSON INTERVIEW, covering his work from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion, JOHN WORKMAN interview, TRINA ROBBINS interview, also Trina, MARIE SEVERIN and RAMONA FRADON talk shop about their days in the comics business, MARIE SEVERIN interview, plus other great women cartoonists. New SIMONSON cover!

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(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes by KUBERT, SIMONSON, JIM LEE, BOLLAND, GIBBONS and others, TOTH on continuity art, TOTH checklist, plus SHELDON MAYER SECTION with a look at SCRIBBLY, interviews with Mayer’s kids (real-life inspiration for SUGAR & SPIKE), and more! Covers by TOTH and MAYER!

(108-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983! Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

1970s Marvel Horror focus, from Son of Satan to Ghost Rider! Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, GARY FRIEDRICH, DON PERLIN, TONY ISABELLA, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring RUSS HEATH, MIKE PLOOG, DON PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and more! New GENE COLAN cover!

Interviews with Tower and THUNDER AGENTS alumni WALLACE WOOD, LOU MOUGIN, SAMM SCHWARTZ, DAN ADKINS, LEN BROWN, BILL PEARSON, LARRY IVIE, GEORGE TUSKA, STEVE SKEATES, and RUSS JONES, TOWER COMICS CHECKLIST, history of TIPPY TEEN, 1980s THUNDER AGENTS REVIVAL, and more! WOOD cover!

Interviews with ’80s independent creators DAVE STEVENS, JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, and SANDY PLUNKETT, plus lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Love & Rockets, Mr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by STEVENS and the HERNANDEZ BROS.!

’70s ATLAS COMICS HISTORY! Interviews with JEFF ROVIN, ROY THOMAS, ERNIE COLÓN, STEVE MITCHELL, LARRY HAMA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, SAL AMENDOLA, JIM CRAIG, RIC MEYERS, and ALAN KUPPERBERG, Atlas Checklist, HEATH, WRIGHTSON, SIMONSON, MILGROM, AUSTIN, WEISS, and STATON discuss their Atlas work, and more! COLÓN cover!

Discussion with ARTHUR ADAMS about his career (with an extensive CHECKLIST, and gobs of rare art), plus GRAY MORROW tributes from friends and acquaintances and a MORROW interview, Red Circle Comics Checklist, interviews with & remembrances of GEORGE ROUSSOS & GEORGE EVANS, Gallery of Morrow, Evans, and Roussos art, EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER interview, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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(128-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

#20: ROMITAs & KUBERTs #21: ADAM HUGHES, ALEX #22: GOLD KEY COMICS & examinations: RUSS MANNING ROSS, & JOHN BUSCEMA &Interviews Magnus Robot Fighter, WALLY WOOD &

Roundtable with JIM STARLIN, ALAN WEISS and AL MILGROM, interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and FRANK BRUNNER, art from the lost WARLOCK #16, plus a FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION, with a Flo interview, tributes by HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISS cover!

History of Harvey Comics, from Hot Stuf’, Casper, and Richie Rich, to Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” line! Interviews with, art by, and tributes to JACK KIRBY, STERANKO, WILL EISNER, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL KANE, WALLY WOOD, REED CRANDALL, JOE SIMON, WARREN KREMER, ERNIE COLÓN, SID JACOBSON, FRED RHOADES, and more! New wraparound MITCH O’CONNELL cover!

Joint interview between Marvel veteran and superb Spider-Man artist JOHN ROMITA, SR. and fan favorite Thor/Hulk renderer JOHN ROMITA, JR.! On the flipside, JOE, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT share their histories and influences in a special roundtable conversation! Plus unpublished and rarely seen artwork, and a visit by the ladies VIRGINIA and MURIEL! Flip-covers by the KUBERTs and the ROMITAs!

(104-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

Exhaustive MIGNOLA interview, huge art gallery (with never-seen art), and comprehensive checklist! On the flip-side, a careerspanning JILL THOMPSON interview, plus tons of art, and studies of Jill by ALEX ROSS, STEVE RUDE, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and more! Also, interview with JOSÉ DELBO, and a talk with author HARLAN ELLISON on his various forays into comics! New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS speak, interviews with and art by NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and more! Features new covers by GAHAN WILSON and MARK BODÉ!

Focus on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS! ALAN MOORE interview on everything from SWAMP THING to WATCHMEN to ABC and beyond! Interviews with KEVIN O’NEILL, CHRIS SPROUSE, JIM BAIKIE, HILARY BARTA, SCOTT DUNBIER, TODD KLEIN, JOSE VILLARRUBIA, and more! Flip-side spotlight on the amazing KEVIN NOWLAN! Covers by J.H. WILLIAMS III & NOWLAN!

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(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(122-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

ADAM HUGHES ART ISSUE, with a comprehensive interview, unpublished art, & CHECKLIST! Also, a “Day in the Life” of ALEX ROSS (with plenty of Ross art)! Plus a tribute to the life and career of one of Marvel’s greatest artists, JOHN BUSCEMA, with testimonials from his friends and peers, art section, and biographical essay. HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. Spektor, Turok, Son of Stone’s ALBERTO GIOLITTI and PAUL S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar, Boris Karloff, The Twilight Zone, and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMM cover!

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(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Previously available only to CBA subscribers! Spotlights great DC Comics of the ’70s: Interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN on JACK KIRBY’s Fourth World, ALEX TOTH on his mystery work, NEAL ADAMS on Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, RUSS HEATH on Sgt. Rock, BRUCE JONES discussing BERNIE WRIGHTSON (plus a WRIGHTSON portfolio), and a BRUCE TIMM interview, art gallery, and cover!

Compiles the new “extras” from CBA COLLECTION VOL. 1-3: unpublished JACK KIRBY story, unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art, unused JEFF JONES story, ALAN WEISS interview, examination of STEVE ENGLEHART and MARSHALL ROGERS’ 1970s Batman work, a look at DC’s rare Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, PAUL GULACY art gallery, Marvel Value Stamp history, Mr. Monster’s scrapbook, and more!

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $3.95

the good stuff

More on George: https://www.facebook.com/comicbookfever

Sensational Shellhead The sweet awesomeness of Play Imagination’s astounding ’super alloy’ Iron Man by George khoury CBC Contributing Editor This page: What can better describe these models of Ol’ Shellhead “Super Alloy” line from Play Imaginative?

XXX TM & © copyright notice.

Over the last couple of years, Play Imaginative has spoiled us all with the sweet awesomeness that is their stellar Super Alloy Iron Man line. The company’s mission statement is simple: “Play Imaginative’s desire to create high-end figures is fueled by the passion to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. In doing so, we are committed to design and produce figures that are cutting edge as we push the boundaries to become the game-changers in the industry.” One look at these bad boys and you’ll never look at collectible figures the same way again. These toys are so radiant that you’ll swear that Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man walks among us. Play Imaginative utilizes the skills of top artists and their two in-house design teams to flesh out each Iron Man suit in Tony Stark’s armory to perfection. All of this high quality comes from the company’s pursuit to bring the look and spirit of the movies into our homes. The company works together with Marvel on what they can and cannot do. They will continue to conceptualize and achieve unprecedented levels of articulation, lighting, effects and detailing in the world of toys. The outpouring and positive reception from toy collectors from all walks of life have ensured that line will continue to flourish. Play Imaginative had big plans for the future of these Super Alloy die-cast-metal figures. Upcoming releases will include a certain gigantic armor designed to take down Marvel’s Green Goliath in Avengers: Age of Ultron movie. “Our goal is to produce all the suits that you see in the movies and we are scheduled to have the Iron

Man Mark 43, 44, and 45 in 2015-2016,” says Anthony Le, the company’s sales director. “There are plans for the Hulkbuster as this figure will be one of the items we’ll highlight later this year. We can’t give additional information about it at this time, but promise that collectors will be in awe.” The recent success of the Mark 42 (featured in Iron Man 3) is proof that there’s no stopping this Super Alloy line. Le comments, “All the [Super Alloys] are produced in limited quantities as we gear our business to the distinguished collectors. In addition to the limited quantities, we offer exclusive versions as well.” The line will continue to flourish as long as collectors line up to collect them all.

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

marvelman

The Return of Miracleman

Cory Sedlmeier, Marvel’s restoration virtuoso, on the revial of the classic series Interview conducted by Jon B. Cooke CBC Editor [For many of us old-time comics fans, the domain of the devil got downright frigid on Jan. 15, 2014, when the first issue of a reprinting of the legendary Miracleman series, that ground-breaking saga as originally written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, made it to the racks. We all knew that the property was fraught with contention, and litigation, and that one giant mess engulfed the tales — arguably composing the finest super-hero saga ever written — and many were resigned that the epic would never again see print. But the House of Ideas pulled off the impossible and the stories are again seeing the light of day (albeit without Moore’s name attached, by his request, as the credits feature only the credit, “The Original Writer”). Cory Sedlmeier is overseeing the re-presentation of the series, which will soon return from hiatus with the Neil Gaiman-scribed story arcs. (Full disclosure: Cory has been my editor for a handful of introductions I’ve written for the Marvel Masterworks series.) Transcribing by Steven Thompson. — Y.E.]

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Cpry Sed;meier photo by and © Bruce Guthrie.

Comic Book Creator: Can you give us a little background, Cory, and what people might recognize as you having worked on? Cory Sedlmeier: The main thing that I do now is edit the Marvel Masterworks. I came to Marvel 14 years ago, as a college intern, and they tossed me into the collections department. I wanted to learn as much as I could and threw myself headlong into whatever they’d let me do. At the end of the internship, Axel offered me a job, but by intent or just unwittingly, I’d specialized in being a little crazy about making the classic collections the best they could possibly be. The collection guys I interned for grabbed me and I ended up helping them before moving on to editorial proper. I worked on… just about everything everywhere there was a fire to put out… Epic, X-Men, you name it. Working with Garth Ennis on Punisher MAX and helping launch Astonishing X-Men were great experiences. Of the series I edited on staff, Fantastic Four/ Iron Man: Big in Japan, by Zeb Wells and Seth Fisher, is the most important to me. Haunt of Horror, the series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations by Richard Corben, is up there, too. Now, I get to do what I do freelance. CBC: And you’re currently working on the Miracleman restoration. Cory: For me, Miracleman goes as far back as when I was an intern. I remember being in the office way back in 2001 and Joe

came in and said, “We’re going for Miracleman.” Well, it took quite a while to get everything ironed out because it’s the longest and craziest history of any character — by a pretty long stretch, going as far back as the ’40s, if you want to draw a really long line. It took some time to get everything untangled, but once the green light was finally lit, I jumped in with both feet. We started work in late October of 2013. It’s amazing that much time has passed, but I’ve been busy, busy, busy, trying to gather all the materials and original artwork that we can… From there it’s been all about working with the artists, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben, and now Mark Buckingham, to bring the series back to print in a way that best represents their creative vision. Because, particularly for guys like Garry, Alan, and Rick, they didn’t have a lot of involvement or input as to how their work looked beyond the ink they put on the page. Chuck Austen’s first story, for instance. That was a nighttime scene, but they originally colored it as daytime! In particular, Garry told me stories about how the early Eclipse stuff, when his stories were first printed in color, that they were colored by underpaid fabric designers from Spain. They had no idea how to color a comic! Garry described it as if an insane person dumped an Easter Egg kit all over the pages. When we got to Alan Davis’ run, I spoke with him about how he wanted to approach bringing his work back to print. I asked what he thought of the original series’ coloring, and he said, “I’ve actually never seen my Miracleman work in color — ever.” I sent him PDFs of the original stuff and his response was that he didn’t have any nostalgia for it because, of course, he’d never seen it before and he didn’t like what he saw in the versions from the ’80s. I wanted to keep the look of the series consistent with the time that it was conceived. The colorist that I thought could best do that was Steve Oliff, who, I didn’t know this at first, worked at Eclipse and developed a lot of the coloring techniques that were used on Miracleman in the ’80s and ’90s. They just weren’t used as well as he used them! At least, not until Sam Parsons, who Steve trained back then, took over. Steve was a real pioneer of a technique called grayline coloring. They would take the artwork and reduce it onto a Photostat in either blue or gray. The line art was on a separate acetate overlay. With this method the colorist could do painted coloring that the printer reproduced from directly. It allowed for much

Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Warrior TM & © the respective copyright holder.

more nuanced painted coloring instead of the traditional, flat 64-color comic book coloring. Steve actually re-used those grayline techniques on the new editions of Miracleman, just like 30 years ago, doing the work by hand with markers and watercolors, then scanning it in and bringing it in Photoshop for the final print art. We send files to the printer digitally now, but the techniques and methods that he used were all strictly of the period. With the new coloring, this isn’t something where we’re trying to update! We’re not trying to do Turner Classic Movies colorizing Citizen Kane or something like that. It’s about doing Miracleman, for the first time ever, with the artists’ full involvement and input, realizing their original vision. Everything’s been discussed with the creators and they’ve had full approval. We also worked from the original scripts and took direction from there as well. The other challenge is restoring the line art. Over half of the first three graphic novels are shot directly off the originals, in particular the Totleben run. I think I got close to finding 60% of John’s originals. His pages, scanned directly from the original artwork… are just absolutely stunning. Mark kept virtually all of his originals, which is a massive boon. For the rest, I’ve been digging up every source possible, which has been very successful. People knew this series’ importance. They held onto stuff. You know, Garry just has an amazing memory for this stuff. He has it all right in the back of his head and he saved pretty extensive files and materials from the series. So he could send me scripts, notes, sketches, and designs — all kinds of development stuff — that we incorporated into the comic reprints and the collections. It’s enabled us to really bring things together in a definitive format. It’s great that with today’s technology, we can retain so much more detail than was possible in the ’80s and ’90s. The Letratone, Mark’s photo-collages, everything’s crisper and clearer. It’s what these guys actually laid down on the boards. Mark’s art from “Notes from the Underground”? So much was lost in the original printing! Being able to re-present Miracleman with this level of fidelity and quality is a pleasure. These guys did some of the greatest work of their careers and it deserves to be shown in the best conceivable way that it could ever be done. And that’s what we’ve tried to do. CBC: What is your assessment of Miracleman? Cory: Miracleman is one of those series that just blew my mind, like so many other people. When it originally came out, in 1982, if you look at what else was around at that point in time, if you look at the comics field surrounding it, it is so far ahead of everything else. Me, I didn’t come to the series until later on, but when I did, the scope of what was being done and the way that it approached the concept and the metaphor of super-heroes and blended it with Nietzsche’s philosophy, trying to draw a conclusion as to what might happen if these kind of super-powered creatures existed… How that would affect them as humans… The way that Johnny Bates is corrupted… How power affects your sense of self and morality and the way that you relate other beings around you… It Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

just showed a level of potential I don’t think had been seen before and since. Miracleman, for very good reasons, was very influential and you can see strong reflections of it in other work. Because it’s been out of print for so long, a lot of the ideas from it have been liberally borrowed, but what’s crazy is that there’s a generation that has never actually read the real thing. CBC: Right. And you’ve finished of the “Original Writer’s” run, right? It’s been on hiatus? Cory: Yes. We took a little time off because we needed schedules to line-up for [writer] Neil Gaiman and [artist] Mark Buckingham. Bucky was finishing his amazing, massive run on Fables including the 150th, final graphic novel-size issue. So we waited until the timing is right to begin their run. To get the best work from two of the best creators that have ever worked in the medium, you wait. What they have in store, we want that to be as satisfying and perfect as possible.

Above: This godlike Miracleman variant cover by Gary Leach is from #16 [May ’15]. Inset left: Warrior #2 cover. Below: A nod to that out-ofprint, great book on the history of the character, Kimota! The MIracleman Companion, with Mark Buckingham cover art, a pastiche of Whiz Comics #2.

Above: A panel at last year’s Baltimore Comic-Con spotlighted Miracleman. From left, Cory Sedlmeier, Alan Davis, Tom Breevort, Mark Buckingham, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch. Photo is by Bruce Guthrie.

Below: A detail of the hero by Mark Buckingham depicting Miracleman: The Golden Age.

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Photo © Bruce Guthrie.

The work Mark’s been doing so far has been amazing. He’s doing mixed media, sculptural/painted covers for The Golden Age, their first six-issue storyline. For each cover, we’re taking a different member of Miracleman’s pantheon of gods and depicting them in a mythic sense. The first issue has Miracleman literally represented as the Olympus pyramid, towering over mankind. The next issue opens during a hurricane and the cover has Miraclewoman depicted as the storm blowing the characters away. Mark’s playing a lot with these different metaphors and the godly stature of the characters in relationship to humankind. It’s a Golden Age in name and opportunity, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Golden Age for the way every human feels in relationship to the world and the way it’s changed. Living gods are obviously a massive shock and, while there’s no war, no poverty, and no hunger, people are still flawed and are trying to reconcile their own lives. And now they have to do it in comparison to these perfect beings who surround them. CBC: How many issues actually in the first run of Neil’s story were printed? Cory: Neil and Mark did six issues of The Golden Age and three issues of The Silver Age, but only two Silver Age issues were published. For the new releases, Mark’s decided to re-ink those last three issues, as well as the “Retrieval” prologue to The Silver Age. His art style has evolved, as anyone’s would over twoand-a-half decades, so he’s going to back into those stories to re-ink them so that they’ll match seamlessly with his new work. He’s going to use a lot of the techniques and washes that were part of his best work on Fables. It is stunning! It sweetens the 25-year wait that much more. The last published issue of The Silver Age ended on an enormous cliffhanger. People have been waiting to see where it goes and it’s going to be every bit as satisfying as everything in the series has been to date. Miracleman is one of the highest watermarks in the super-hero genre, and Neil and Mark are going to maintain that very, very high bar throughout the conclusion of The Silver Age and then into The Dark Age, which will grab a lot of attention! CBC: Are you going to wait until the scripts come in before you schedule them or are they to come out regularly?

Cory: We are going to move into The Silver Age on a monthly schedule and we’ll just continue from there. CBC: In other words, Neil’s a very busy man, but he’s committed to this schedule? Cory: Sure. Neil and Mark have waited 25 years to finish this story and it’s something they’ve wanted to complete for a long time, to finish the story they’ve always had to tell. When they started Miracleman, they were comic book neophytes. Mark was very new to comics and Neil got the MM gig before he’d even done Sandman. Clearly their talent was apparent right from the get-go, that despite being relative unknowns they inherited this huge series. Their work was fantastic, and now they’re the biggest guys at the table. CBC: You and I had the opportunity to meet at the New York Comic Con. I guess it’s time to geek out and talk about some of the great archaeological work that you did. Would you like to share that story of finding some of the artwork? Cory: I’m a mad man for doing research. It’s part of what I find really engaging and fulfilling about the work that I do on the Marvel Masterworks and Marvel’s other collections. I was a popular culture studies major in college, so that combination of history and anthropology in pop culture mediums is really what just lights me up. And for a series like Miracleman, such an amazing work of comics fiction, I wanted to dig up everything that I possibly could to give readers as much of the history, background, and behind-the-scenes about the series as possible. I talked to as many people as possible who were originally involved in the series to build a complete understanding of what the philosophy and decision-making was, why something was one way in one issue and why was it a little different in the next issue. I wanted to really put together an essential understanding of the series, so that in bringing back into print, what we’re doing is as creatively sound and as definitive as possible. Through my research, I found a treasure trove of material that helped make all that possible… but I won’t say where! CBC: You had some insight into continuity, hints that perhaps stories go in a different order? Cory: Well, with the second Miracleman graphic novel, the chapters were serialized in [British comics monthly] Warrior in one order, another order when Eclipse did their comic-book version, and another when Eclipse did their hardcover version of it. They weren’t printed in the same order twice! That drove me nuts. If there’s a change, I want to know why there was a change. I want to know all the decision-making and the rationale behind the series, and this just completely perplexed me and drove me insane. Through talking with almost everyone who was involved with the series, it turns out that the story that ended up being Book Two’s title story, “The Red King Syndrome,” which John Ridgway illustrated, was — from Alan Davis’s recollection — something that was originally conceived for another magazine Dez Skinn intended to launch. It was begun much earlier, Alan recalled waiting on reference for the Zarathustra bunker interiors from John Ridgway so he could finish the final page of Warrior #10. “The Red King Syndrome” wasn’t published until Warrior #17.

Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Going through files and everything that I uncovered, I saw where there was a point where they thought about associating “RKS” with the end of the first Miracleman graphic novel, A Dream of Flying. Dez Skinn proposed to Eclipse to put it at the end of the first graphic novel after Miracleman learns about Gargunza in the Zarathustra bunker. Through talking with Alan Davis and John Ridgway, I came up with enough background information to understand what the original placement of the story was intended to be and where it stood in the narrative of the larger Miracleman storyline. And that’s the way that we approached it for the new edition. CBC: The Warrior version of Book One did not start with the Mick Anglo/Don Lawrence prologue, right? Cory: Right, the original Warrior edition didn’t have the Anglo/Lawrence “Invaders From the Future” prologue. It just launched right into Miracleman’s return. When Eclipse got the rights to do the Miracleman reprints in the U.S., in ’85, they knew that the U.S. market had probably never heard of Marvelman or Miracleman, as we know him now. Garry Leach actually came up with the idea of taking one of the old stories from the ’50s and using it as a way to introduce the characters to new readers. It was to give ’em the basics of who the Miracleman Family are, what they’re like, and also set up a counterpoint to the very realistic narrative that was going to come down the line. And again, Garry has a crazy memory. He told me that “Invaders from the Future” was supposed to have been colored in a very simplistic, 1950s comic-book color palette with the coloring mis-registered and lots of aging and foxing to the paper! Those underpaid Spanish fabric designers Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

couldn’t swing it, but we can do it now. No problem! So Garry actually went into his comic collection, pulled out an old comic that he had from 1956, which is the year that story was originally done, and scanned the paper. We used that aged paper scan as texture for the background on the pages to make them look 60 years old. And, on top of that… Like I said, I’m kind of insane with my research. When you look at an old comic and see the BenDay dot patterns, those are called line screens. There are a number of dots per line. We scanned a comic from 1956 and we measured the exact line screens to the dot. There’s also different angles for each color plate. We measured the screen angles for the cyan, for the magenta and the yellow, separately! Then we screened everything, both the number of dots per line, and the exact angles, that would have been in a comic book from 1956, just to make this thing completely, unassailably, perfectly, historically accurate. It is complete insanity and, really, would anybody other than me and Mike Kelleher, who executed this mad plan, notice?! I don’t know, but it was a lot of fun and satisfying. That’s a crazy example, but it’s the level of attention and care that we’re putting into everything on Miracleman. It’s a definitive piece of work that I love and I want everything to be as absolutely perfect as it can be in every possible way. CBC: How has the response

Top: Incredible spread by John Totleben, which graced Miracleman #16 [Dec. 1989]. Above: Vignette of character drawn by Alan Davis. 13

Above: Cory Sedlmeier shared an example of the extensive reconstruction/remastering is done on issue reprint issue of Miracleman. Above is from the Miracleman #1 [Aug. ’85] and the new edition [Mar. ’14].

Inset right: Perhaps the best super-hero comic book ever executed. Gods can be monsters, indeed. Miracleman #15 [Nov. ’88].

Below: The Marvel men get together in this, the first issue of The Marvelman Family [Oct. ’56].

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

been to the schedule? Cory: Well, people would like more and faster, which is good. There’s a demand. We did set it up so that we had the appropriate amount of time to do it the way it needs to be done. If we rushed in headlong and went, “Yeah, we’ll just put out a 200-page graphic novel right off the bat,” unrealistic pressure would have been put on everyone in terms of doing the restoration work, in terms of Steve Oliff doing his best work on the coloring… There’s a human element behind creating comics, which is that it involves people and work. Good work takes time, so we’ve approached it in a fashion where we give everyone the time that they need to do the best possible work. I can think of different comic series that are seminal, absolutely definitive works in the medium, that didn’t come out anywhere near on time! But, decades later, nobody really remembers that. All they know is that it’s great work and that’s what matters. CBC: Recently, at New Year’s, an All-New Miracleman Annual came out.

Is that a part of canon? Cory: Sure. The stories from the Annual are collected with the third graphic novel, Olympus. The Grant Morrison story was actually written back in, I believe it was ’85. As Warrior was folding, there never was an opportunity for it to see print. When Marvel was ready to bring Miracleman back, Joe Quesada got ahold of Grant and asked him, “Hey! Do you still have that script? We’d like to publish it.” Grant said, “Sure! But only if you draw it!” It was agreed and after 30 years, they finally got to bring this lost Kid Miracleman story to readers. The Annual also has a new story by Pete Milligan and Mike Allred that taps into a different vein of the characters and the crazy and fun spirit of the Mick Anglo-era stories. CBC: What about Miracleman: Apocrypha, the three-issue companion series? Cory: At present, there aren’t plans for Apocrypha. We have more than enough to do with what we have on our plate. That doesn’t mean it won’t ever be seen, but it’s not in the cards at the moment. CBC: And the completion for all this is by the end of 2016? Cory: Neil and Mark’s first issue is out Sept. 2015, so based on the number of issues that they have left, we’ll be completing their run in 2017. CBC: I don’t know how many people pick up your Omnibuses, but they are truly outstanding. Is there any plan for a Miracleman Omnibus? Cory: Right now, we’re sticking with the format we have, doing hardcovers of each graphic novel. So if you want to get your Miracleman fix, that’s the place that you need to be. CBC: Is there any plan that you know — and do you have any opinion about if they did — to introduce Miracleman into the Marvel Universe? Cory: You know, I’m probably not the best person to ask. The role that I’ve had has been focused on Miracleman in his unique world. I know it means a lot to some fans that everything be interconnected, but that’s never been my preoccupation.

geez louise, it’s the big red cheese!

Shazeventy-Five & Counting! The aging hero reflects on his colorful, multi-faceted days of Golden Age glory

Shazam! and Mr. Mind TM & © DC Comics.

As channeled by P.C. Hamerlinck

And there were always plenty of annoying thingamajigs popping up that Holy moley! It has all seemed like a dream, just like what I had to deal with: the Selective Billy said outside of the old abandoned subway station on Invisibility Belt that caused that very first fateful night. Poor kid… some of the crazy me to think I was having stuff he’d have to report over the radio! But a lot of folks hallucinations … the believed him — and believed in us. mirror that produced Shaz– err, you-know-who anticipated the kind of evil reflections that situations we’d be up against, and equipped us with the came alive … the wisdom, strength, stamina, power, courage, and speed to Dream Transmitter face everything, and I mean everything!: a raging atomic that could control fire that could even burn water… the mirage maker… the people’s dreams … mountain mover… an artist with an eraser that could wipe the Hate Machine out anything… the time I had to seal off the hole to Hades, … or that darn where all the water in the world’s oceans had been draining horn that spewed down into… and even fighting the whole world itself! out anything you But I think some of our greatest challenges involved wished for, and lifting up disheartened souls and help them find their way as much as you as they stumbled through life. We did this frequently with desired. It sounds Tawny, our frequently foibled furry feline friend! Otherwise, nifty, but it was a I’ve witnessed humanity at its lowest and at its highest, like big mess. the day I wandered down the Street of Forgotten Men. I’ve Speaking of also seen opportunity knock for many people, and witmesses, there’s nessed how it’s so often ignored. Once I went so far as to been a lot of unexbecome a hobo in order to give a disillusioned man a sense plainable things that of purpose again in his life. I fondly recall the blind man who happened that still “saw” me in a different light than anyone else ever has, have me scratching and actually helped me solve a crime. I also met a man that my head to this day: nobody loved (except for his dog!). the Three Sister Fates I despise discrimination and prejudice more than anywho control the world thing else. I battled it often, like when Tawny tried to move and everyone’s destiinto a new neighborhood … or when all the “undesirable” nies recklessly turned 1942 people were driven out of a town called Perfection. into 1492 … and the commotion And, since I am a mortal after all, I’ve had to overcome from a simple, seemingly endless string some of my own personal issues, like being envious of the pulled from another dimension. Additionally, I faced the lives of “ordinary” men … and dealing with the monotony of living embodiment of fear itself that, quite easily, stirred saving people every day of the week. up panic in the city. Then there was the day Father Time Yet, as often as not, each of those days were filled with had absent-mindedly turned his hour glass upside down, something exciting, sometimes otherworldly, and always thereby setting events on Earth backwards — but gave me troublesome! Anything seemed possible. I smiled and rolled the chance to re-do things all over again the right way. And with it, no matter how offbeat things got! Imagine, if you then there were the seven men roaming the earth can, trying to make sense in the World of the Subconscious who were the living counterparts representing where all things were backwards, upside down and inside the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man. It was a bit out … or traveling through a black hole to an illogical, dou- humbling knowing that, even when I stopped ble-talking place called Nowhere … or entering upon the such evil in the world, it would ultimately be Land of Surrealism, a place where imagination was more replaced by even greater evil. important than rules. I guess nothing was more evil than Along the way I’ve encountered Glomper frogs from that nasty little twerp, Mind. It took me two Venus, ogres, trolls, imps, prehistoric zombies, a junkman years to stop that monster. There’s been from the Land of Limbo (where all discarded things of Earth scores of other losers like him that I’ve had end up), a house that didn’t want to be haunted, mist-like to take down … a psychotic beast-man … creatures who were the discarded instincts of mankind, a a human-hating, atomic-powered, colorblind man jealous of people who can see color so he ten-foot tall robot … and the develops a blackness germ to remove color in the city, a Nazi nut job who left my friend ghost writer who wrote ghost stories and who really was a Freddy for dead … all real ghost, a collector of bad thoughts who put a curse on a man pieces of work that ultimately to think aloud, the Temple of Izalotahui in Guatemala, the got what they deserved. Ah, but Book of All Knowledge that fell into the wrong hands, and from day one, I still hear the incessant cackthe trouble caused just from getting the wrong clothes back ling of the demented Doctor who keeps on from the dry cleaners! inventing gadgets and contraptions to rule the Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

Above: Cartoonist Mark Lewis kindly contributed his version of the Big Red Cheese at 75. Below: This illo of Mr. Mind is from a sales flyer for The Monster Society of Evil slipcase edition. Next page: C.C. Beck re-creation of his Whiz Comics #22 cover, plus a Captain Marvel Club pin. Both courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

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Whiz Comics, Shazam! TM & © DC Comics.

world. He’ll never give up, and I’ll keep on putting him away. It’s what we do. The Doc’s daughter (no, not the one that’s a pain in the neck for Mary) … well, we’ve always had this mutual respect for one another. It’s complicated, with her father being who he is and all. I guess I’m still a little bashful around the ladies, although I was once temporarily blinded by the hypnotic spell of the seductive Deliah, mistress of mental suggestion. Like all respectable heroes, I’ve done my fair share of time travel, especially to distant planets and to the far future — once actually to save the human race from imminent extinction. I visited 3000 A.D., a time of peace and contentment, but only on the surface, of course … and I met the Captain Marvel of 2943, who turned out to be a big coward! No one is more brave and pure of heart than Billy. That’s why the wizard chose him, y’know. He sure got himself into some pickles, though … getting bound and gagged all the time … but only called on me when he really needed a big brother to step in. I remember when Billy ate some bad lobster and a fierce battle of good versus evil took place in his mind … or the time he dreamt had that our entire universe is the result of a dream by a napping giant from another dimension. Once when Billy came down with a bad cold and lost his voice, he couldn’t summon me, so he ended up using his own ingenuity to foil a gang of terrorists. In a odd twist one time, Zeus had sent down defective lightning bolts that made me powerless but gave Billy amazing abilities. He had fun with that, like any kid would! Another time, due to a stiff shoulder, Zeus hurled down the lightning only to hit another boy and, for the first time, Billy and I existed side by side! Yes, Billy and I have been through a lot together. We’ve been going for just a little over a decade now. To be honest, I really don’t remember much beyond that. You see, I’ve been trapped in this sphere of Suspendium somewhere in the universe for Lord knows how long. It’s frustrating … I have so much more work to do … so much more to experience and discover … to bring some light again into the darkness. I think this is one time where I could sure use a hand. I wonder if anyone anywhere can hear my thoughts? Can you?

comics in the library

Geary and the Art of Murder The cartoonist’s chilling and yet accessible Victorian true-crime graphic “novels”

All TM & © Rick Geary.

by RicHard J. Arndt CBC Contributing Editor After Bone and Tintin, the most checked-out graphic novels on my library’s shelves are split between Rick Geary’s two factual murder series — A Treasury of Victorian Murder and A Treasury of XXth Century Murder, and various mythology books. This time we’re dealing with Geary’s two linked series, a collection of books I personally find enormously entertaining and informative, and am very pleased to see that students do, as well. Geary’s been around as a cartoonist for quite a while, debuting in the late 1970s with decidedly quirky work in a variety of publications, most notably in National Lampoon and Heavy Metal. Many of those tales were reprinted in his Housebound with Rick Geary collection. Geary’s tales are slice-of-life segments that were often eyed from weird angles, both in the cartoonist’s distinctive art approach — a sort of highly detailed locale rendering combined with a bizarre mix of big-foot cartooning, sampling the flavorings of Robert Crumb, Howard H. Knerr, and Gary Gianni — and his odd camera arrangements in panels, with the reader’s viewpoints coming from very low on the ground and looking up at things, such as the soles of shoes or looking straight down at characters from high overhead. By the mid-’80s, Geary’s efforts were appearing in both alternate/underground titles like Bop and more mainstream alternate titles from Pacific, Eclipse, Fantagraphics, and Dark Horse. Among those ’80s tales were the occasional crime story, most notably the true crime tale of “The Abominable Mrs. Pearcy,” which appeared in Prime Cuts. This story formed the basis for Geary’s first Victorian true crime murder book, called A Treasury of Victorian Murder [1987], from NBM. That initial book consisted an overview of the turn-of-the-last-century and characters, a reprint of the Mrs. Pearcy tale, and two more short if pithy examinations of additional Victorian crimes. Evidently the book sold decently enough since Geary and NBM began a series of such books in 1995, beginning with the most famous Victorian murderer of all — Jack the Ripper. Over the next 12 years, a total of ten true crime volumes appeared, including The Borden Tragedy, The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield, and The Saga of the Bloody Benders. In 2008, Geary had apparently reached his limit with the Victorian era and began a 20th Century series that has reached (thus far) six volumes, including The Lindbergh Child and The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans. Geary’s somewhat dry art style works wonderfully well with a police procedural tale. His deceptively simple and oddly warm art allows the reader to lean in and peek at horrible happenings while simultaneously maintaining an emotional distance. Geary never uses toning or shading with his art so the styling manages the hat trick of vivid black and white clarity without undue foreshadowing influencing your take on the developments. His research is top notch — an example of which is his describing and drawing Lincoln as being too tall for the boarding house bed he was rushed to after his shooting, and being laid diagonally on the bed so that he could fit. Although no research appendixes appear, I’ve yet to find an inaccuracy when checking Geary’s facts against traditional true crime volumes. The Borden Tragedy even includes contempoComic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

rary press clippings and Lizzie Borden’s indictment order in the back of the book. Children, particularly of middle-school age, have a vivid interest in the morbid, as do many adults — witness the popularity of such true crime TV shows as Forensic Files and its many imitators. When I was a child, there were no books on true crime murders for children. I satisfied that urge by going to the adult section of the library. This prompted a huge discussion between my parents when my mother discovered I was reading a book on the Boston Strangler, complete with crime pictures. My mother maintained that I was too young, not ready for that kind of gruesome knowledge, and that the book would make me a pervert (literally, I was eavesdropping nearby) while my dad, a man I never saw read more than the local newspaper, Grit, Outdoor Life, Western paperbacks, and the occasional Conan the Barbarian comic I left lying around, said what I thought at the time and still believe to this day to be the wisest thing I’ve ever heard anyone anywhere say. He said “Look, if the kid reads a book from start to finish, all the way through, then he’s ready for the book, no matter what you or I or anybody else thinks.” My careers as a librarian, writer, and father are all based on those words. Children will read what they will, no matter what anybody thinks, and a parent or librarian’s job is to guide them, not to stand in the way. Every subject on God’s green earth, no matter how morbid or sordid, has a decent, clear, understandable book written about it somewhere. Leave it out in the open and, if they’re interested, they’ll pick it up. If they don’t, no worries, children also won’t touch anything they’re not interested in. Forbidden fruit just increases kids’ interest. I, and many of my students, like Geary’s murder books. They’re smart, pull no punches, but don’t dwell unnecessarily on the bloodier details. They provide an enormous wealth of detail without force-feeding the reader. Geary’s latest is a fictional effort — Louise Brooks, Detective — a murder mystery solved by the real-life but fallen out of flavor actress from the legendary silent film Pandora’s Box. A great story done in much the style of the murder books. It’s also a fabulous read. It will be added to my library’s graphic novel section as well. Great book!

This page: Rick Geary has nicely carved out his own niche in the field of graphic novels by focusing on real-life mysteries, usually set in the distant past. The cartoonist, a perennial attendee at Comic-Con International: San Diego, kindly helped out this issue by digging through his files for his self-caricature seen above. Thanks very muchly, R.G.!

Next: Graphic novels and Mythology!

Neal Adams, Stuart (Re-Animator) Gordon, and others share about WARP!, the ’70s Marvel-inspired theatrical cosmic epic about a bank teller who becomes God!

there came Warp! But the trilogy’s first episode, entitled Warp One: My Battlefield, My Body, wasn’t committed to celluloid; rather it was a production staged on Broadway, opening on Valentine’s Day in 1973, performed live before the Klieg lights in front of enthusiastic Manhattan theatergoers. Conceived as homage to Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Mighty Thor, the ambitious science fiction epic featured an able young cast and crew, some of whom would go onto Hollywood distinction, and featured the art direction of the most highly-acclaimed comic book artist of that era. And although it would receive standing ovations and eventually an award for the innovative costuming, Warp closed after a mere seven previews and eight performances, doomed by caustic and dismissive reviews and maybe a too-quick rollout on the Great White Way. Whence Came Warp: The Warp trilogy was the brainchild of future feature film director Stuart Gordon (later renowned for cult favorite horror flick Re-Animator) and novelist/playwright Lenny Kleinfeld (writing as Bury St. Edmund). The production, which first had a successful yearand-a-day run in Chicago, was initially staged to critical notice by the Windy City’s renowned Organic Theater, a company founded by Gordon and his wife, actress Carolyn Purdy-Gordon. The Organic would later be noted for premiering famed playwright David Mamet’s breakout drama, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and be at the epicenter of a thriving theater scene in the ’80s. The origins of Warp are to be found, as easily suspected, in an appreciation of both comics and theater. “I read comics as a kid,” Kleinfeld said. “I read everything as a kid. I was an only child. The first writing I can remember doing (in second or third grade, maybe) was when I discovered you could erase the dialogue balloons in comics and write your own. So I did an unau#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

From the ’70s it came. The first episode of a trilogy depicting the cataclysmic, otherworldly struggle between cosmic warriors, some allied with the power of darkness and others with the force of good. Fantastic characters, a few unaware of their own true nature, yet destined to save the universe through newfound abilities. Shockingly, some would be revealed to be siblings to one another, as desperate battle is waged against an evil overlord, all played out before an astounded and delighted audience… one rumored to include an incipient young filmmaker by the name of George Lucas. And lo, so it was, more than four years before the release of Star Wars,

thorized rewrite of an Uncle Scrooge comic book.” The budding scribe would return to the form, though he explains, “I stopped reading comics sometime around junior high (my father threw out my collection and warned me not to buy any more), and didn’t resume reading them until the end of my senior year of college, in 1969. I believe those guys [Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby] had been at work for a while by then. I had no idea who they were. A friend said that Marvel Comics went well with pot and acid. He was right.” Stuart’s upbringing was a bit restrictive. “My parents didn’t want me to read super-hero comics,” he said, “so I was reading things like Scrooge McDuck and stuff like that. But when I got older, when I got into high school, I got into Marvel Comics. I became a big fan of Doctor Strange, The Mighty Thor, and Conan the Barbarian.” Stuart’s younger brother, David George, who would be a technical director in early Organic productions, recalled the early years with his sibling. “We were very close. When I was 11 and Stuart was 14, our father died. He had a heart attack and that broke up the nuclear family, as it were. So I often joke that my mother raised two ‘only children,’ in that we both had our own passions and our own interests, and we were always encouraged to pursue them.” While David is a self-described “nature nut,” Stuart revealed an interest in the performing arts at a very young age. “I wished I had saved this,” the younger brother remembered, “but after our mother passed away, I had found, rubber-banded together, all of my brother’s report cards. On his kindergarten or first grade one, it had some mention of he was great at directing play on the playground. This guy was born to be a director. ‘Plays well with others’? No, he was directing the play!” The World’s A Stage: A passion for theater came to each his own way. “I’ve always loved theater,” Brooklyn-native Kleinfeld shared. “When I was in high school, there was great stuff being done in New York — a new Albee play every year; Pinter was on a roll, too… I saw the Royal Shakespeare (or was it the National’s?) production of Marat/Sade, which blew me away… And in my high school English classes, I was the only kid in the room who got Shakespeare, loved Shakespeare, was immediately intoxicated by the language.” Chicago-born Gordon said, “I was in some high school plays and some friends and I started a comedy group called ‘The Human Race,’ which we patterned after [the Chicago improvisational comedy group] Second City.” When asked if he performed, he said, “I did when I was a teenager, and I did some acting in college, but I discovered pretty quickly that I was a pretty bad actor. So I started directing.” The name of his first troupe was Screw Theater. Cecil O’Neal, an Army veteran who started at the same university as a Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

political science major, described the ideological leanings of the Midwest institution. “At that time, UW was ranked only behind Berkeley in terms of academic standings of public universities,” said O’Neal. “It attracted a lot of students from the East Coast, from all over the country, a lot of international students. So there was certainly a very well-educated, slightly radicalized East Coast student who had a large profile at Wisconsin at the time.” Provocateurs: Of impact was The Game Show, a parody of TV contest programs created by Gordon, one with a razor-sharp satirical edge. O’Neal said, “The Game Show was really out there. An audience would come in. We locked the doors of the theater. It was based on the idea of a television game show except audience members who participated in the game were abused, physically attacked, restrained… and, of course, they were all actors, plants in the audience. The whole premise of it was, ‘Would an audience rise up and object to what was going on and shut it down?’ In ways, it was a social experiment.” In an interview with the Wisconsin Union website, Gordon described the theatergoers reaction. “Real audience members eventually rose up and charged the performers onstage, demanding the show be stopped…We were surprised by the reaction to The Game Show. We thought the audience would 19

Previous spread: Neal Adams’ wraparound cover for The Neal Adams Index [1974] had the Warp characters facing off with some of the artist’s signature DC heroes. Above & Below: Warp co-creators Stuart Gordon, the play’s director, and Lenny Kleinfeld, the playwright, both of the Organic Theater. Next page: The evocative Warp poster with art by Neal Adams, who came on board as the Broadway production’s art director.

discover none of his friends were answering their phones. “Everyone was at a rehearsal of Stuart’s new show,” he said. “So I dropped in on the rehearsal. It was for Peter Pan. And an hour later, I was a member of the cast, in a non-speaking role — the only kind I can be trusted with. I may be the worst actor of any living English-speaking playwright. And probably some of the dead ones.” The Lost Boys: Gordon with his theatrical company did produce a topical variation of the classic. “It was done as a political cartoon about the ’68 [Democratic National] Convention in Chicago,” he said. “I had been at that convention and protested against the war and got tear-gassed by the police. So I took J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and did it as a commentary about what was going on. It included a psychedelic light show projected on the bodies of seven naked dancers and that ended with us getting arrested for obscenity.” “Us” included a young woman who performed in the play, Carolyn Purdy, a self-described hippie from that era (“But only because of my having met Stuart,” she said, adding, “I started out as Susie Sorority”). She explained, “I was a dancer in a nude sequence intended to represent innocence. How ironic that the real innocence was our belief that we were doing nothing that the Madison city fathers would find objectionable. In an election year. How naive of us. After the election, the charges were ‘withdrawn.’” The Republican district attorney’s crackdown on nudity also made the wires, Kleinfeld recalled. “It became an international news story,” he said. “Johnny Carson was joking about us on the Tonight Show.” Jerry Fortier, the psychedelic lighting effects projectionist who worked on the play and would be involved with Warp, remembered, “A country-&-western song based on the Peter Pan production that had the lyric, ‘Take it off, Tinkerbell!’ was on jukeboxes on the Madison campus. The song was about us turning Peter Pan into a burlesque show.” Overall, Fortier said, “My memory of Peter Pan is one of being terrified and of having to make fraught decisions as a group of people.” He added with a laugh, “I don’t think I had ever been in a situation like that before, as if being on a raft and having to decide who are we going to eat.” The Organic: Effectively forced from college, Gordon and Purdy-Gordon founded the Broom Street Theater, in 1969, and produced one show in the Badger State, but David George Gordon recalled things weren’t much better off-campus. “They were harassed by the city, which did not like the fact that they had gotten away unpunished for their brash, post-teenage antics,” he said. “The fire department would come in and shut them down because they didn’t have enough fire extinguishers. So there was a lot of that going on and finally, by invitation, they moved the theater.” Purdy-Gordon said, “We moved to Chicago in early 1970 and brought several fellow members with us from Madison,” and the Windy City, a two-and-a-half hour drive from the Wisconsin capital, welcomed the avant garde troupe. “The theatrical community in Chicago was very vibrant and exciting back then,” she said. “There were several wonderful theater companies… [and] everyone was doing edgy stuff… [Second City founding director] Paul Sills gave us a lot of encouragement when we first arrived. He said, ‘Come to Chicago. The city won’t give you any grief about nudity or anything else. They don’t care what you do.’ After our arrests in Madison, this was music to our ears.” And so was founded the legendary Organic Theater. Suggested Cecil O’Neal, who had performed in Peter Pan, “I would say that the Organic Theater was radical in its outlook. We did productions of Animal Farm and The Odyssey, which were radical in their perspectives. They were fairly sensual, fairly physical, and in many of them, blatant nudity. They all had a subversive undertones.” #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos © the respective copyright holders.

stare blankly at the stage for the duration, but they responded with anger and outrage.” Attending UW at the time, Lenny Kleinfeld was critic for the campus newspaper, and the production was his first exposure to Gordon’s work. “Every performance of which ended with the audience revolting and storming out of the theater,” he said, “which was Stuart’s intention.” Detailing his budding friendship with Kleinfeld, Gordon said, “We were good friends at UW after he had come and reviewed some of the shows I had done there. He was a theater critic and would write opinion pieces, and things like that, and he pissed off a lot of people. But he liked my shows, so we got to be good friends.” About his own journey into the theater, Kleinfeld confessed, “I began reviewing theater in my college newspaper [The Daily Cardinal] so I could get in free, and get published more often. (I was already writing a weekly column.) I got to know some of the people whose shows I gave raves to.” His byline was a pseudonym, “Bury St. Edmund.” Kleinfeld disclosed, “I needed a pen name for that column I wrote for the student newspaper, because my tone was pretty obnoxious, and people would call me and rant. So I picked a pen name that was blatant — the kind of arch name writers used when writing for pulps in the 1920s and ’30s — and, more importantly, a name which wasn’t in the Madison phone book.” While at UW, Kleinfeld explained, “A girl sat next to me in some class (don’t remember the subject), told me she was the chairman of the Student Union Theater Committee. They produced three one-act plays a year by undergrads. They had no viable scripts and had to make a decision the next day. I told her I’d never written a play. She said if I could write a 30- to 60-minute play by tomorrow she’d guarantee they’d produce it. So I stayed up all night and wrote a terrible play, which did get produced; the mind boggles trying to imagine how the other submissions could possibly have been significantly worse.” Working a summer job back home, he had to skedaddle from a New York City restaurant gig where he engendered the wrath of a mob-connected Teamster (“Long story,” says Len). Kleinfeld returned to UW to

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

Purdy-Gordon said, “Organic never set out to do strictly political theater. Yes, Animal Farm was political, but so was the book. We just set out to do original material and original adaptations. We were all over the map in terms of subject matter.” Stuart explained the concept of the newborn troupe. “The idea was that we were a professional company,” he said, “and we didn’t want to have to take other jobs to support ourselves in theater. It was dedicated to creating original work through the use of an ensemble. It was kind of a collective… One of the productions we did fairly early on was an adaptation of Candide, which [famed theater producer] Joe Papp saw, and he invited us to New York to perform it at the Public Theater.” It was at this time the brothers Gordon reunited. David George had left UW, studied in Berkeley, California, and was working at the post office. “My brother called me up one day,” he said, “because they had a spot open for a technical director because [Candide] was getting more complicated, particularly as they were touring. But I’ve always actually suspected (though I’ve never actually asked him this) that he was being kind of paternal and helping to bring me back into the family. ‘You’ve gotten too far away in California.’ It was a nice thing for him to do.” The Organic Theater’s first foray into the Big Apple was not a critical hit. “Candide was received poorly because it was put on by ‘scruffy hippies,’” David George recalls. “I remember one review that referred to Candide as ‘shabby actors in shabby long underwear,’ and ‘the stage looked like the bottom of a birdcage by the end of the show.’” O’Neal remembered, with a laugh, “Going to New York with Candide was thrilling, a lot of fun. It was an adventure. We were getting paid almost nothing and trying to survive in New York while we remounted the show and set up. We moved from flea-bag to flea-bag hotel, because we would register two people in a room though five of us would be sleeping in there, and we would get caught and have to find another flea-bag.” Poe and Paranoia: Returning to Chicago, the company then staged a play based on the last four days of an acclaimed Baltimore author’s life. “Poe was gloomy,” David George remembered. “It was a hard play to perform because it was kind of crazy. There were some borderline crackups with people who were in the show, because it was all about an insane author dying. It made enough to pay our salaries, but not much more than that. And everybody was frustrated and really wanted to trying something Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

different and new.” An aspect of turning to less volatile content may have been the general demeanor of that era. “Things in America turned ugly,” Jerry Fortier said, “Anybody who had ever smoked pot — ever! — felt like he was totally going to end up in jail because there was some narc someplace lurking. Anybody who was involved in any kind of political thing felt threatened.” And Gordon and company were doubtless growing weary of being targeted by authorities, and understandably so. O’Neal explained, “We always had a cautious paranoia about our place in the community, particularly in Chicago, where there was this notorious sense that the cops and whatever we called ourselves — those of us with long hair and lived a slightly alternative lifestyle — there was always a sense that they were always ‘out to get us.’” The actor shared that the Organic founders felt under siege. “Carolyn and Stuart were having some difficulty with a landlady in Chicago,” O’Neal revealed, “and a drug squad showed up at their place one night, searched the apartment, and hauled them off to jail. We all were convinced that they were coming after the whole company, so we all ‘cleansed our abodes,’ as it were, expecting a knock at the door at any time. So, yeah, we always had a sense of slight paranoia, which was probably a smart thing to have at the time. Because they were out to get us!” Discussing the generational rifts of the time, Fortier surmised, “Nineteen sixty-eight is the pivot point when everything changed. It went from fresh to being sour, when the wine turned to vinegar… It was either you were going to be a hippie-dippie, artsy-fartsy, escapist comic-book person or you’re going to take up a gun and go underground to make revolution. It’s like, ‘This is serious now. This is adult stuff.’” An early 1972 Chicago Tribune profile of the Organic portrayed a co-founder in a less provocative frame of mind. “Gordon… denies that experimental theater has any moral or political role to play,” writes Michael Sellett. “‘I don’t even know if political theater is a possibility,’ [Gordon] said. ‘I know it isn’t for me. I just want to escape, to dream. I can’t get into anything ‘heavy’ or meaningful; and I don’t think we have to.’” After all, self-righteous soliloquies on stage might not be profitable and, as the mandate of the Organic was to be self-supporting, there were bills to remit and actors to pay, and thus Carolyn Purdy-Gordon took on multiple tasks in her and husband’s theatrical company to help keep down costs. “I started out as the house manager, box office manager, costume maintenance person, company cook, and was drafted into acting when one of the actresses left the company (and Chicago) abruptly,” she said. “I knew the show, so I was put in as the replacement. It was fun, I was good enough; so I stayed.” O’Neal recalled, “Poe was a really downbeat play,” he said, “and it was time to do something lighter. But also the work up until Warp was all 21

This page: Warp was born of the Organic Theater, founded by Stuart and Carolyn Gordon, in 1970. The company, which continues to the present day, would have a significant impact on the Chicago theatrical scene in the two decades that followed, memorably for introducing the work of playwright David Mamet to the stage. These photos include some actors who would go on to Hollywood success, including Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz. Photo at far right is a sequence from Warp. Next page inset is an comics fandom adzine that sported Warp as cover art. Below is a photo from the 1979 production of Warp, as well as Stuart Gordon’s art for the original staging’s program. Images snagged from an ’80s Lenny Klienfeld memoir article.

work created by the company, a kind of collective creation, playing with given text… playing with The Odyssey, playing with Animal Farm, playing with Candide. Stuart was always the final arbiter and shaper of the text, but it really came out of improvisation. We had always talked about doing something based on comic books instead of what the world considered serious literature. We actually talked at one point about doing a play based on Conan the Barbarian before it was ever made into a movie. So we had all kinds of ideas floating around.” For something different and new, Gordon was indeed imagining a less literary, more low-brow subject than Homer or Orwell, and he called in an old buddy to collaborate on something with a bit less social commentary, a little more pizzazz, and much more escapist in content.

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

Lo, There Shall Be Warp!: Stuart Gordon decided to contact “Bury St. Edmund.” “I was still in school when Stuart moved back to Chicago and founded the Organic,” Lenny Kleinfeld said. “My wife [National Public Radio correspondent Ina Jaffe] and I drove down to see every production, but I had no involvement until Warp.” “I really can’t recall the exact ‘ah-hah!’ moment when we decided to do this play Warp,” David George said, “but I do remember driving up to Madison, where Lenny lived, and with my brother and his wife, we all hung out for a couple of days and kicked around this idea that we wanted to do a show that was like Marvel Comics, and Lenny being asked if he wanted to write the script.” The notion for the “The World’s First Science Fiction Epic Adventure Play in Serial Form” actually started out as an exercise, Stuart Gordon revealed. “We used to do improvisations where we would act out the comic books. I remember doing The Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange, having the actors play the characters using the dialogue from the comic books.” Thus a concept developed to dramatize the Lee/Kirby/Ditko comics on stage. “We contacted Marvel about basing the play on some of their characters, Thor or Doctor Strange,” he said. “It probably would have been Doctor

Strange.” But the House of Ideas nixed the idea, and the director was determined to forge ahead. “We decided to create our own comic book and came up with the idea for Warp.” Kleinfeld said, “Stuart began by having actors read aloud from Marvel comics. Didn’t work. That’s when he phoned me.” “From reading all these comics,” Gordon said, “we came up with this idea for a story about a schizophrenic with a two-sided personality who becomes these different super-heroes. That was the basis of Warp.” Gordon explained, “When I wrote out this scenario, which was really sketchy, I brought it to Lenny and we started working it out, collaborating on it. Originally we thought we were going to be doing seven episodes, but after doing the first one, we realized it was going to be too big.” (Kleinfeld actually remembered, “Stuart had gotten over the seven-part madness by the time we spoke about what we’d do.”) “We would sit down and hammer out a greatly detailed outline with ideas for the dialogue,” said Gordon. “Then Lenny would sit down and write the dialogue. Some of it was quite wonderful, with almost a Shakespearean quality (which we sort of borrowed from Thor, with their very grandiose way of speaking). Some of the dialogue was parody, with one being a take-off of the ‘To be or not to be’ speech.” (Gordon also revealed that super-hero jargon was ubiquitous during production. “We used to quote comics all of the time when we were working on the show,” he explained, laughing, “When anyone had any complaints, we’d say, ‘Send it to Subby’! Or when people would ask, ‘How come you can do this, but we can’t do that? I want a No-Prize! There were all of those kinds of things. One of the lines we had was, ‘Less low-key and more Loki!’ We were into all those comics big time.”) “Warp was really the first production that was scripted with a writer in the room,” O’Neal revealed. “We still had a lot of improvisational freedom, but it really was the first one in which we were handed a script. ‘These are last night’s rewrites,’ and ‘This is the next scene.’ That was interesting and it was just a helluva lot of fun!” Kleinfeld recalled the collaborative process. “I’d drive to Chicago,” he said. “We’d do a general outline of where we wanted each episode to go, then do more detailed outlines of the first scenes. Then I’d drive back to Madison, write the scenes and drive back to Chicago. Stuart would laugh and cut 50% of what I’d written, until I finally developed a working idea of how stage time runs much faster than prose time.” Given the episodic structure of Warp, were old-time movie serials an influence? “They were less an influence than the serialized stories in the comic books, which prob-

Warp Story

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

ably borrowed from the movie serials,” the playwright answered, “at least as far as having each episode end with a cliffhanger. We found the cliffhanger thing worked great in live performance. Audiences would howl at the end of Episodes One and Two.” Kleinfeld added, “Episode One was an instant hit, and I wanted to live long enough [instead of driving through snowstorms] to finish the trilogy, so my wife and I moved down to Chicago, when Stuart and I began writing the second show.” And once Warp started rehearsals, O’Neal — who was selected to play the lead, Lord Cumulus — said, “It was also tremendous work. I cannot remember ever working harder as an actor. I’ve worked in some pretty sophisticated theater since then and, in those days, we didn’t have fight choreographers and fight directors — we made everything up on the fly. We threw our bodies around the stage like we were invincible. We created the sets and special effects out of nothing. It was heady times.” David George recalled it taking about six months from deciding to do the play to it being on stage. With a chuckle, he added, “The thing that cracks me up about Warp is that it was a stoned idea that was rehearsed stoned. The whole thing was a wild experience! We literally opened the show not knowing if it was any good or whether it was terrible or it was wonderful. With the first previews, the audience was reacting so positively, we all knew that we were on the right track. But I think that we were clueless whether we had gone over the edge!” Three For One: When Gordon was asked what was the process in producing a three-part play, he replied, “Well, the plan was hopefully we would be able to bring in an audience and, as it turned out, we did. The audience really loved it. We first did it at a theater called the Body Politic, on Lincoln Avenue, in Chicago, where the Story Theater had been originally. It was a little theater, about a 165 seats, with the audience sitting on three sides of the stage. The show was a success and, because of that, we started to work on Episode Two. And it was funny because by the time we got to Episode Three, the theater was financially in better shape, so we had more money to spend, so Episode Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

Comic Book Creator: With comic fans, Warp is legend because of the participation and artwork of Neal Adams. There were only 15 performances of Episode One on Broadway, so many didn’t have a chance to see it. Except for the comic book series, most fans have no idea of the story. Can you give us a synopsis of the three episodes? Stuart Gordon: The first episode is called “My Battlefield, My Body.” Its hero is a guy called David Carson, a bank teller, who is in love with a bank president’s daughter, Mary Louise. He has a secret in that no one knows he was a schizophrenia patient, an incurable schizophrenic, and one night he had this weird dream where something split off from him and, after that, he was completely cured. So he’s worried that if anyone should find out about this, he’s not going to be able to win the employee-of-the-year award or marry the bank president’s daughter. At the banquet for the employee-of-theyear, he has this intense headache and ends up going into the Fifth Level, where he is told he is actually Lord Cumulus, Defender of the Universe. He meets this wise old man called Lugulbanda, who sends him on a mission to find the evil Prince Chaos and destroy him. He’s trained by the Mistress of War, Sargon, an 87,000-year-old Amazon warrior, who looks like a total babe. CBC: Scantily-clad, of course! [chuckles] Stuart: And she shows him all these powers he has, such as mind-blasts, with which he can seize things with mental energy. In league with Chaos is Valeria, the Insect Sorceress, who is half-insect and half-human, the vamp character who speaks with a Transylvanian-type accent. When he finally meets Chaos, it turns out that Chaos is the other half of his own personality which had split from him, the evil side of him, so if he destroys Chaos, he destroys himself. It’s a predicament. That’s basically the first episode. The second episode, called “Unleashed, Unchained” [referred to as “SlitherlusT” in Playbill] is when Xander comes from the Sixth Level. Valeria literally gives birth to him. In the opening of the play, she lays an egg on the stage, a pretty bizarre, sexual thing. He hatches out and takes over. The wise man, Lugulbanda, tells Cumulus and Chaos that the only way that they can stop Xander is for the two of them to join together and do battle as one, but they initially refuse because they hate each other so much. But, at the end, they finally agree to fight together against Xander and they lose. They are defeated and imprisoned, and Xander is going to get the Cosmic Crystal and it looks as if all is lost, and that’s where Episode Two ends. The way Episode Two ends literally is Cumulus and Chaos are about to be beheaded by Lugulbanda, who has been taken over by Xander and become a zombie, and he has this huge axe, places their necks across each other so he can cut off both heads with one blow. But in actuality what happens is, at the beginning of the third episode, “To Die… Alive,” instead of cutting their heads off, Lugulbanda just nicks them and their blood intermingle. As soon as that happens, they turn into another super-being called Ego, who is actually a little girl. Xander falls in love with Ego and love is a force he’s never felt before and it ends up destroying him. He is destroyed by love. After Xander disappears — sort of melts away like the Wicked Witch of the West — Ego turns back into Cumulus and Chaos, and they are told they have to seek out their father, a character referred to as He-Who-Dreams, the most powerful being in the universe. They have to find and save him because he’s in trouble from the Level of the Forces of Infinity. So they go on this quest to find He-Who-Dreams and, at the very end, they find him and he’s dying, and basically Ego is the new He-Who-Dreams. So what Chaos and Cumulus have to do is become Ego again, but this time they will stay Ego forever. When they become Ego they completely forget about their own personas, so it’s sort of like dying and sacrificing themselves to become Ego. Essentially they are becoming God. CBC: They become God? Stuart: They become He-Who-Dreams, who is a girl, so it’s strange. The Forces of Infinity are like apocalypse is upon them, like Ragnorak in The Mighty Thor, and so they stop that by becoming the new He-Who-Dreams, who is able to bring peace. The play ends with the idea that they now have to leave Lugulbanda and Sargon behind to look for the new Lord Cumulus who will eventually take the place of He-Who-Dreams. So it’s a cycle. There’s a whole thing in the third episode where they have to find the ring of He Who Dreams but you think the ring was a piece of jewelry; no, it’s a cycle. It’s a process. CBC: So you guys were doing a lot of acid? [laughs] Stuart: We were! The one-line description of Warp: When you tell people is that it’s about a bank teller who becomes God. 23

Above: Carolyn Purdy-Gordon and husband Stuart Gordon in the early days of the Organic. Below: The Marvel comics of the 1960s and ’70s served as inspiration for the Warp trilogy, particularly the characters Doctor Strange and the Mighty Thor. With respect to Neal Adams’ for his bringing in a whole new element to the notion of cosmic in comics, here too is a cover to on one the chapters of his and writer Roy Thomas’ Avengers intergalactic Kree-Skrull War. Next page: Photos of the original Chicago production of Warp, culled from different sources, both mostly courtesy of David George Gordon, who kindly opened is coveted Warp scrapbook to share with CBC.

Warped Sense of Humor: Part of the success of Warp was the inclusion of humor amidst its earnest context, though that would emerge organically. “When we did the first episode,” Gordon confessed, “we were approaching it much more seriously, but the audience started to laugh at things, and we realized there were places where we could be funny, and the actors started riffing with it a little bit.” For instance, the director said, “There’s a big moment in the first episode where Lugulbanda, the wise old man, puts an

amulet around the neck of Lord Cumulus before he sends him off on a quest to find Prince Chaos. Cumulus looks at the amulet and asks, ‘For luck?’ And Lugulbanda says, ‘Sure!’ It was touches like that which could make it funny.” “Lenny had a great sense of humor which came out in the dialogue,” Gordon said. “Prince Chaos wants to destroy the universe and David Carson says, ‘“Destroy the universe”? Where’s he gonna live?’ It didn’t take itself too seriously and a lot of the characters were very funny.” Actor John Heard, who would join the Chicago production in spring playing Lord Cumulus, said, “One of the great lines from Warp was, ‘He who dreams holds back the hordes of infinity.’ Meaning that only one moment in time is allowed to happen to anybody, so that we’re not bombarded with a zillion different things. It was a response to Artaudian sensibilities… I mean, Stuart and Lenny, they were not ill-read! They knew what they were doing, what they were writing, and what they were creating. If you understood the metaphors or were familiar with that literature, it was pretty poetic. But, at the same time, it was just campy!” The director likened Warp to his future signature film. “It was like Re-Animator in a lot of ways because the humor was not at the expense of the story,” he said. “We were not making fun of the material. There was a lot of tension and suspense that was created which could be broken with a joke. The fun of it was that the audience got very involved in it. Like, in the first episode, in appears that Sargon has been killed, blows herself to bits, but when she would show up in the second episode, the entire audience would cheer. They were glad to see her. The audience was really with the characters.” Cecil O’Neal remembered, “It was such a success in Chicago, we almost had a cult following. It was the first time in my life when I’d be in a restaurant and someone would send a drink over to me with a note saying, ‘Saw you as Cumulus. Loved it!’” Of Cookie and Cod Pieces: Gordon and Kleinfeld wrote the three installments as needed. “We wrote them one at a time,” the director said. “We wrote the first episode and produced it. We had done the show Poe before and it had not done particularly well, so we were pretty broke, and we really had to scrape things together for Warp. Some of the solutions ended up being some of the things the audience liked the best, like for a raygun we used a corkscrew. There were all these found objects that we would use. We were literally scrounging through trash looking for things to use for props and costumes.” As costume designer, Cookie Gluck was an essential and innovative component in the production, in essence assigned to imagine the unimaginable. “I knew all the people from the Organic Theater because I was then married to Cecil O’Neal, who eventually became Lord Cumulus, Avenger of the Universe, in Warp,” she said. “I moved to Chicago with Cecil and I had a background in art. I did costumes for the Organic Theater. I didn’t charge them any money, so I was a shoe-in for the job.” Her ex-husband shared, “Cookie was a visual artist and had a degree in art from the University of Wisconsin. She actually had a full-time job at the time, a straight office job. She was a painter and a sculptor, but she was always interested in alternative materials and fabricating materials, working with fabric. She knitted and crocheted and sewed.” O’Neal added the “let’s put on a show” attitude was infectious. “There was not a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse of anyone in the company who, at some point,” he said, “didn’t get up to their elbows in the work.” Gluck revealed that working on Warp was a life-changing experience. “I was there, I had a sewing machine, and we were just throwing things together,” she said. “The truth is that I really didn’t know any better. I didn’t know #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Three was the most grandiose of the episodes.” The procedure was to conduct a measured rollout of the trilogy. “I think Episode One opened in December of ’71,” Gordon said, “and Episode Two opened probably three months later. Then we ran the two of them together in repertory, so we continued running Episode One; on Tuesday, we’d run Episode One and on Wednesday, we’d do Episode Two, for instance. On Saturday nights, we’d do two shows with One followed by Two, so sometimes audience members would stick around and see both shows.” The director’s brother said attending Warp was an in-thing to do at the time. “When the first episode was running, it was a happening place to be at the theater,” David George revealed. “We had very rabid fans and once the second episode ran and people realized that this was indeed going to be a series and were anticipating number three, then we were kind of like the toast of the town. I’m actually amazed — and my brother would say this, as well — in retrospect, from the perspective as a grown-up, that we didn’t run that show for two years in Chicago and just get some serious money out of it. Because it was packed houses; people couldn’t get in to a lot of the performances once all three episodes were running.”

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

what I didn’t know. And it was pretty amazing, because in the process of doing it, I discovered that I actually could make costumes, which I’ve been doing for the next 40 years.” She would find her forté. “What I could do is put together, essentially, wearable soft sculpture,” Gluck said, “though I had no idea what I was doing at the time and my process got much more sophisticated as I knew more about what I was doing. But having the ability to visualize two-dimensional shapes in space, solid geometry — I had a good head for math but being able to calculate that, and also having a sense of practical physics, which is another thing I had no idea at the time would have a practical value to me — and I came to this as an artist.” On a web page devoted to the history of the Organic Theater, Gluck said, “If the [Warp] designs seemed imaginative, it was because I didn’t know any better. The only reason the men’s space costumes exposed their rear ends, which was considered very daring at the time, was that I had no idea how to construct a pair of trousers.” (Fortier did recall, “There were these really incredible, tight-fitting costumes that were crocheted with these open spaces.”) Enter the Flying Frog: “We were pushing as many sorts of things as we could,” the director admitted. “We had strobe lights, but some of the stuff was very low-tech,” said Gordon. “The sound effects were all done by my brother, doing explosions in the microphone with his mouth!” So the low-tech approach was, in its way, convincing? “It was!” Gordon exclaimed. “But it was very simple stuff. We had things like flashpots, a little bit of pyro. We had projections. We ended up using a laser in it, some of the first laser effects. It was a combination of high-tech and low comedy.” The director’s kid brother did serve as Warp’s technical director. “There were a lot of special effects,” David George said, “lighting and things like that, in which I had a direct role in. I also had a direct role in making sound effects. I would use a microphone and guitar amplifier and make explosion noises, believe it or not. We’re talking lowtech here, but it worked! Almost the same thing that you’d do as a little kid, but with a microphone and reverb, I could make really giant-size explosion noises when someone got zapped by Lord Cumulus.” David George reveled in his stint with the Organic. “The theatrical life was a good as being a rock star,” he enthused. “A lot of theater people would like to be musicians and a lot of musicians would like to be theater people. Basically with both you’re moving large crowds, making them happy or sad or whatever. It gives you a great sense of power.” Describing his stage credit, he said, “I created a special effects company (I’m not really sure why) and Flying Frog Enterprises was the original company. Actually, in retrospect, I did have people helping me… working with lasers and Theremin, things a little beyond my reach, and they became part of Flying Frog.” Where did the moniker come from? “By the time I got to New York,” David George explained, “I found that there already was a David Gordon in the Actors’ Guild, so I decided to be the Flying Frog. My friend, André DeShields, and I would periodically go to a restaurant in Chicago called the Flying Frenchman and, one night after drinking a lot, we decided Flying Frog was a good name for me. (There’s actually a line in [the film] McCabe & Mrs. Miller, ‘If a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump his ass on the ground so much.’)”

William J. Norris as Symax

Richard Fire as Lugulbanda

Carolyn Purdy-Gordon as Valaria

Above: Caption John Heard as Lord Cumulus

Tom Towles as Prince Chaos

Richard Fire promoting Warp

Cordis Fejer as Sargon

Tom Towles as Prince Chaos

Cecil O’Neal as Lord Cumulus

William J. Norris as Symax

The Surrogate: Asked to describe what a theatrical director does exactly, Gordon answered, “Well, it’s hard to describe. I think that the director often stands in for the audience and you’re trying to tell a story and the director says, ‘You know, I’m not getting this part of the story. It’s not coming through.’ Or sometimes literally he can’t see you because you’re standing behind another actor or scenery Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

or whatever. I think the director’s job is to take the script and bring it to life.” Brother David George believes Stuart, who recently adapted his cult horror classic as a musical production to great success, has talents most effective when used for the stage. “My brother is actually a brilliant director of live theater,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I think that’s where he best connects with his audience. Re-Animator: The Musical I actually enjoyed more than the movie. He completely gets that the audience has the hair standing on the backs of their necks. He really uses creativity and imagination — and playing — to great advantage.” The younger brother was impressed with the writing. “I really have to credit Lenny Kleinfeld for working on some really beautiful scripts,” he said. “There are lines in that show that I still quote today. When Lord Cumulus first meets Prince Chaos, Chaos says, ‘I am Chaos, king of the universe’ (or whatever), and Cumulus says, ‘I am not impressed,’ and Chaos replies, ‘Serves well enough to keep the natives in line.’ There’s a line from André DeShields playing Xander, who says, ‘I’m amazed to hear such braggadocio squeeze itself from the mouth of such a worm.’ It’s almost like Shakespeare!” O’Neal — whose favorite line is “’Here I stand, once again, before the portals of my fate,’” adding, “It’s a riff on ‘Casey Jones,’ and for years I’ve had that in my head” — doesn’t recall simultaneously remembering lines from three plays as being that challenging. “The text was not difficult to learn,” he shared. “People not in the theater often say, ‘My god, how do you remember all those words?’ But, with a few exceptions, unless you’re doing King Lear, that’s really not the hardest part of acting. The most difficult part was the backstage choreography. There were so many quick scene changes and so many places we had to get off and get around to make a new entrance somewhere else. And when we weren’t on stage, we were making sound effects or playing musical instruments… all of that was a lot to get embedded in your brain.” (Nor did Heard find learning three plays at once off putting. “No, that wasn’t hard,” he said. “That was

fun.”) By spring 1972, what took a toll on the lead actor were the arduous action sequences. “We had no physical coaches or fight captains and I probably had five stage fights per a performance,” said O’Neal, “where I was doing back rolls, handsprings, and falls… Physically, it was really demanding. One night I was doing a movement sequence where I had to do a couple of handsprings and take a fall behind a scrim, so that part was done in shadow. I hit the stage and almost blacked-out from pain. And then I was fine. But a similar thing happened a few days later and it happened a couple more times. One night it happened and the next morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I had a herniated disk and pinched nerves in my back, and I wound up spending something like ten days in traction in a hospital. Then I tried to return and my back just wouldn’t take it. So, at that point, I had to very sadly leave the company and the production. We were in rehearsal for Episode Three, so there was quite a workload — performing during the night and rehearsing during the day.” The loss of O’Neal as Cumulus put the production in dire need of a new leading man, one with the looks and stamina to step into the role of Lord Cumulus. Cordis Fejer, who played both Sargon and Penny Smart, suggested her younger brother. Heard by Happenstance: John Heard, who after Warp would go onto success in film and television (featured in innumerable productions, including The Sopranos, Big, and The Trip to Bountiful, though best known perhaps as the father in the first two Home Alone movies), started acting as a child because his mother was active in community theater. Attributing his breaks as an actor to luck, Heard continued on stage through high school and into college, where he became involved in experimental theater. “It all just kind of came together, instead of being in the classical drama society plays,” he said. The thespian explained how he came to Warp in the middle of its Chicago run. “What happened,” he explained, “was my grandfather died and my sister Cordis came home, and she was involved with Warp and the

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

This spread: Neal Adams character designs for the Broadway production of Warp. From left, Lugulbanda, Sargon, Lord Cumulus, Prince Chaos, Symax, and Valaria, the Insect Queen.

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Organic Theater. She got a phone call, in fact, that Cecil O’Neal had hurt his back, and I guess Cordis had said, ‘My brother can do this.’” At the time, Heard was working as a “jobber,” making $5 a day, ‘just standing on stage.’” But when his sibling offered the opportunity to star in the popular Chicago show, “I didn’t want to,” Heard said. “I said I didn’t have the money to fly to Chicago. But my Uncle Cookie, who was only there because his father had died — and we’d maybe seen our uncle five times in our whole lives — and, standing in the hallway of our house, he asked, ‘How much does it cost to go to Chicago?’ I told him and he reached into his pocket and pulled out $60. He said, ‘Here you go. Now you don’t have any excuses.’ If it hadn’t been for Uncle Cookie, I wouldn’t have gone.” With a chuckle, Heard recalled, “I was a babe in the woods compared to what was going on in the Organic Theater. It was an eye-opener.” Not only taken aback regarding the physical exertion the role demanded, “I certainly wasn’t prepared for that costume, with the bulging codpiece, and I didn’t want to do it for that reason.” In fact, Heard abruptly left the theater an hour into watching a performance, and retreated to his sister’s apartment. “I was lying on my cot, staring straight up at the ceiling, when she came home and asked, ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ She said, ‘Yes, you are.’” Explaining his state of mind in that period, the actor said, “I had gone to Catholic University and not been able to cut it classically, and had worked in repertory, which is pretty academic compared to the Organic Theater, so I was sort of horrified, I was sort of scared. And it was basically the ’60s and people were smoking dope and had long hair, were very political, Vietnam… so I laid there and said, ‘I’m not doing this,’ and she said, ‘Yeah, you are,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, you are,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are, because if you don’t, I’m going to tell Mommy.’ So I went, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’”

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

Getting Off: When asked about the director’s method, Heard shared, “Stuart was pretty quiet. I think his favorite direction is: ‘Do it again, I’m not

getting off on it.’ And my favorite story is that when Richard Fire was ‘dying’ as Lugulbanda, cutting his throat with the amulet or whatever… They had these three oblong-shaped platforms no higher than five feet, if that, and he had to ascend to the top platform in the middle of this little, padded stage, cut his throat with an amulet that he wears around his neck, and fall down dead. And he did it and did it, and Stuart would say, ‘Nah, nah, that’s not it, that’s not exciting. I’m not getting off on it.’ And finally Richard ‘cut’ his throat and, instead of falling down on the top platform into a heap, he threw himself against the back wall of the theater, which was draped. And he slid down the drape completely behind all the platforms offstage. And we didn’t see him, and Stuart jumped up and said, ‘Oh my god, that’s it! That’s it! That’s great! Do that again!’ And Richard popped his head over the platform and asked, ‘Is that it? Is that what you like?’ And Stuart said, ‘Yeah, yeah, man! That was it! I really got off on it! That was great!’ And Richard looked at him and said, ‘Y’know, Stuart, you know why you think it’s great? Because I’m hurting myself!’” Heard laughed at the memory and added, “That was classic! But I wouldn’t say that about Stuart; it was just funny at the time.” About the strenuous action sequences, Heard revealed, “My savior was Tommy Towles, who recently passed away. Tommy would wrap his arms and legs around me and roll me around the stage, and whisper in my ear, ‘Are you okay?’ Because he played Chaos to my Cumulus — order/disorder, good/evil, yin/yang — and he was much more physically endowed.” Heard then detailed how he differed from much of the company. “They were all into marijuana,” he said, “and I have to say that I was a drinker. I was a juicer and they were potheads. So there would be times when I would be hung over,” and thus Towles would check on the young actor’s condition as the duo clenched in battle onstage. Regarding what he brought to the character, Heard offered, “I created the ‘Mind Zap.’ I modeled it after Thor. I had long hair and whipped my head back and did a head-beam, y’know? And Flying Frog would be behind a scrim, offstage, and make a sound effect with his mouth into the micro-

Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

phone.” He added with a laugh, “That was Warp!”

Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, who played Valaria (the Insect Sorceress) and Mary Louise, shared her experience of the Chicago run, saying, “Suffice to say I never missed a single performance of Warp during that year-and-a-day run, nor any of the subsequent runs of that show that we did. There is always a process of ‘smoothing out kinks’ in any show. That’s what rehearsal is for. At least partly.” The actress was also one of the troupe who was not daunted by learning a triad of scripts. “It didn’t seem all that difficult to learn three shows,” she said. “After all, it was spread out over several months. Repertory companies do it all the time.” Purdy-Gordon added, “Memorization is a skill that actors get good at. It was deeply satisfying to play a character that had the luxury of three-plays’ worth of development.” Warpathon: A momentous decision was made by the Organic in the fall, one that required the show to end its successful run in the City of Big Shoulders, and to celebrate, it was determined that the company put on all three episodes in one day and evening, affectionately dubbed “Warpathon,” held on Dec. 9, 1972. Tickets to the event proved to be hot commodities and theatergoers would not be disappointed. Szarabajka said, “We had a sold-out house and we had Chef Louis Szathmary from [renowned Chicago restaurant] The Bakery across the street bringing in courses in-between acts — six different courses — with wine. It was quite a gala event!” Warpathon was hard work for the company, Purdy-Gordon recalled. “It was tiring, but we were young, and the adrenalin was flowing in abundance,” she said. “We even had a naprapath there with an oxygen tank backstage for those of us who felt the need. (It got him a free ticket to the trilogy!)” Her husband added, “This whole thing took six or seven hours. It was great. It was really fun.” Cecil O’Neal, although sidelined with the back injury but still actively helping out at the Organic, served as interviewer for renowned Chicago area videographer Anda Korsts in documentary segments related to the trilogy, including a segment on Warpathon. (Footage of the event, which features Chef Szathmary, interviews with theatergoers by O’Neal, and appearances by Stuart Gordon and Tom Towles, is available to view online, at mediaburn.org/ category/anda-korsts). O’Neal remembers that actor James Earl Jones was among Warpathon attendees. So, too, did a very popular comic book artist, a guest of a player newly arrived to the science fiction epic, Anthony D’Amato, a Northwestern University law professor whose fortunes had recently improved after investing in an earlier Chicago stage production. Greased Lightning: Interestingly, a year prior to the debut of Warp, a “rowdy, dangerous, over-sexed, and insightful piece of alternative theater” opened across the street on Lincoln Avenue, in the Kingston Mines Theater. Described by Scott Miller as a show “rejecting the trappings of other Broadway musicals for a more authentic, more visceral, more radical theater experience that revealed great cultural truths about America,” that play was Grease, which would, in a more sanitized form, achieve phenome#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld. All photos © the respective copyright holders.

This page: Top is actor John Heard, who portrayed Lord Cumulus in the Broadway production. Middle is David George Gordon, the Flying Frog, Warp sound effects person (though now known as the Bug Chef). Above is actor and voice talent Keith Szarabajka, who played various roles and was Heard’s understudy. Inset is ticket to the Dec. ’72 Warpathon, courtesy of David George Gordon.

Thus Spake Szarabajka: With Heard taking leave of the Cumulus role for extended periods, a young actor fortuitously showed up on North Lincoln Avenue. During the summer of ’72, while working a seasonal job unrelated to theater, 19-year-old aspiring actor Keith Szarabajka (pronounced “Sara-bike-ah”) attended a production of Death of a Salesman starring Jack Warden. “I was so moved by the play,” he said, “and became so afraid of ending up like Hap or Biff, that I drove my company car to Chicago at nine o’clock on a Sunday night — like I was possessed or something — and ended up in front of the Body Politic, where Warp was just letting out, and I suddenly woke up. ‘Oh my god, what am I doing here?’ I started banging my head against the light pole, saying, ‘I really have to stop smoking pot! I can’t do this anymore!’ And somebody tapped me on the shoulder.” That somebody was actor William J. Norris of the Organic Theater, who played the Caliban-like sidekick of Chaos, Symax, and was understudy for Lord Cumulus. Szarabajka had ended up in the Chicago off Off-Loop theater district because, “I had seen Poe the year before, when I was still in high school,” he said, “and thought it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen — I didn’t know they could do things like that in the theater! I thought, ‘I want to work with this company.’” The young actor gave an audition to play Cumulus and that led to becoming an understudy for the role and performing, for instance, as a Faceless One. He would play lead for extended stretches in Heard’s absence. But when the teenager saw his first performance, “I couldn’t believe that I was going to have to do those things on stage!” he shared with a laugh. “Which I did, but it was overwhelming! It was nothing like I’d ever seen before. People were flying over each other, coming in and out of the audience, the fight was intense… the rock ’n’ roll music was exciting, the lighting, and it was funny as hell!” Szarabajka described the physical effort it took, even as a teen. “You really had to be in good shape to do it. We all worked out. We were in good shape. It was an ordeal to do that show.” O’Neal, who taught the part to the newly-arrived understudy, said that before his injury, “I was working out pretty hard to stay in condition for the show and, in all my vanity, to try to look good for the show. Tommy, Richard [Fire], and I went to the gym together almost daily. We worked out together throughout the run.” The director recalled an aspect of the pumping-iron regimen of the actors. “They were always picking up these body-building magazines, which were not that popular then,” Gordon said, “and there was a guy in there who was Mr. Universe, and everybody used to laugh about his name, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a matter of fact, we ending up naming one of the characters in Warp, Dr. Schwarzenegger just because we thought it was kind of funny and as an inside joke for all the body-builder people.” The Lord Cumulus understudy was increasingly on stage as Heard was missing performances. “John can be irascible at times,” Szarabajka suggested, “and he was not really happy; this really wasn’t what he wanted to do, this little, stupid science fiction thing in an off Off-Loop theater in Chicago. He wanted to be doing Shakespeare and what have you.” But Heard expressed another reason. “I didn’t like the sex,” he said. “I was really put off by the sexuality. I had to kiss my sister. But that was just my self-consciousness.” He also lacked a sense of belonging with the Organic family. “I mean,” Heard said, “they all went out to smoke their blunts, and I went to the Old Sport Inn to drink my whiskey and later argue with my girlfriend.”

Grease © Paul Nicholas & David Ian Associates Ltd. All photos © the respective copyright holders.

nal success on Broadway and upon the silver screen. The musical’s associate producer was D’Amato, a lawyer investing in his first stage production. Prophetically for Warp, the rock ’n’ roll musical had journeyed east and opened Off-Broadway, in New York, on Valentine’s Day, 1972. D’Amato took notice of the serial play performed in the semi-round, and an offer to bring Warp to the Great White Way was suggested. “So that was the model we were following, in Grease’s footsteps,” Gordon explained. “Grease started in Chicago, moved [to New York] Off-Broadway, and eventually made it to Broadway, which is what we should have done. Tony D’Amato had been one of the investors in Grease and so, when he saw Warp, he optioned it and raised the money to bring it to New York.” “There was already very well-established Chicago theater scene,” David George said, “and Grease was probably the one success story. Here’s a bunch of people who actually took the show to Off-Broadway and became famous. It was something to aspire to, but also, in and of itself, there was a strong and supportive crowd who really liked Off-Loop theater.” The younger Gordon continued, “When we met Tony D’Amato, the hope he shared was, ‘I brought all these guys to New York and now they’re rich; I could do the same with you.’ We liked that idea. We had very active glands and the idea of waiting was something we were not familiar with.” The new producer also offered the company another enticement. The Adams Proviso: That special Warpathon guest was Neal Adams, then only 31 and already a legend in the comic book world, who flew in from New York with his daughter Kris to attend the performance marathon. The director’s brother distinctly recalled the addition of Adams was a boost to the cast and crew on the decision to travel to the Big Apple. “Part of the lure,” David George said, “to sweeten the deal, was when Tony D’Amato said he could get Neal Adams to do the artwork and streamline the existing costumes, we were just completely ecstatic.” Added O’Neal, “I remember Stuart making the deal and getting Neal Adams onboard, about which everyone was incredibly excited.” In reply to a question about favorite artists, Stuart Gordon said, “Well, the guy who became our favorite was Neal Adams, and when we did Warp — we had been reading a lot of comic books while we were working on Warp — Neal was our favorite because his stuff really moved and his anatomy was great. So we contacted him about doing the poster for the New York production and got to meet him. He came to see our show in Chicago and then he said he wanted to do more than just the poster, to do the costume designs and the sets and everything. He ended up getting very, very involved and became our production designer.” As to the timing of Adams’ arrival, Szarabajka recalled, “Neal got involved somewhere in the fall there, November-ish. He did renderings and changed the look in a big way.” The artist recalled being approached by producer D’Amato. “He called and asked me if I would be interested in doing stuff for the show he intended to bring to Broadway called Warp,” Adams said, “and he tried to describe as much as he could to me — it wasn’t easy to do — and I said, ‘Sure! Anything. I’d love to. Sounds great.’ He didn’t expect that answer. Somehow, people outside of comics books — including Stuart Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld — Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

thought that comic book artists are up here, and that this guy Neal Adams would never agree to do this.” Adams continued, “According to Stuart later, there were two producers who were trying to get the rights to do the show and take it to New York, and to each one Stuart said, ‘If you can get me Neal Adams, I’ll go with you,’ never knowing how easy it would be. So I couldn’t think of how many ways I could say yes, because I said yes in any language you could’ve offered it to me… I will say yes and I will do it. So D’Amato was the first on the phone, and because of that, I hate to say that I’m responsible for this event happening, but in some ways I apparently was, with D’Amato being the producer rather than anyone else. I was immediately invited to go to Chicago.” Before traveling to the Windy City, the artist would meet the director in Manhattan. “It turned out that Stuart Gordon was coming to New York,” Adams explained. “So I met him on Eighth Avenue, in a coffee shop or deli or wherever, and the first thing he did was hug me and I hugged him. I thought, ‘This is a great guy. I like this guy already.’ So we talked about it and he said I could do anything on it that I wanted — costume design, poster, whatever.’ I said, ‘I’d love to do whatever but I need to see the show.’ So it was very ambivalent what I was going to do.” Adams-izing Warp: “We went to Chicago,” Adams said, “and I saw the show. It was in this awfully small place, like some loft somewhere and I was taken aback by the primitiveness of it, but at the same time I liked the show because it was essentially based on comic books. What Stuart and Lenny had done was design a show like a very kitsch comic book story that included things from The Avengers and old comic books. The hero was a bank teller who didn’t realize he was Lord Cumulus in this other dimension. And the thing that was so cool about it was that it was in three parts. You could watch it in three nights.” The artist continued, “I got to see Warp and thought I would love to do everything on this. So Stuart talked to me about it and he asked what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘I’ll do anything!’ He said, ‘Can you design costumes?’ I said, ‘Sure! Would love to design costumes.’ Now, I had designed costumes in comic books and I thought I designed them realistically — everybody said that I designed costumes on characters in the way they really look. ‘If the characters existed, they would be the way that you drew it.’ I said, ‘I do have that reputation and I did take a fashion class (that I escaped from) and I understand things about fashion.’ He said, ‘Okay, we’ll figure your part in it.’” The comic book artist dove in to meet the challenge. He said, “Now, at that time, the costumes had been designed by Cookie Gluck, who was the designer and builder of the costumes. I did not figure on my future with Cookie Gluck not going to be so great, because she considered herself the designer and builder, and I was being invited to design. She didn’t like that. Certainly the costumes she designed were not… grand. They were conservative, I have to say. So I started to hand in some drawings of the characters immediately and Stuart decided to have me go ahead and design the characters and the costumes, which I did, to (I found out later) to Cookie’s chagrin. It didn’t necessarily make sense that she would be upset because she designed good costumes, but they were standard costumes, and here they were falling on a comic book artist to design the costumes which, by the nature of

This page: Inset is Grease Playbill [1972], from the Broadway production. From top is Jerry Fortier, Neal Adams, Cookie Gluck, and Neil Peter Jampolis. 29

them, would be rather out there.” Gluck recalls the comic book artist’s contribution and was impressed with the rendering, though concerned about the execution as wearable designs. “Neal Adams is a wonderful illustrator,” she said, “and I think he had a sense of what science fiction looks like. He never knew a thing about the way to construct a wearable garment, but he would do all these pictures that were gorgeous. And then Stuart and the rest of them would want me to reproduce that in costuming because they didn’t have any idea how you get, for instance, those two little lightning bolts to be right over her nipples, and stuff like that. It really takes a lot of material and tooling and structural know-how, all of which I learned because I had to. But it didn’t come from Neal Adams. It’s almost as though he stretched it by calling for things that were difficult to construct. I mean, he stretched it and then we scrambled to materialize it.” Regarding both creatives, David George Gordon said, “Cookie’s designs were very much Cookie’s. They had macramé in them, for example, that she did herself. They worked; they were really good, but instead of having, for instance, Sargon wearing a leather outfit, she was now wearing brass breastplates. Neal did a lot of work based more on the genre.”

Tubular Hell: Jerry Fortier revealed that a special effect he had devised was tested with terrifying results during rehearsal. “It was actually my idea to get this big, Plexiglas tube and it was about eight feet tall and maybe three feet across. This tube comes down over Lord Cumulus and, from an opening in the stage, a fog machine fills the tube with ‘poison’ gas — Cumulus is gassed by Chaos. At the very first rehearsal and the tech run-through, they pumped in too much fog, with John Heard, who was in costume in the tube. He totally got scared sh*t-less and was freaked-out by the super-thick, oily fog. It probably wouldn’t have really killed him, but he started leaping, trying to grab the top edge of the tube eight feet up! It was the most scary, pathetic moment in the theater to be watching this happening, especially it being my stupid idea! It was just terrible, just awful. I felt so bad… it was dramatically very effective! It had cost a helluva lot of money and they just figured out how to minimize the fog. They just went in too gung-ho the first time.” Answering a written inquiry about the incident, actor Heard said, “Your tube question was a response to ‘How are we going to mount this on the Broadway stage and fill the stage?’ We were in a tiny little place in Chicago and the audience was sitting almost semi-circular around the #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

Art Director Adams: The artist, not being a card-carrying member of any union, was given the catch-all credit of art director and, indeed, he contributed to more than just the clothing. “Not only did I design the costumes,” Adams said, “but I also designed the stage and the sets.” Having to follow union protocol could be frustrating for Adams. “Unfortunately, the unions said that there had to be a union stage designer. It didn’t matter that I had already designed it, he said. “I had designed the stage that had a lip and it was sharp, so it basically looked like an oval. The stage designer redesigned it so it was [less] thick, so it looked a little bit like a space ship. And that was my first discovery of what it’s like to work with other people who had no brains.” Adams also contributed to the scenery with background paintings, illustrated slides, and lighting effect suggestions. “Then I did the poster, which you’ve seen a million times,” he said, “which everybody seems to think is cool. And it was put up all around town. Then I started to do the drawings for Playbill and had a different [cover] drawing for each episode.

I essentially designed the thing to come to Broadway with some really new ideas.” For some in the crew, the involvement of such a remarkable talent was invigorating. “You had the same feeling with Neal as you had with Stuart Gordon,” Fortier said. “All of the sudden, there was this perfect stranger who you hadn’t read about in the newspapers and you realize when you meet him that there’s this whole scene that’s galvanized around him filled with creativity and energy, like a dynamo for a whole area of creation.” The man also socialized with the company. “I got to know the guys,” Adams shared. “Everybody in the crew was great. We had them up to our house. At the time, we had a nice apartment in the Bronx. The guys were used to living in these hotels, so we’d bring them up for dinner. André DeShields would bring extra dishes — he was a charming guest… what a great guy. We had everyone around the dining room table, we all had a big dinner with home-cooked food, and it was good for them. It was really nice. They got to relax. We had them up a bunch of times.”

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

stage. I was in your lap! And we went to Broadway, oh my god, and all the effects had to be much, much bigger, a little more tech.” During rehearsals, Heard ventured to a nearby theater staging Jesus Christ Superstar and was awed by the size of the stage. “It completely dwarfed Warp! That was when I shook my head and said, ‘No, we don’t have a chance. This is ridiculous.’ We were just this little show that fell out of Chicago.” Heard continued, “I just know that we had many meetings trying to decide. We had options to go into this house downtown or this new space that had been renovated and made into a little theater. The argument was that we wouldn’t last ten minutes on Broadway, whereas this show has its appeal largely by word of mouth, for people going out to the theater to have fun… it could have been a happening, it could have been a rock concert, it could’ve been a coffee shop presentation from our point of view, to keep it small. And then there was that ambition to be on Broadway, of course.” The Ambassador: Warp had played in Chicago in a venue that had 165 seats; the theater selected in New York City boasted nearly seven times that number. “There was a lot of discussion whether to open Warp Off-Broadway,” David George said, “like Grease had opened and then moved to Broadway after it was successful, which was a good move… because, by then, New Yorkers had thought of Grease as their own show. But we couldn’t find a suitable house that was available Off-Broadway; we would have This spread: Scenery art, to wait six months or a year, whatever it was. And we were not up for that. ‘Well, than promotional art, and Xander let’s just take it to Broadway! That’s great! Let’s do it.’ I think we pretty much got over character design, all by the there in three months.” incomparable Neal Adams, The director explained the selection of the Ambassador. “One of the reasons we ended who with his studio, Continuity up on Broadway,” Gordon said, “was because that year had been a really bad year for Associates — particulary Kris Broadway, so all these shows had closed and there were all these empty theaters, so we Adams Stone and Jason “Spyda” were told, ‘We’ll give you the theater for the same rent as an Off-Broadway theater.’ And so we Adams — shared a wide array of did.” awesome Warp-related material. In retrospect, Szarabajka now reflects, “We really went in there under-funded. Originally A nod to Doug Murray, who also we were supposed to go in a theater in St. Mark’s Place as an Off-Broadway thing, and that’s shared some reproductions. what it was budgeted at and then, at the last minute, the Ambassador became available, so we found another $75,000 from Anthony D’Amato.” Asked about the changes to the show coming East, Cookie Gluck said, “Did it look different? The whole production was different. It pretty much sucked. I don’t think anyone else would tell you that. What happened was they took essentially a production that worked because of its intimacy — in its scale, in the round, in the small theater — where you could use Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

a corkscrew as a weapon and use flashpaper and everything like that. It became, as though you were right in it… and they put it in this huge Broadway theater, proscenium stage, and kept it a three-episode show, so if you wanted to see all three shows, it was like a capital investment. The show itself became very, very small like the panels in a comic book. Because you’re sitting up there, paying an exorbitant price to see what really doesn’t loom large. It was very small for the space.” A Feb. 25, 1973 Chicago Tribune article on Warp reported that the Windy City investment for Episode One in the 165-seat Body Politic was $1,000. In contrast, “At New York’s 1,100-seat Ambassador Theater, the price tag read $240,000 — much of the additional money going into sets and new and better costuming.”

Union Rules: Moving the show from Chicago to Manhattan was an eye-opener for the Flying Frog. “The story that has not appeared in print,” David George shared, “is here I am working, I had to join the musicians’ union and all this stuff… there’s incredible rules in Broadway shows. You can’t touch your own props; the prop steward has to hand them to you. People who had been working on Broadway knew all this, but, of course, we didn’t. I was working with a sound person who we had inherited with the show and was work this very large and complex sound system we had developed, and he was a veteran of a zillion shows. He was in his 50s or early 60s himself, and — keep in mind I was 23 — and we’re working on the show. He, at one point, said to me, ‘I haven’t had this feeling since Funny Girl.’ What a great line!” Neil Peter Jampolis, the Tony Award-winning light designer, remembered, “At that time, to work on Broadway, one had to be a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829, or hire a member to supervise the non-union designers. Jane Reisman was hired to light the show, and I was hired to ‘supervise’ the work of [costume designer] Laura Crow. The New York producers, or manager [Frank Marino], were Thunder and Lighting: Jerry Fortier, who in the ’60s had men I had worked for before.” Jampolis is Reisman’s husband and he assisted his wife joined with the Flower Power & Light Company (cited as on Warp. “As a lighting designer myself, I recall drafting creating “liquid emotion” lightshows) and was inspired by the plot for Jane and helping to design the special effects,” the rock venue Fillmore West psychedelic visual experihe said. “Jane did a phenomenal job with the show. At that ences, had worked his projection magic with Stuart Gordon on the notorious Peter Pan production at UW. By luck, time there was no electronic control of lights. Dimmers were run manually and were resistance type, which meant in late fall 1972, with his Eyes of Khamphalous Lightshow taking a break after an extended stay in Amsterdam (where they were both dangerous and gave off tremendous heat. he, his wife Kathy, and Michael and Lois Danzig participat- There were a great number of cues, and each one required a stagehand to move one or more handles while counting ed in Pink Floyd concerts, among others), he would attend seconds, and looking ahead to the next cue. It was nightWarpathon and be enlisted by Gordon to help with special marish, but very beautiful.” visual effects. “When we saw this play,” Fortier revealed, The director did recall the nightmare aspect. “Part of “we said, ‘They really need us!’” it was that stuff would happen so fast, you couldn’t cue it “We knew Stuart and he knew that we were doing lightshows in Europe,” he explained, “and we all liked each up technically,” Gordon said. “When we took the show to New York, we had to write down all the light scenes and other and liked to work together, one thing led to another, everything, people were having nervous breakdowns to and we ended up doing Warp on Broadway.” Fortier and his crew of Kathy and Lois (credited togeth- keep up with it. At that time, we were told by the lighting stylist that Warp had the most cues for lighting of any show er in Playbill as “Kinetic Angstrom Manipulation”) came that had ever opened on Broadway. This was before they into the production brimming with ideas, though the realhad computerized lighting boards, so they had to do all this ities of being innovative in the strict environs of the Great stuff with these enormous transformer… big levers they White Way would scale back ambitions. As postscript, would have to pull. So the guy who was running the lights Fortier warned, “If you’re looking to experiment with new was having a heart attack trying to keep up with it.” technology, don’t do it on Broadway.” And union requirements led to some frustration in the “We weren’t allowed to work the show the way that we wanted to,” he confided, “so we had to scale down the projection booth behind the audience. ““We couldn’t use movies,” Fortier said, “and we had to have somebody from, intricacies of what we were doing and keep it simple. So I think, the projectionists’ union sitting in our lightshow that was basically the problem. We wasted a lot of time shooting film. We had gone to the guy who had done all the booth. So this very big, heavy guy from the union had this job to sit in this booth because the union had to have a special effects for the Captain Video TV show and bought representative for us to be allowed to do it. We weren’t in film clips from him. And we went to F.P. Cisco to rent this the union; we were lightshow artists!” equipment in order to do animations when David Carson Jampolis remembered a frightening moment during turns into Lord Cumulus at the office party. We did animarehearsals, when an electrician fell into the control board tions of him going through a 90-degree phase. We made and was badly shocked. He also shared about the difficult Lugulbunda’s mouth as the narrator, a disembodied mouth that we were going to project… and we had to scrap all of venue. “The Ambassador is an impossible house,” he said. “The architect, Norman Bel Geddes, had the idea to build that. But we had spent a tremendous amount of time and energy working on these things and then it wasn’t negotiat- the theatre at a 45-degree angle within the city lot. That resulted in a very wide and shallow house and stage. The ed, so we couldn’t actually do it.” stage is triangular and the pipes get shorter as one moves Fortier continued, “I had a lot of ideas about the show, upstage, and the only way backstage is through an up-cenwhile it was being rehearsed, that involved projections and timing of effects, but by that time it was Broadway and ter doorway. Awful to work in.” And the building was difficult regarding a Jampolis area of expertise. “The Amtime is money, so I felt kind of alienated from the actors, bassador is also a very difficult theatre to light in because because they were way far away, in the bowels of the theater, and our projection booth was actually in the lobby. it is low and wide,” he said. “In those days, there were no trusses with front-of-house lights over the audience. In Even though the Organic Theater is family-oriented, a any case, we had a drop that hung out over the audience group in the commune sense, to some degree, it didn’t sit properly in the Broadway milieu. It felt that we were out of to create a kind of overhead projection surface and would #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld. Photos © the respective copyright holders.

This page: Top shows Towles and Norris posing in a promo shot. Middle is actor Andre De Shields. Above is Angelique Touvere cosplaying as Valaria, back in a ’70s comic con.

our habitat. And the union situation just brought that home in a very hard and fast way.”

Photographs and Via Galactica TM & © the respective copyright holders.

have blocked any lights from high in the house.” Sharing about his wife, who today is suffering from Alzheimer’s, Jampolis said, “Jane was a terrific lighting designer. We have been married for 45 years, and the show was early in our couple-hood. She often felt overshadowed by the fact that I was a set, lighting, and costume designer with Broadway and had opera credits. She was so proud of her work on Warp, it gave her a real boost in confidence.” He added, “The effect of Warp on my career was only that I have always been happy I got to work on it and talk about it. It was such a pleasure to sit through rehearsals, and previews, and its too-few performances. There was a devoted crowd who came every night through previews and after opening: Warp-heads.” (One such Warp-head was then Chicago-based scribe John Ostrander, who would later be playwright for an Organic Theater production and write for the Warp comic book series. “I did travel to New York City specifically to see Warp along with five friends in a small car,” he said. “We traveled all night and went over the George Washington Bridge just as the sun was coming up. Incredible sight.”) Basecamp Continuity: Stuart Gordon was awed when he’d visit the advertising art firm just recently opened by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. “When we went to New York to see Neal,” he said, “I remember sitting there and all these guys just keep walking through. Everyone would just show up at Neal’s and hang out there. Bernie Wrightson was there. Howard Chaykin was an apprentice there. I remember meeting Vaughn Bodé and Jeff Jones. They would all just come and walk in!” Needing a place to plan their effects, Jerry Fortier and his Khampalous cohorts were accommodated with an office. “Continuity Associates was home base for the projections, and I shared the actual space itself with artist Jack Abel. It was a big room in the back. It seemed that Jack kinda liked that we were around. He was a really nice, soft-spoken, very friendly, very kind guy, and we just immediately liked him. He was a very warm person.” Keith Szarabajka also recalled frequenting the agency. “I spent a lot of time at Continuity, just hanging out. They didn’t mind me being there.” In fact, the actor confessed, “I lived in Neal’s office after Warp closed, when I remained in New York for about three months.” Fortier has fond memories of the glamour of theater and comics. “It was very exciting. Broadway has a lot of energy, though, of course, it was super-seedy back then! It was really, really, really bad. It was really great, though, to be walking over from the theater to Continuity Associates and being in a place where people are making comic books! You can imagine! All of the sudden, I’m in this world that I could have only imagined! Here they are making the comic books and who gets a chance to be in that domain for a month or two, or whatever it was there? It was just incredible and really exciting. And Neal was a great guy and it was exciting to work with him and go have lunch with him in the restaurant down the street.” Coming into Continuity every day, Fortier witnessed how hard the artist worked. “I remember very clearly arriving in the morning and finding Neal asleep at his desk, slumped over a piece of paper, where he was working from the night before,” he said. “Because Neal had so much work, because he was really hot then. I had the feeling that he was finally making some bucks and having a lot of work and facing a lot of pressure. There must be tremendous pressure to put out comic books! I got the feeling that he was at the height of his career and at a certain age where he was still physically able to work super-hard and able to burn the candle at both ends. He was working like crazy.” Previews and Promotions: Preview performances of Warp commenced on Jan. 31, 1973, and many comic book fans attended the play, especially after Adams had this Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

notice published in The Comic Reader #93 [Jan. ’73]: A Word from Neal Adams.

One of those projects which have been screwing up my deadlines is Warp (the world’s first science fiction epic adventure play in serial form). It’s a show that’s so totally worth our time and attention as comic readers that I can’t wait till it gets into town late January so that everyone I’ve told about it (the show) will finally get to see it. What (you ask) have I got to do with the show? I designed the costumes and the set. And that, since you asked, is one of the better things I’ve been doing lately!

TCR’s companion fanzine, Etcetera, ran a promotional spread (accompanied by Adams illustrations) in its second issue [Apr. ’73] by future comics pro Paul Kupperberg, who gushed, “Warp is highly recommended to those of you who enjoy s-f, comics or Neal Adams’ work or who just want to see a good play.” The director recalled it was important to appeal to a specific segment of potential ticket-buyers. “We put up the poster in all the comic book stores,” Gordon said. “So, yeah, we were definitely pursuing that audience. But you have to also remember that this was four years before Star Wars and there wasn’t that big of a science fiction audience as there is now. It was a fringe audience then.” Fan and frequent Continuity visitor Doug Murray (who would go on to acclaim as writer of The ’Nam, a Marvel series chronicling the Vietnam War) did his bit by scribing a feature article for the prozine tabloid The Monster Times. In #20 [ Mar. ’73], which gave insight into the producers’ efforts to reach out to the fan base, Murray reported: So this is Warp. The question is, will it gain support in the big sophisticated city? Will people go to see it? The producers are sure of one thing: If people go to see Warp One, they’ll be back for Two and Three. So they’re doing all in their power to get audiences to Part One. They started a campaign to acquaint people they know will be interested (comic and sci-fi fans, college students) in the play. Free Warp posters will be distributed, college newspapers and radio stations will be alerted. Better still, ticket prices are scaled low enough to make it possible for everyone to see Warp. They are doing their best — now it’s up to you. See Warp. Tell your friends. Hell, tell your enemies.

Indeed, for the show’s preview performances, the Ambassador box office offered “highly reduced price scale” tickets. The New York Times listed discounted admissions of $5.50 and $6.50, respectively the equivalent of 27 and 32 comic books in 1973. Orchestra seats for the regular run fetched $7.50. John Heard remembered, “Of course, then Warp had

This page: Top is the late actor Tom Towles, who passed away this year. Next is actor William J. Norris. Above is poster art for Via Galactica. Below is New York’s Ambassador Theater.

way house, it was fairly small, so the audience had a nice balcony that put them pretty close to the action. I think the show still worked in that theater. Although, it’s funny: I had a lot of conversations with people afterwards when I told them we were in the Ambassador Theater. They’d say, ‘Oh my god, that’s a death house!’ It turns out the Ambassador has a reputation for being a theater where no show has every really worked. Now they tell me!” Opening Night Omen: Anticipation for Warp’s Broadway debut, on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 1973, was high, Stuart Gordon said. “We all thought we were going to become rich and famous. We had given up our Chicago apartments and moved to New York. We had even given up our theater. We thought this was it, we were going to hit the big time.” And David George Gordon shared, “Of course, we actually thought that we had done a great show. A lot of people flew in from Chicago to see it — our fans — so the audience was very receptive. We thought the show was great and looked really good.” But though well-received by theater-goers, late in the performance, there was a glitch. “The opening night’s performance… it was weird,” Gordon said. “There was almost like this moment, towards the end of the play, when the actor who was playing Symax, a purple, intelligent ape who was Chaos’s servant, was jumping off one of the levels and and his costume got caught and it ended up dislocating his arm. He was able to finish and we didn’t realize he was hurt until it was over. It was like that was the moment our luck changed from good to bad. That was sort of the way we felt, like the lightning bolt hit us.” The director’s wife, who played Valaria, recalled the premiere went fairly well. “Much of it was a blur, I guess,” Carolyn Purdy-Gordon said, “because opening nights often are. Our Symax the ape — played by Bill Norris — took a fall at the very end of the show and sprained his shoulder, but that was about the only traumatic thing that happened during the performance. And that was pretty bad, because he couldn’t do any more of the New York shows.” The director’s brother shared, “In New York, they do this calculus on opening night. They look at all the reviews and figure out which ones are important and which ones are not — ‘How did we do in The New York Times, etc.’ — and, at least for the Broadway productions, they post a closing notice as soon as they’ve done the calculus. Because it’s so expensive with union salaries and fees, and each week (I’m just guessing here) costs tens of thousands of dollars, so getting the two-weeks notice out there is part of the process.” Pro Praise: As one might expect, the Broadway premiere of Warp was highly anticipated by the professional comics community, particularly the source of the production’s initial concept, Marvel Comics. And while today the “Man” of the House of Ideas, Stan Lee, only vaguely recognizes the title, others from the Bullpen do have memories that have lasted these four decades. The imprint’s then editor-in-chief Roy Thomas (who collaborated with Neal Adams on the resoundingly cosmic “Kree-Skrull War” in issues of The Avengers that predated the first Organic Theater show by mere months) shared, “The costume Neal designed for the hero made me suspect it was likely to be seen by some as a ‘gay’ fantasy. I liked the show, but it didn’t seem right for Broadway, somehow, and I wasn’t too surprised when it failed. Too bad, though, because the show, as I recall, was well-written and imaginative.” Alan Weiss, a young comic book pro who had superbly inked Adams on chapters of the aforementioned Avengers space epic, said, “We went to see Warp at least a couple of times. I remember liking the show very much. Mostly we were glad it was a super-hero show done well, was good looking, was done in an appreciative-of the-source-material spirit, and wasn’t an embarrassment along the lines of the Batman TV show!” Weiss recalled also spending #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld. The Monster Times and Etcetera © the respective copyright holders. The New York Times © The New York Times Company.

Above: The lively Monster Times during its all-too-brief stay, gave Dour Murray space to feature Warp just as it debuted on Broadway. Below: The New York Times of Feb. 4, 1973 included this ad for the show. Bottom: Future comics scribe Paul Kupperberg gave Etcetera #2 readers this review of the science-fiction play.

an enormous underground and comic-book lovers following — potheads, R. Crumb, the whole regimen of literature all the way back to J.R.R. Tolkein… any place where Lenny Kleinfeld borrowed of the metaphor of good triumphing over evil.” English teacher Brian J. McCarthy, of Brooklyn’s John Dewey High School, and advisor to the school Science Fiction Club Newsletter, even brought his students to the Ambassador. He reported in the fanzine’s April 2, 1973, edition, “The many students who were with me when we saw a preview performance [of Warp] were, without exception, positive in their reactions towards the play. Without exception, every student enjoyed the play and felt that a school trip should be planned.” Warp visual effects wizard Jerry Fortier and actor Heard recalled comic book fans crowding outside the backstage exit to score autographs from cast members. And publisher Alan Light stoked interest among readers by using the line art from Adams’ poster as cover of The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom #29 [Feb. 1, ’73], along with an oddly phrased plug inside its pages, “If you live within attending distance, I recommend you do!” It was exciting, too, for crewmembers to witness the previews. “I was always waiting for the coup de théâtres to happen,” Fortier confessed, “and that’s what keeps you going. There are certain moments that you love, certain lines that you love, or certain characters that you love. I mean, Carolyn Gordon as Valaria, the Insect Sorcerer, was fantastic! Symax was a great character.” He added, “I was never bored watching the show because I was always waiting for certain moments to come together and create an incredible transition. Appearances and disappearances would happen… Newsreel cameras had very large flashbulbs connected to them to take film, back when film was slower, so they were quite big and bright. They would first coat the bulb with egg-whites and dip it in flash powder, which you would normally use in a flash pot. The intensity of the flash would temporarily blind the audience and there would be smoke hovering in the air, and something would appear or something would be gone or change into something else. That would be just one example. When you’re actually doing projections for a show, you have to stay engaged, because these are your cues and it’s important and you want them to be perfect and in coordination with everyone else. You can’t afford to get bored.” In retrospect, the director reflected, “The Ambassador was big, but the thing about the theater was, for a Broad-

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld. The New York Times © The New York Times Company. The Buyer’s Guide © Kraus Publications.

time with the crew. “There were a few nights of hanging out with writer, director, and cast members,” he said. “I also recall Neal having Stuart Gordon and, I think, Keith Szarabajka, plus a few of us freelancers (probably Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, maybe Larry Hama and Howard Chaykin, Alan Kupperberg, myself and others) up to his place in the Bronx. Neal’s wife, Cory, would be (as always) a sweet and attentive hostess, feeding the starving creative crazies. Those were some fairly rowdy, delightful nights.” A frequent presence at Continuity back in the day, Weiss added, “I remember seeing Neal’s drawings, especially the character designs as they were being produced. Really great! We comical book guys were all pretty proud about the comics hitting Broadway in a fun, yet respectably classy fashion, with designs by one of ‘us’ for a change, as it should be. Not just ‘one of us,’ but one of the very best, ever!” Scribe Marv Wolfman (who would become Marvel editor-in-chief by ’75) said, “I remember seeing Neal’s art and we were pretty much all blown away by the fact that there was an original super-hero Broadway show that didn’t play it totally for laughs.” And fellow writer Gerry Conway opined, “Honestly, while I loved the show, I’m not sure it needed to be a trilogy. It was a great riff on comics and science fiction, but it was primarily that — a riff. It was developed as an off Off-Loop show in Chicago, and its charms were too specific for a mainstream Broadway audience. For example, its most effective theatrical tricks were its smallest and simplest — a one-man sound effects performance on microphone, a ‘floating’ magic carpet that was clearly an actor wearing fake legs on a wire-strung carpet, super-powered battles that involved little more than mime and flashing lights. Warp was a sweet little tribute to the inherent silliness of both comics and theater — a knowing wink to the conventions of both — and it was too gentle and light to survive the crushing weight of Broadway expectations. That said, it’s in desperate need of a revival by some small waiver theater somewhere. I’d love to see it performed again.” (Comics artist Alan Kupperberg, who recently passed away, was a Continuity regular involved in the actual production — so much so that even today actor Keith Szarabajka fondly remembered the cartoonist. Kupperberg told interviewer Bryan Stroud, “I lettered the Playbill cover, which Neal drew. I think I may have even cut out the Zip-A-Tone [for the logo] that was transformed into the Ambassador Theater’s marquee… I think I still have one of his rejected super-hero costumes for that show… Not the cool leather costume; the one with the sequins on it.” He added with a chuckle, “I don’t wear it out much.”) Two of the creators involved in a transformed “cosmically aware” Captain Marvel of that same period acknowledge they likely attended a performance, but memory fails. Steve Englehart doesn’t remember precisely why someone in his Avengers #125 [July ’74] exclaims “Yggthion on high,” but Yggthion being a character in Warp, it’s easy to surmise some contemporaneous impact on the writer. “Actually,” admited Jim Starlin, “I don’t recall anything about Warp, other than Neal Adams’ costume designs, which had nearly everybody’s cheeks hanging out. Saw more bare butts that night than I did in [the Broadway hit featuring frequent nudity] Oh! Calcutta!” The Curse of Galactica?: As a matter of circumstance, three months prior to Warp’s premiere, in a theater a block away from the Ambassador, another Broadway science fiction epic boasting bombastic special effects and fantastical interstellar settings had been staged. It was called Via Galactica and, as the daughter of its producer recently enthused in The New York Times, “It was going to be fantastic! Flying spaceships! A stage made of interconnecting walkways and trampolines — with a Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

backdrop of thousands of Ping-Pong balls strung together, floor to ceiling, upon which gorgeous images would be projected.” Raul Julia was the star of its Uris Theater run, a production rumored to be very expensive at a cost of almost a cool million. It was also a musical — an all-singing musical with no spoken dialogue — with a plot so convoluted a synopsis had to be inserted into Playbill (“while you’re adjusting to our mode of storytelling…”). The critics were brutal, the audience stayed home in droves, and the play was a spectacular flop, legendary even for its day, when Broadway was in cyclical decline. On Dec. 2, 1972, Via Galactica closed after four nights and seven performances, with a loss of $850,000, placing it in Smithsonian magazine’s top ten Broadway failures of all time. Remember: The era of Warp was not that far removed from the scourge of “camp,” a smug, smirking cynicism and weird, pervading attitude of embracing while simultaneously dismissing artifice, an attitude among the smart set which arguably hampered the progressive influence of comics and science fiction on popular culture during the 1960s. (Essayist Susan Sontag would single out “the old Flash Gordon comics” as an example of “canon” in her 1964 breakthrough essay, “Notes on ‘Camp.’”) And while, by the early ’70s, there was likely an appetite by audiences for well-done “sci-fi,” clever, well-executed, and enthusiastic work was rarely making its way before the great unwashed. Thus anything hinting of a speculative future for mankind or set in otherworldly locales would invariably be dismissed by television and newspaper critics as being akin to (pee-yew!) mere kid’s stuff, like Buck Rogers or Captain Video. Jerry Fortier remembered the bitter aftermath of Via Galactica on Broadway. “We knew about it,” he said. “It was already closed by the time we got there. And it seems a little ominous to me. And, of course, after the fact, at least verbally there was some bandying about that is was the ‘bad taste’ of Via Galactica to set up the critics to hate Warp as well.”

Above: Ticket prices are included in this notice appearing in The New York Times, Feb. 11, ’73. Below: Apparently the NYT mistakes Warp as a musical in this brief from Jan. 18, ’73. Bottom: The Buyer’s Guide of Feb. 1, ’73, used the Adams poster art as cover, adding this oddly worded note, as well.

Critical Disdain: In such a derisive critical environment, Via Galactica was savaged by reviewers, and Warp fared little better, though it was, in the eyes of all involved and many in the theater seats, quite well-received by the audience. In a Warp post-mortem, James Martin reported in The Chicago Tribune later that month, “[Gordon] could see disaster coming by the time the opening night cast party was an hour old. With great expectations after a tumultuous audience reception, the cast and crew had moved over to the ballroom of the Diplomat Hotel, where they planned to drink merrily while the reviews began to trickle in.” (Coincidentally, in the very same ballroom the following summer, a nascent rock ’n’ roll group, one that wholeheartedly embraced both comic books and the cosmic, had a breakthrough performance, when Kiss first met their future manager, Bill Aucoin, who immediately sensed “magic 35

Clive Barne’s ‘High’ Praise: Then came the judgment of the newspapers, which proved mostly negative. Douglas Watt of The Daily News sniffed, “Seeing Warp, a kind of poor man’s Via Galactica… is about as edifying as spending an hour-and-a-half poring over the proofs of a doomed sci-fi comic strip.” While Edwin Wilson of The Wall Street Journal enthused, “It comes on like Gangbusters,” the Great White Way acknowledges that it is the opinion of the Gray Lady that matters, her influence will make or break a show. And New York Times critic Clive Barnes gave a mixed, lukewarm assessment. “My Battlefield, My Body is well done and fun of sorts… But how long can you laugh with a thing when you are really laughing at it. We are living in a junk world and this is junk art. Beautifully cooked — but junk.” After giving nods to Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, brother and sister Heard, and Tom Towles (the latter “perhaps the best of all”), the influential theater critic came to this 36

This spread: At left is Infinity #5 [’73], which included Doug Murray’s post mortem on the science-fiction play, “The Rise and Fall of Warp.” Below: Clive Barnes’ snarky theater review that arguably sealed Warp’s fate. From The New York Times, Feb. 15, 1973. Next page: Among the treasures shared by Neal Adams and Continuity Associates are these ad layout sketches, apparently intended to counter the lackluster and negative reviews Warp received from TV and newspaper reviewers.

snarky conclusion: For comic book addicts in search of a childhood they never had, lost or are currently sustaining, Warp might well be a lot of fun. Others are warned that, while it is undeniably cleverly done, it is at heart a one-joke evening. But some people like one-joke evenings. Go with friends, and go at least a little cheerful, if not actually high.

The John Dewey Science Fiction Club Newsletter, in dissecting the fate of the play, was most astonished by the derision of critic Richard Watts, of The New York Post, who was derided by the fanzine as “the most ridiculous reviewer and winner of the Fugghead of the Year award.” Watts was then quoted (with much indignant italicizing and furious underlining in the fanzine) as writing, “The authorship [of Warp] is attributed to Bury St. Edmund and Stuart Gordon, who so far haven’t denied the accusation… Not being a fan of science fiction or comic books, I may not be their fairest judge possible judge in theater form, but I thought last night’s noisy procedure was simply dreadful. But the Ambassador was packed with young people who made the youthful audiences at Hair look like pillars of stuffy respectability, and they were having a rewarding emotional experience. While I have no respect for the taste of people who enjoy and understand science fiction, I stand in virtual awe of their cerebral equipment. I never had more than the vaguest conception of what was going on and usually not that.” The Newsletter — and much of comics fandom — was positively apoplectic at the Post’s prejudiced review. The fanzine raged, “The future of a science fiction play should never be in the hands of a Richard Watts; instead, he should have allowed someone else with a more objective mind to review Warp.” Doug Murray wrote that Watts’ column “smacks of dishonesty, not only to Warp, but to his readers.” Paul Kupperberg editorialized in Etcetera #2, “It’s a shame when a thing is often done away with because of the short-sightedness of some of its critics. And it’s even worse that people follow the advice of some stranger who has somehow obtained the power to dictate what the people like and dislike.” Zeroing in on the Watts slam, Kupperberg continued, “After that, are we supposed to be expected to respect his opinion? Well, I guess so. There was not too large an audience after the show’s closing.” (The piece, headlined “R.I.P. Warp,” including a photo of graffiti on a New York subway platform — a head shot of Lord Cumulus exclaiming. “Warp lives!” The surreptitious illo was executed by, Kupperberg recently revealed, his late brother, Alan.) #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld. The Monster Times and Etcetera © the respective copyright holders. The New York Times © The New York Times Company.

in them.” Rumor has it that Kiss front man Gene Simmons, a huge comics fan, attended the Broadway production, which may— or may not — have influenced the band.) “The TV reviews came in first,” said O’Neal, “and they were devastating. That is all I remember. I was devastated that it hadn’t been better received, almost speechless.” Fortier recalled, “The Gene Shalit review came on during the late night newscast and he panned it as being total garbage, and I think John Rockwell did the same thing. Shalit said that the poster misrepresented the show.” The visual effects maestro also remembered, “Tony D’Amato threw his plastic champagne glass at the television screen. Of course, it was a pathetic little black-&-white television. It wasn’t a super-symbolic thing to do, but it was symbolically fraught.” Doug Murray, in his “Rise and Fall of Warp” article in the prozine Infinity [#5, 1973], wrote, “Perhaps the most influential of the TV critics is Kevin Sanders of ABC; his feelings on Warp are typical of most critics: ‘Warp is,’ he states, ‘a comic book come to life.’ Further, he explains, ‘Comic books are greasy kid-stuff.’ His conclusion: ‘Warp is bad theater.’” As the 11:00 news broadcast critics piled on the show, Neal Adams instinctively acted with a confederate to lighten the dire atmosphere. “It was such a tragedy when the reviews came in,” he said, “that people had things to drink and bitched and moaned and carried on, and Keith Szarabajka and I got into a fake fight. I cannot tell you why this happened, but we started throwing each other around the place, as if we were having a real fight, just to get rid of the energy. He was flipping me over; I was flipping him over, throwing him on sh*t. We were lunging at each other and pretending to hit each other, and everyone thought we were having a real fight for a while; it was really good. And it really took off the energy of the disappointment, though it didn’t take it away. We were just having a great time, like two lion cubs or whatever. But it was so disappointing.”

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld. The New York Times © The New York Times Company. The Buyer’s Guide © Kraus Publications.

Overall, the reaction was devastating for the director. “We opened on Valentine’s Day, I remember that,” Gordon said, with a laugh, “and I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day ever since.” The Day After: Whether actually hung-over or merely fatigued from the critical bashing, the cast and crew awoke the next day, Thursday, to ponder the sobering question as to whether Warp would continue. David George Gordon recalled, “It was sort of, ‘I’m on the top of the world, mom,’ to ‘Look what the cat dragged in.’” The director remembered, “The next night, everybody was really down and dispirited, but there was a pretty good audience there, and we went out and did the show and, at the end, the audience gave us a standing ovation! Then somebody in the balcony yelled out, ‘F*ck the critics!’ Which, you know, definitely cheered us up.” The lead actor didn’t show up to perform that night, his understudy revealed. “John Heard got sick the next day,” Keith Szarabakja shared. “He had an asthma attack. I actually went to the theater the next day between 6:30 and 7:00 because I had to do a series of physical warm-ups because they essentially ‘killed’ me in every scene — I was always the Faceless One or the bug that got killed — and so I’m on stage doing warm-ups and Frank Marino, the stage manager, asked me, ‘So, are you ready?’ I go, ‘I’m always ready, Frank. What’s up?’ And he goes, ‘Oh my god, nobody told you. You’re it tonight! You’re playing Cumulus!’ At that point, I had never actually done the part on that stage, so I ended up doing it the next four days. Out of the seven actual performances (not counting previews), I actually did more than John as Cumulus. It was a Broadway production, so it was very, very different than doing it in a small, 165-seat house. It was an experience, that’s all I can tell you, but I did get through it.” Upon being asked if, given his reluctance at times to commit to Warp, Heard answered, “If I had been that ambitious, I would never have let Keith go on! I was never really a part of the gang. I was never really part of the group. They had formulated long before I had showed up. I was a little bit of an outsider, but only for my sister, who was very much ensconced in Chicago theater and had been so for years.” Whether ambitious or not, the actor did harbor a degree of loyalty to the company. The week Warp was being staged, Heard had checked in with his agent, who received a call during the visit and instructed the young actor, “Go over to the Morosco Theatre. They’re looking for a replacement in the play called The Changing Room.” Heard said, “That was probably the highlight of my career as an actor,” mesmerized during an audition seeing dressing room doors labeled with the stellar names of Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates. Though it would come down to Heard and another actor for a “towel-snapping” role in the locker room play, he abruptly left the audition out of fidelity to the Organic. “So I snuck myself out of a part with which I probably would have soared for the next six months, getting a Broadway Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

check in New York City.” By Friday, the Organic was resolved to have the show go on. “So we were trying to keep going.” Gordon said, “and we thought if we could keep it running, let’s open up Episode Two as fast as we can and keep going. But we walked into the theater that night and there was a closing notice posted by our producer. The show was going to close.” The production’s backstage demeanor became one of mourning. “In fact,” David George said, “the guy who said, ‘I haven’t had this feeling since Funny Girl’…? I think he was very embarrassed because he had opened himself up that way. Then he wouldn’t have much to do with me after that. Once they posted the closing notice, he went from being my buddy and friend to being ‘I’m just here for the job.’ It was an eye-opener, for sure.” Post-Mortem: Much of the show’s failure on the Great White Way was attributed to the poor reviews, but in its aftermath, other facets shared blame. Heard exclaimed, “The critics weren’t ready for it; the unions weren’t ready for it; the production organization wasn’t ready for it… nobody knew how to deal with it. It wasn’t the right subject matter… saying it was a science fiction play in serial form… it’s not what you do on Broadway!” The Chicago costume designer believed, “I just think it was ill-fit for the genre. I think it came in on the coattails of Grease, which was a huge success,” Cookie Gluck said, “but it was a different kind of show. It was the same producer as Grease and I think he thought he could walk on water.” “Broadway has so much of its own baggage that goes with it,” the director now says. “There’s all these things about stage hands, unions… plus the attitude is so different. A show like Warp would have much more been in the right place would have been Off-Broadway, where shows like Hair and the more avant garde things were done. Where Broadway was so full of tradition and Warp was out of place there. The thing that was different was that the audience responded extremely well — we were getting standing ovations every night. Some of the critics even made mention of it, ‘They must have brought their busloads of people from Chicago to come and see the show.’” “In both instances going to New York,” David George lamented, “I realized later we were kind of audacious in what we were doing, which was almost too experimental for them, and that there were standards to be held both in Off-Broadway and, especially, Broadway. I remember several of the Warp reviews said, ‘The group that calls itself the Organic Theater.’ They didn’t even want to admit that that was our name!” Eastbound, Westbound: Ironically, the best reviews Warp would receive about the Broadway run would see print weeks after the closing notice, well after any potential impact. Newsweek, The Village Voice, and Playboy magazine would give enthusiastic approval, but the die was cast and the company was at a crossroads. Heard recalled that the biggest question after the closing of Warp was: who in the company would be going back to 37

This spread: Covers by Neal Adams of the 1979–80 Chicago revival of Warp staged by the Organic. We’re not quite sure why the hum-drum cover at immediate right replaced the dramatic version on the next page.

skydive, retired after 23 years as chairman of Southern Methodist University’s theater department. He now spends six to nine months a year with his wife Rebecca in the Dordogne Valley, in France. Keith Szarabajka is an in-demand voice artist and actor with a great number of television and movie roles to his credit, most prominently as the lead in Stephen King’s Golden Years mini-series. Of his years with the Chicago troupe, the thespian remembered, “Being a part of the Organic, well, as far as theater is concerned, it’s like being a part of SEAL Team Six. It was an elite group of people who are incredibly talented and ambitious. They remain lifelong friends of mine.” Nominated for four Tony Awards and winner of one, Neil Peter Jampolis, a distinguished professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, remains a lighting, scenery, and costume designer, with innumerable Broadway and Off-Broadways productions to his credit. He is also lauded for opera productions, some of which he directed and have been staged at the Metropolitan Opera and other houses. Cookie Gluck would share with Laura Crow and Neal Adams the New York Drama Desk Award for Warp’s costumes. Today she runs a successful business, notably creating props and costuming for major league team mascots and corporate clients. Cordis Fejer, now Cordis Heard, who portrayed to acclaim Sargon in Warp, later appeared in Caddyshack, Fearless, numerous TV shows, and most recently in the 2014 movie Why We Cry. Richard Fire had a multitude of roles in Warp, most prominently Lugulbanda, and is likely best known for co-writing, with director John McNaughton, the movie thriller Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. He passed away this summer. After playing Prince Chaos in both Organic productions, Tom Towles went on to become a highly-recognizable character actor in many films and TV shows, particularly after appearing as the cretinous sidekick in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Towles died in April of this year. Full Circle: Warp would be revived as a trilogy on stage over the years — in Georgetown in ’73, back in Chicago by the Organic in ’79–80, and Off-Broadway in New York in late ’96 as an all-three-in-one-day presentation — and it was even optioned in the mid-’80s as a motion picture (by the writers of Poltergeist, who produced a draft script, which truncated three episodes into one). Stuart Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld still own the property. Whether there’s still life in the concept, Kleinfeld shared, “I have no idea how Warp would feel to an audience today. And not much hope that I’ll ever find out. Technically, it’s not something that a waiver theater can pull off; it requires paid actors and designers working full-time, with an adult budget. I doubt it’ll ever receive a viable production again. But you never know.” #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

Chicago. “I think I had enough impetus to stay in New York and try to be a working actor,” Heard said, “[impetus] that the rest of the gang didn’t have.” After struggling and on the verge of getting a license to become a taxi driver, the actor would receive his break when hired for a TV movie and, from there, a successful career in television and movies. André De Shields, a UW graduate who had portrayed Symax after Bill Norris’ injury, and Xander, the Unconquerable, would stay in the Big Apple after being noticed in Warp, and in only two years, the actor had a breakthrough when he earned the title role in The Wiz. Most of the company would return to the Windy City and, soon enough, the Organic was staging new productions, notably a Ray Bradbury adaptation, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (which would eventually be made into a movie directed by Stuart Gordon) and Bleacher Bums, as well as David Mamet’s first play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, later adapted on film as About Last Night…. Lenny Kleinfeld became a columnist for Chicago magazine and then worked for years as a Hollywood screenwriter. He has since written two novels, Shooters & Chasers and Some Dead Genius. About his nom de plume, Kleinfeld said, “I didn’t intend to ever use Bury St. Edmund again. But when Stuart designed the program for the first episode of Warp, he used that instead of Lenny Kleinfeld, and had the programs printed without showing it to me. I was pissed off at having that ridiculous name on my first professionally produced play. But the Organic couldn’t afford to re-do the programs — hell, the whole show was funded by a $1,500 loan from Stuart’s mom. And besides, I had no idea if it would matter; there was no guarantee more than 12 people would ever see the show, or that we’d get as far as staging Episode Two.” Stuart Gordon went on to cult horror film fame as the film director best known for adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction, including Re-Animator, Dagon, and From Beyond. He also co-created Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and returns on occasion to stage direction, recently with Nevermore and Re-Animator: The Musical. Younger brother David George Gordon has achieved gastronomic notoriety for his Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, and he travels the country promoting that and other nature-related tomes. (About his sibling, he said, “We like to joke that because here I am, a naturalist, and here he is, a director. I said to him one time, ‘We’re the weird Attenborough brothers,’ and my brother said, ‘No, the Attenborough brothers are the boring Gordons.’”) Carolyn Purdy-Gordon has often acted in her husband’s movies, all too often playing a character killed on-screen. She has a catering business that services independent feature films. After raising three daughters with Stuart, Purdy-Gordon says, “I think maybe the best is yet to come.” Cecil O’Neal, who suffered bouts of sciatica after the Chicago injury but would go on to run marathons and, last year, at age 71, take his first

Warp TM & © Stuart Gordon & Lenny Kleinfeld.

The trilogy’s other co-creator would love to have it adapted as a film series and believes it as having an ageless quality. “When we did Warp,” Gordon said, “we were all in our twenties, and there’s something about Warp that is eternally young, which I think is great. The thing that was clear to me when I saw it, when they did it in New York in the late ’90s, was that it is timeless. It’s kind of like Midsummer Night’s Dream or something. It’s in this whole other fantasy world and it’s not influenced or changed by our world. It is a Never Never Land kind of place for me.” Of course, a comic book adaptation did see print as a series between 1983–85, the debut title released by independent comics publisher First Comics. Though there was hope by First that Neal Adams could be enlisted to draw Warp (which did adapt the play trilogy in its initial issues), Frank Brunner was the series artist at the onset. Lasting for 19 issues, the title and accompanying three Warp Specials were not well-received by critics (“a chore to look at as well as to read,” quipped one review), readers, or the property’s creators. Said Kleinfeld, “To borrow a phrase from Sam Shepard, ‘It sucked dogs.’” Gordon was a tad more diplomatic, saying, “Yeah, that was pretty great, although when they adapted the plays, they took all the comedy and humor out of Warp. They played it very straight. I thought it was pretty well drawn. I liked a lot of it. But it was missing something… It’s funny: They would paraphrase a lot of the dialogue and take all of the jokes out.” Star Warp: An essay of this length, devoted to a show that was a hardly a blip on the pop culture scene of the 1970s, seems extravagant and, well, probably it is. But when the Warp characters appeared on the wraparound cover of Doug Murray’s Neal Adams Index, in 1974, and upon word circulating among fans about the mythical Broadway production, a lifelong curiosity persisted in this writer. Plus, given that aficionados of Jack Kirby have long felt that major elements of his Fourth World opus were appropriated by the original Star Wars trilogy, which boasts a huge impact on culture, one ponders, too, the similarities with George Lucas’ phenomenally successful film series and the Gordon/ Kleinfeld three-part stage production. This correlation has not been overlooked by Warp’s participants. Stuart Gordon said, “There’s a rumor — and I don’t know if it’s true or not — that George Lucas did see the show in New York. There’s a lot of similarities between Star Wars and Warp, including the name Lugulbanda, which is very much a name that sounds like it could fit into Star Wars. Plus there’s a whole thing in Warp where characters would turn out to be brothers or sisters, which you see in Star Wars. Cumulus and Chaos are brothers, and it turns out that Sargon and Valaria are sisters. There are all of these sorts of revelations about families going on. And just a lot of the attitude, as I recall, is very similar. I think Star Wars is much more into hardware, whereas Warp was more into inter-dimensional stuff. And the fact that it’s a trilogy, that there was three parts.” About any connection, Lenny Kleinfeld offered, “Years later, in Los Angeles, Stuart introduced me to a guy who was on the Star Wars merchandising team. He told us Lucas saw Warp on Broadway before writing Star Wars. Put it this way: when the first movie came out, Linda Winer, the Chicago Tribune theater critic, asked me after the first movie came out if I’d noticed how much the Star Wars characters and their costumes resembled those in Warp. But you know, the story and sensibility of that movie is way different from what we did.” The playwright added, “A little postscript: In 1987, I flew back to L.A. from the funeral of an uncle I was fond of, walked into my apartment and got a phone call from a development exec. She said she was working for George Lucas and they were interviewing writers for a new Star Wars trilogy; did I want to interview for the gig? I said sure. She said I’d first have to sign a release saying that anything Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

I said during the interview would be property of Lucasfilm. I was in kind of a surly mood; I snorted and said, ‘Why not, George already lifted ideas from me — ask him about seeing a play called Warp. For some reason, I never heard back from her.” Jerry Fortier also pointed out similarities, saying, “It does work on various levels: the whole idea of the Knights of the Universe, a future/past type of thing, this knight organization with cultivated powers, spiritual but also militaristic, almost Japanese martial arts that is put into a science fiction context.” Citing obvious corollaries, Keith Szarabajka noted, “Someone is taken from a mundane existence into this universe in which they had no idea had existed — Skywalker/Cumulus. There’s an older, wise person — Obi-Wan Kenobi/Lugulbanda — and the protagonist is teamed-up with a rash, brash anti-hero — Han Solo/Chaos — and trapped in the end of Episode Two by an evil force that’s taking us over after a climactic battle. In their final chapters, they both have problems that end up the same: Star Wars has rebellious Ewoks, and we had the rallying cry, ‘The Skleeks belong to the Pleeples!’ Nuff said!” Szarabajka continued, “It’s interesting that they both have a similar structure that ends up being structurally deficient at the end. To me, it’s an interesting arc. Warp ended with He-Who-Dreams and Infinity. And, in a sense, Star Wars ends up with that unity when we find out that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. I guess it’s very Joseph Campbell.” The Warp Take-Away: It would be understandable if the general attitude of those involved with Warp would be of disappointment at its failure to continue on Broadway or resentment over the play’s possible influence on an enormously profitable film series. Yet, in interview after interview, the pervading sentiment is one of gratitude. Cecil O’Neal recalled, “I was with Stuart and Carolyn maybe a few months ago, and we were talking. Stuart said something about the possibility that I might have felt badly treated or that I might have gotten somehow screwed in not being in the Broadway production. But I never felt anything like that. I had a great, great time, and it was incredibly gratifying. I learned loads from the whole Organic experience. It was an incredible learning, stimulating, and creative time in my life. There are things that I learned there and things that I experienced there that informed the next the thirty or forty years of my career. So I am delighted to have been a part of Warp.” Keith Szarabajka said, “Warp deserves to be a legend because it was completely different than anything I’d ever seen. It was extraordinary. And the people who did it were extraordinary — Stuart, his brother David, and all the people who played music… it was really cool.” “Those were good days,” shared John Heard. “That was very much a rich time for theater — new playwrights being political, being cultural — it was a very good, positive time to be connected to the theater. We were very, very fortunate. Warp was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. It was an eye-opening experience. My sister had led the way and connected me with people I still know today.” Gluck is thankful for her days at the Organic Theater. “Warp pretty much launched me,” she said. “It was also the start of the Chicago theater scene and, in terms of timing, I’m grateful for all of it, for getting me in tune with what my special gifts are and propelling me into a venue where I could do it.”

Special thanks to all who helped with this article, listed here alphabetically: Jason “Spyda” Adams Kris Adams Stone Neal Adams Nick Caputo Howard Chaykin Continuity Associates Kevin Coccio Gerry Conway Anthony D’Amato Steve Englehart Jane Fire Jerry Fortier Jeff Gelb Cookie Gluck Mike Gold Carolyn Purdy-Gordon David George Gordon Stuart Gordon Larry Hama John Heard Neil Peter Jampolis Lenny Kleinfeld Paul Kupperberg Stan Lee Paul Levitz Russ Maheras Doug Murray Rick Obediah Cecil O’Neal John Ostrander Jim Starlin Hugh Surratt Keith Szarabajka Roy Thomas The Time Capsule Christine Torreele Alan Weiss Glenn Whitmore Marv Wolfman Robert Yeremian 39

Back in the mid-’80s,

I discovered Peter Bagge’s work at Newbury Comics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first issue of Neat Stuff had been beckoning to be purchased for more than a few visits, with the cover’s cartoon mesmerist beseeching me with his hypnotic gaze. But I held out, instead buying an Arthur Adams annual featuring Marvel properties I didn’t give a hoot about or the latest Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman, starring a character who actually was interesting. But, after a summer’s resistance, I caved. Bagge had me... for life. Initially I wavered because of the seemingly crude art, but Peter’s writing pulled it all together for me to recognize that, whether depicting Buddy Bradley or Margaret Sanger, his is a truly remarkable and original body of work, some of the best comics ever. I’ve also been impressed with Peter’s moxie to keep an eye on the ball.

I first met the cartoonist on his 1993 Hateball tour with Daniel Clowes. It was in a dingy second-floor record shop near Brown University. I came with pal Les Daniels and, with few others paying attention to the visiting creators, I had my Neat Stuffs and Eightballs signed and prattled on to the pair, mostly about my love for the Bagge oeuvre. Clowes listened patiently but I recall Bagge cutting me off and (not unkindly) prodding me with, “Are you gonna buy something, or what?” It had been, after all, not a great day of sales for the two. The impact on me was lasting. Bagge means business. The majority of the following interview was conducted over marathon phone sessions a number of years ago and once over lunch during MOCCA, enlightening conversations I enjoyed enormously. This transcript came close to being the centerpiece of the seventh issue of Comic Book Artist, Vol. 2 — Peter had provided the cover in 2006 — but that “final” edition wasn’t meant to be. I’m grateful to the artist for his patience, understanding, and help. It’s taken quite a spell.

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

The cartoonist and I last met at this year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego, where he indulged my wonky concept for a photoshoot. He was also having a surprisingly profitable show despite being tucked in a corner of Artists Alley. When I sat with the guy, a steady stream of aficionados were picking up commissions or buying stuff, amid amiable chit-chat. I was delighted to purchase a piece myself. It was gratifying to witness. One of the greatest comic book creators of his generation was, be it sales or adulation, effortlessly doing well. Peter Christian Bagge was having a very good day.

Buddy Bradley, Neat Stuff, and Hate TM & © Peter Bagge.

A career-spanning conversation with the brilliant cartoonist behind Hate and a whole lotta Neat Stuff… Comic Book Creator: How do you pronounce your last name, Peter? Peter Bagge: “Bag,” as in “paper bag.” People usually pronounce the “e” at the end, like “baggie.” It’s Swedish in origin. CBC: Does the name mean anything? Peter: I asked lots of people if the name had a meaning and nobody was sure, except that they said that it’s very similar to the word for a ram, or male sheep. I’ve also read that it’s an Old English name for a bag maker! CBC: You said your father had an English background? Peter: My great-grandfather emigrated from Manchester, England. He was extremely ambitious and eventually started an architectural firm, even though he had no formal training. His firm, Neville & Bagge, was more like a land speculation and development business than anything else. Anyhow, he became a millionaire from this racket and employed all four of his sons, including my grandfather, until the Depression hit and the firm was wiped out. CBC: What was your mother’s background? Peter: Well, on my mom’s mother’s side, they go way, way back. She even joined the Daughters of the American Revolution at one point, but quit almost immediately because they were such stuckup bigots. But my mother’s father was an immigrant from Denmark, and worked as a chauffeur for the Rockefellers. CBC: That is impressive. Did they tip well? Peter: He seemed well taken care of. My mother met the Old Man — John D. Rockefeller, the first — lots of times when she was a little girl. If my grandfather was driving him around and he spied a bunch of kids playing, including my mom and her brothers, he would have my grandfather stop, get out and open the door to the backseat. He’d then make the kids hop into the limo with him one at a time, and he would hand each one a shiny new dime (which, in the ’30s, wasn’t chump change.) It was apparently terrifying for the kids, because Rockefeller looked just like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He was real thin and covered in liver spots, and he was probably in his 90s by then. My mother says it was a horrifying experience, sitting in the back of a dark limo all alone with the Crypt Keeper, but it was worth the dime. Apparently some PR firm advised him to do this so he wouldn’t come off as so miserly. CBC: Was your mother’s family solid middle class? Peter: More like comfortable working class. My grandfather had a lot of sh*t jobs before he landed that one, so he was extremely appreciative towards the Rockefellers.

Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

CBC: What did your father do? Peter: He was an officer in the Air National Guard and hated every minute of it. Unfortunately, my father was never really clear about what he wanted to do with his life, which is one of the many reasons why he always seemed very bitter and frustrated. He had been drafted into World War II, but didn’t see any action, so when the Korean War was kicking up, he was eligible for the draft yet again. And here he was married and wanted to start a family, and had an okay job as an office clerk on Wall Street, so the idea of getting hauled off to Korea terrified him. One of my uncles was in the Air National Guard Reserves, and he suggested my dad join the Guard for as long as the war lasts, to keep out of the draft. So my father joined the Air National Guard as a form of legal draft-dodging. Once the war was over, he looked into what else he could do, but nothing else paid quite as well, or the benefits weren’t quite as good. And the Air National Guard was based in Westchester County — my parents were both from there — which meant not having to go into the city. So he stuck it out for a while as an enlisted man, working part-time at a record store and going to officer’s school at night, so that by the time he retired he worked his way up to a colonel. He was just a paper-pusher, to be honest. An office manager in a fancy uniform. CBC: Had he had a college education? Peter: When he was in high school, my father had a very good short-term memory, so he always got straight A’s. He had this inflated opinion of himself as a genius just because he aced everything. He never had to study or work very hard to get an A; it just came really easy to him. But once in college he struggled just to get a C. He suddenly wasn’t a genius anymore, so he dropped out. His ego was wounded. CBC: You said he was bitter? Peter: Yeah. He could be a very difficult person to deal with. Very moody and short-tempered. CBC: Did your father drink? Peter: Oh, yeah. Both my parents did. My dad was an angry drunk, too. My mom is a real sweetheart, but she was… [pauses] CBC: An enabler? Peter: Yeah, I guess. Everybody that met my ma just loves her to death. She could be the sweetest, kindest person in the world, but she’s a real space case. My parents were very much like [TV sitcom All in the Family characters] Archie and Edith Bunker. My ma was a real “Edith,” always wanting everyone to make nice. She hated conflict, which my father was

always providing in spades. But she was also quite helpless and dependent on others. She awas utterly dependent on my dad, and later on the various men she dated until they died off, one by one. She never mourned any of them once they passed away, either — including my father! She’d just move on to the next one, and eventually became utterly dependent on my younger sister. CBC: Did they stay married? Peter: Yes, they stayed together, but it got really grim. They both got really depressed, with endless money problems. It seemed like they were sh*t-magnets, but it was because they always let things happen to them. Rather than foreseeing problems down the road and acting accordingly, they would do nothing to avoid trouble. They just let life happen to them, something I swore I would never do when I grew up. It was the same with having five kids. They didn’t want five kids, but they didn’t do what it takes to avoid it, either. CBC: Were they Catholic? Peter: Obviously! But that’s another strange thing — and it also goes to show how passive my parents were — is that my mother grew up Protestant, though she was not very religious. She couldn’t even recall what denomination she was as a kid, it meant so little to her. She just remembers vaguely enjoying Sunday school and stuff like that. Meanwhile, my father’s father was a lapsed Episcopalian, but his mother was half-Irish and very Catholic. She pushed to have all us grandkids raised Catholic and, since nobody was pushing back, we were raised Catholic. CBC: Did you go to confession? Peter: Yeah, we did all that twisted, meaningless nonsense. By the time I was 13, I told my parents, “I don’t believe a word of this.

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Photo and The Bradleys TM & © Peter Bagge.

Above: A 1987 snapshot of the Bagge men, taken in Peter and Joanne’s backyard in Seattle. Left to right, Mr. Bagge, Peter, Peter’s younger brother Tony and older brother Doug, the latter who would contribute to the short-lived Comical Funnies at the behest of Peter. Below: The battling Bradleys, Peter Bagge’s outrageously dysfunctional middle-class cartoon family creation, first appeared in Comical Funnies, the New York City tabloid that lasted for three issues between 1980–81. Edited by Punk magazine legend John Holmstrom and Peter Bagge, both late of the School of Visual Arts, along with Bruce Carlton and J.D. King, Comical Funnies would also feature other early Bagge creations Studs Kirby and Junior. The Bagge art here was used as the wraparound cover for The Bradleys, collecting the Neat Stuff strips [1989]. All courtesy of Peter Bagge.

I can’t stand it anymore.” I couldn’t stand breaking up my Sundays and missing [New York children’s TV game show] Wonderama just to go and listen to all that convoluted, hateful bullsh*t. It wasn’t like I wanted to learn about or experience other faiths, either. I was and remain a hopeless agnostic. I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body. CBC: It retrospect, did it seem like an alcoholic household? Peter: Oh, yes, it definitely was. My parents always drank somewhat, but by the time we were all in high school, their inability or willingness to cope kept diminishing, and they turned more to drinking. Booze and TV, that was their life. Neither ever helped us with school or homework – my ma just watched the soaps all day and my dad watched the Mets at night. They had five kids in seven years, so we all moved out of the house, in pretty short order, which made life a lot easier for my parents. My father was also able to retire fairly early. They moved to Florida, bought a condo on the water, and by then they seemed okay. The pressure was off. Still, y’know, I wouldn’t say they were happy; it still took very little to get my dad all pissed off. My father once got so mad watching the news and hearing [U.S. Senator] Ted Kennedy talk about something or other (my dad was a Republican) that he wrote Kennedy a letter. He typed it up and showed it to me. I said, “Dad! You can’t send this!” It was practically a death threat! “When those crazies shot your brothers, they shot the wrong one!” CBC: Where do you stand in the lineup of the Bagge kids? Peter: I’m the second. Well, I’m the oldest now, since my older brother passed away, so now there’s me, two sisters, and the youngest is my other brother. My two sisters and I were like Irish triplets, all born a year apart of one another. My little brother is five years younger than me. CBC: Were there any creative streaks in either your siblings or your parents? Peter: Yes, my older brother Doug was very creative and spontaneous, a real natural cartoonist. Without even trying that hard or honing his craft, he was just one of those people who had a gift. He sorta reminded me of someone like [The Simpsons’ creator] Matt Groening, how he’d just sit down and do a drawing and everybody’d be immediately charmed and amused by it. My brother and I would make our own funny pages, fake Sunday supplements. Doug would draw a comic and then I would draw one. We’d even make our own newspaper. It was called The Daily Snortster. My brother invented this whole little country called Philberville. It was like this island off of New Jersey coast

All characters and artwork TM & © Peter Bagge.

or something, and the newspaper would be all about what was going on in his mythical sh*thole. Doug would write about presidential elections with his own made up parties and candidates. One party was called the Political Party, whose slogan was: “Politically Speaking, the Political Party Speaks Your Language!” That still cracks me up to this day! CBC: These Sunday funnies were all hand-printed? Peter: Yes, everything was handdrawn, and there’d only be one copy of it. We didn’t print it out. The newspaper would be four pages of news, sports, and ads, and then there’d be eight pages of comics — which, to us, was what all newspapers should be like! Drawing comics almost came too easy for him, because he never developed a work ethic toward his comics. He didn’t pencil it; he would just sit down with a marker and make it up as he drew. It would just flow. He didn’t have to think it out, and it always would be hilarious. I drew comics largely just to keep up with him and be like him. CBC: So your brother was a natural cartoonist? Peter: Yeah, he was a real natural. I had to work twice as hard to be half as good. I tried to do it just like he did: take a pen and draw without any planning, but it never worked. So, after a while, I started secretly roughing it out first the way almost all professional cartoonists do, though I didn’t know that at the time. To me it felt like “cheating”! CBC: What was the content of your cartoons? Peter: It was the same as my brother’s, all gags. Absurdist satire. We were just trying to be funny. CBC: What were your inspirations at the time? Peter: Mostly the funny comic strips in the daily and Sunday papers. Plus MAD magazine. I loved Peanuts, by far my favorite comic strip. But other than that, my brother and I also used to buy all those paperback collections, not just of Peanuts, but Dennis the Menace. We loved all the Dennis the Menace paperbacks. We would also collect the old MAD paperbacks. After Peanuts, my next favorite of the paperback collections were MAD’s Don Martin books. I read all of them dozens of times as well. We also would buy Beetle Bailey, and a beautifully drawn kids strip called Tiger… I remember even owning a Marmaduke collection. Why not?! And when B.C. started out, I thought that was hilarious. It was one of my favorites. I can do without it now, but it seemed really “hip” to me at the time. But, to me, there was Peanuts, and than there were all the others. Even as a kid, I knew there was so much more going on, it was just so much deeper. It operated on many more levels than those other strips did. It was contemplative and very philosophical, yet it was cute little kids with big round heads who were saying these things. A deceptive duality was going on there — something that always is the hallmark of great comedy, to my mind. CBC: Did you identify specifically with any? Peter: I identified with Linus. He was by far my favorite character when I was a kid. Though my favorite stuff both then and now was any and all interactions between Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown. When I was only 12 or 13, I quickly got fed up with the strip, starting around 1970, when he introduced Woodstock. All of a sudden, all the jokes were really light and there was lots of Snoopy and his alter-egos. Charlie Brown was suddenly just Snoopy’s straight man, which was a huge waste of one of the greatest comic characters ever. But Schulz had a great 20-year run, and especially in the early ’60s, it’s Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

just the best stuff anybody’s ever done. CBC: Did you always appreciate Peanuts for the artistry? Peter: Yes! I thought it was a knockout in every single way, the writing and the art. CBC: Even the lettering was something. Peter: It’s because of Schulz, too, that I wanted to be a daily strip cartoonist. But then, in the ’70s, and all of a sudden the daily strips, as you recall, started getting smaller and smaller, so the artistry was counting for less and less. Even though I liked the cartoony stuff, like Dennis the Menace and Mort Walker, and all them, those guys are really good artists, too. It’s cartoony, but it still was really good artwork, excellent cartooning, with style and personality. Then, out of the blue, we had Doonesbury, which was supposed to be the new, hip, “smart” strip. I thought Garry Trudeau’s artwork was hideous. I couldn’t even look at it; it was so ugly. I also couldn’t believe it was so popular. I still can’t look at it. I despise his drawing style. And it’s so smug, too. There’s nothing the least bit self-effacing about the humor. It’s so self-righteous, you know? It’s like being in church, only it’s from a liberal, secular worldview, but it’s still a religion. And whether I agree or disagree with what he’d be saying was besides the point. It embarrassed me when I agreed with him! And then, all of a sudden, there was Ziggy, which was hideous. And Cathy? These strips weren’t even funny, they were pathetic, and the art was so f*cking boring and ugly. Now it’s all Garfield and Zits and Dilbert — the latter of which is, at least, kind of funny, but again, the art is so blah. It’s not good

Above: The Bradley Family strip, much the center of the one-man comics anthology Neat Stuff, was a wild caricature of Bagge’s own brood growing up, which would over time result in focusing on the exploits of oldest son Buddy, the star of Hate, seen here with his pals. Below: The first Bradley Family strip appeared in the last issue of the tabloid Comical Funnies, #3, in 1981.

Above: The final regular issue of Hate, #30 [May 1998] included an autobiographical strip written by Peter Bagge and drawn by Danny Hellman. The four pages, reproduced here and across the bottom of the next several pages (appearing by the kind permission of P.B.), describe and encounter with comic-book genius Harvey Kurtzman, who instructed at Bagge’s alma mater, New York City’s School of Visual Arts. Another renowned teacher at SVA was Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and pretty much one of the most important practicioners in the medium. It was Bagge’s Comical Funnies/ Stop! cohort John Holmstrom, while attending the school in the early ’70s, who was among those who suggested SVA hire Kurtzman and Eisner as teachers for the institution’s cartooning program. By 1979, underground cartoonist Art Spiegelman would join the masters and add his expertise to the instructors’ roster.

cartooning. It’s charmless. Mutts is the only one I can think of that has any visual charm to it. I also loved Dick Tracy, though it took me a long time to warm up to the drawing style, since it was so creepy looking. I even liked Little Orphan Annie, and Blondie, and Maggie and Jiggs. All of those old strips, by the original artists, they all were still running in the early ’70s. I also was I was familiar with Popeye and Snuffy Smith, though mainly through the animated cartoon versions of them, some of which were pretty bastardized versions of the original strips. But, when I saw the original Popeye strips by E.C. Segar, I went nuts over it. Another strip I went nuts over, which I wasn’t exposed to until I was in art school, was Little Nemo by Winsor McKay, as well as Polly and Her Pals, mainly for the art. I didn’t think it was a particularly funny strip, but I just loved the way he drew. CBC: How about Krazy Kat? Peter: All I knew of Krazy Kat as a kid was this really bad animated show made of the strip. I didn’t see the strip itself until the Smithsonian [Collection of Newspaper Comics] book. You know the cartoonist who does that comic strip Mutts, Patrick McDonnell? He was a neighbor of mine when I was living in Hoboken, in the early ’80s, and he and his wife [Karen O’Connell, along with Georgia Riley de Havenon] wrote an excellent book about Krazy Kat [Krazy Kat: The Art of George Herriman, 1986, Abrams]. It had a lot of the artwork, but it was also a biography. I was living next door to Patrick when he was working on that book and he collected a lot of Krazy Kat strips, so he showed me tons of the strips. I liked it, but when I hear other people discussing

it in print, I think it’s a bit overrated. I’m not that floored by it. Lots of times I’m a little confused and put off by it. It’s beautifully drawn and designed strip, and it had it’s own very distinct and idiosyncratic worldview, but It doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies the way it seems to with other people. CBC: What other aspects of pop culture were you into as a kid? Peter: I was crazy about MAD, and I used to fantasize about working for MAD. But the same thing happened to me with that mag as that happened with my interest in the daily strips. I guess you could say I outgrew it, but it seemed like it wasn’t as good as it had been. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was losing interest in MAD at the time, but then The National Lampoon did it for me with their MAD spoof. In that satire, they nailed how formulaic that magazine had become. And, of course, by the time I was in high school, I loved The Lampoon. I was never a big comic book fan in general, though. I loved the format of comic books, and still do. I liked the look and feel of them, but I was never too crazy about what was in them. It was something that used to frustrate me, that the stuff you found inside a comic book wasn’t better. Super-hero comics didn’t do it for me at all. I thought they were boring, and I could never get past the absurdity of these men in tights once I reached the age of eight or so. Well, the early Marvel strips were kind of funny, and had a slightly irreverent sense of humor, but I didn’t like that “to be continued” jazz. That always seemed like a blatant scam to me. And I liked Jack Kirby’s artwork. He was the one mainstream super-hero artist whose artwork really stood out. I didn’t even care who drew the other stuff, but Kirby’s drawing style would always catch my eye. CBC: So Steve Ditko didn’t really…? Peter: No, I don’t like Ditko’s work. It’s cold, scratchy, and very impersonal. Like the facial expressions. It makes me cringe when he draws somebody who’s laughing or crying, like did this guy ever look at another human being? It’s always a composite of somebody who’s laughing or crying. It’s like he’s from another planet and somebody’s describing to him what happens to face muscles when somebody laughs. It’s not like I hate his work or I think he’s no good, and people have pointed out his compositional skills to me and such, but his artwork just has no appeal to me. CBC: There’s a sense that Ditko might better belong to artists like Basil Wolverton and some other guys… Maxon Crumb, Joe Coleman, S. Clay Wilson?… than the mainstream journeymen. The guys with intensely idiosyncratic styles whose work come from the fringe of insanity, that the way that they draw is not really of this Earth, that it’s so different, so uninfluenced from other sources. (That there’s an amateur edge to it, maybe?) Do you think that that could be so? Peter: I don’t agree. I wouldn’t say that about Ditko. To me there’s a sameness about all super-hero artists, including Ditko, that puts them a notch below almost all of the better underground and alternative artists. The only reason I can comment as much as I have about Ditko’s work is because I more or less have been instructed to. Otherwise I think is work is way too static looking to even discuss. Wolverton is the opposte to me: distinct and intense and chock full of

Bagge/Hellman strip © Peter Bagge.

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Stop! TM & © Stop! Comical Funnies TM Serious Old Businessmen; cover art © John Holmstrom. The Wacky World of Peter Bagge and Bagge/Hellman strip © Peter Bagge.

idiosyncratic personality. I was always crazy about Basil Wolverton, though I had a weird love/hate attraction/ repulsion to his work. As a kid, I didn’t see a whole lot of work by him. Once in a blue moon, he would still do something for MAD, and his work on those monster stickers that Topps would put out [Ugly Stickers, 1965]. Then later on he wound up doing covers for a humor/horror comic that DC put out called Plop! Even though a lot of what was in it was dreck, that was the only comic book other than MAD that I kept going back to the corner store for, to see if a new Plop! was out. And all he did was the covers! It was the same with [“Rat Fink” hot rod cartoonist] Big Daddy Roth. I loved the car models and T-shirts he made, yet also I hated it, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the stuff. But the “love” part always won out, because I’d always buy it. As far as regular comics go, I would very casually read Harvey and Archie comics. In my household, everybody read those, even my sisters. If one of us was home sick, my mom would go to the store and buy a whole bunch of that slop. She’d only buy Harveys and Archies and I usually only read them when I was sick, when I was delirious with fever. [laughter] CBC: What about Warner Bros. cartoons? Peter: Yes, and I was crazy about them. Again, it was kind of like with Peanuts. I would watch them over and over and over. Other cartoons, if I’d see them for the third or fourth time, I would say, “Okay, this is getting stupid,” like everything by Hanna-Barbera. The last thing I wanted to do was watch some Huckleberry Hound cartoon for the umpteenth time, y’know? But with the Warner Bros. cartoons, they got better every time I watched them. There was so much going on with those, and a lot of the humor was very adult, so every time I would watch it, all of a sudden I’d get another joke and grasp the references. All of a sudden I’d know who Wendell Willkie was and then laugh, whereas beforehand I would just go “What’s a Wendell Willkie?” [laughter] I especially loved the animators whose style was really exaggerated. I love all the directors. Chuck Jones. I loved the stuff he was doing in the ’50s that got very stylish. But my favorite cartoons were by Bob Clampett, because they were so insane. To this day, when I see one that he directed, I can’t believe how exaggerated and nuts it is. I also enjoyed all the Tex Avery stuff, too. Especially when he went over to MGM, where he really took off. (I hated MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, though. I still do.) The only things I watched pretty regularly that I somewhat enjoyed by Hanna-Barbera were their primetime shows, The Flintstones and The Jetsons. I liked those shows because there was a bit more going on, probably because they had a bigger budget than the daytime cartoons.

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CBC: The Ballantine paperback reprints of MAD comics by Harvey Kurtzman: Did they have any particular impact on you? Peter: I wasn’t crazy about the very early MAD paperback reprints as a kid for two reasons: One, they were satirizing things that I wasn’t familiar with — movies I had never seen and such that were before my time. And the other aspect was the artwork was too reduced. Even from the early black-&-white MADs, the magazines, the artwork was much denser, had a lot more detail. But then when they would shrink it down, especially Wally Wood’s work, you could barely make out what was going on. It was no way to fully appreciate Wally Wood. So it really wasn’t until I was in art school that I got into the early MADs. I had no idea who Harvey Kurtzman was, and he taught at the art school I went to, the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. I had a drawing teacher named Jerry Moriarity, who occasionally did comic strips for RAW magazine back in those days. He did a strip called “Jack Survives.” He told me that my drawing style reminded him of Kurtzman. And, at that time, Kitchen Sink put out a comic book collection of Kurtzman’s “Hey Look!” comic pages from the late ’40s and early ’50s, pre-MAD. So I went and bought that and I pored over it. After that I became a huge Kurtzman fan. And later, when they put out all those hardcover collections of MAD, I bought those, the color ones, and went nuts over them. I already knew who Jack Davis was, but then I became a huge Will Elder and Wally Wood fan. I’d seen samples of Will Elder’s work when I was younger and it really put me off. It gave me the creeps. It still does, though in a good way! He doesn’t have a warm, charming style, but at the same time there’s so much thought and detail taking up every inch of every panel. Just from a technical aspect, his artwork is

Top: Upon leaving SVA, Peter Bagge would have an impact on the New York cartooning world, particularly to the “punk” scene of the era. He was managing editor of Comical Funnies, Stop! contributor, and he joined with Ken Weiner (now Avidor) to co-produce a flip-comic, Wacky World, in 1982, each half the work of the respective cartoonist. Brother Doug would collaborate on Peter’s section. Above: P.B.’s senior portrait from his 1975 Walter Panas High School yearbook, complete with cartoon and inscription.

Above: The Comical Funnies editorial crew gave us this behind-the-scenes tour of the CF empire. Our own J.D. King, the tabloid’s associate editor, joined with Holmstrom and Bagge to produce a full-pager that graced the opening strip in CF #3. Below: P.B.’s decidedly non-PC cover for CF #2.

be a cartoonist. There’s no money in it and no respect.” Someone like Schulz was a rare exception, I was told, and thus nothing to go by. When I started going to the School of Visual Arts (which started out as a cartooning school, ironically), all these teachers had a fine art background and were indoctrinated with the belief not that cartooning a low form of art, but that it wasn’t even a form of art at all. You might as well be making widgets in a factory somewhere. That’s what they thought of comic art; it was an abomination. And even though this was the same school that [cartoonist] Burne Hogarth started, and where Will Eisner and Kurtzman were teaching, they offered few cartooning classes and offered no major in cartooning, which meant that a lot of students who were on a cartooning track would drop out early. So, for that reason, even SVA’s guidance counselors did all they could to dissuade me from being a cartoonist. Anyhow, while I was in art school, I’m all of a sudden in New York City, and there were plenty of places where I could see and buy underground comix, and that lit a real fire in me, especially upon seeing the work of Robert Crumb. I had other favorite underground cartoonists too, like Gilbert Shelton, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, and Aline Crumb, and another big favorite of mine was Bob Armstrong, who drew “Mickey Rat.” But, as with Charles Schulz, there was Crumb, and then there was everybody else. He became my new Charles M. Schulz, and I wanted to be just like him. And, as I was saying before, I always loved the format of a comic book — I just didn’t like what was in them. But now, instead of a Richie Rich comic full of Twinkies ads, here was all this crazy, insane, hilarious, well-drawn stuff. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to have my own comic book and fill it up with my own craziness. It took me years before I got my own title, that was my goal. CBC: Back in grade school, were you known as a cartoonist? As an artist? Peter: Yes, though I didn’t draw a lot. I should have drawn a lot more often than I did, especially after my brother, who used to inspire me to draw, went away to college. Also, while Doug was in college, he started smoking tons of pot and doing a lot of acid, and that had a bad effect on his comics, I felt, because they started getting… well, he started doing the surreal, psychedelic stuff that people draw and write when they’re on acid. You know: crap. He thought it was brilliant, but it wasn’t. It’s funny how Crumb says that what got him on the right artistic path was taking acid, because it freed his mind. With my brother, I think it got him very much on the wrong path. All of a sudden it was square to tell a coherent story or end a strip with an actual punchline, so it’d be fake punchlines. Just meaningless profundities, if that makes any sense. During my last couple years of high school, when I would draw comics at all, would be to just draw me and my friends. I’d recreate what we did the night before, when we all went out and got drunk and fell down or made fun of someone. It was kind of like Buddy Bradley, except I was drawing my actual friends, as well as drawing it for them. They, of course, loved it. It was an easy crowd.

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mind-boggling. CBC: Did the counter-culture and underground comix affect you? Peter: When I was in high school, I saw Robert Crumb’s artwork mainly on “Keep on Truckin’” T-shirts and the record cover he did for Janis Joplin [Big Brother and the Holding Company], and I loved it. I wasn’t quite sure who this guy was at the time, though. There was no place in my town that I knew of where I could buy an actual underground comic book. I also confused him with Gilbert Shelton. I didn’t really know them by name, so when I’d see their artwork I’d think, “Maybe this was all done by the same crazy hippie.” I think the very first underground comix I ever saw was — there were some hippies that lived near us who had a copy of Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman (fascinating reading for a 12-year-old). In it, there was a reprint of a two-page strip by Gilbert Shelton called “Set My Chickens Free,” which is a masterpiece. My brother and I both flipped over it! “Who did this? Where can we find more?!” I thought it was the greatest piece of artwork ever created! Better than the Mona Lisa! But I had no idea where to find more of the same. I couldn’t understand why the world wasn’t swimming in artwork like this. I still don’t! CBC: So The National Lampoon was influential? Peter: Well, I loved the comics section in The Lampoon. I loved that whole magazine when I was a teen, but for some reason I never fancied working for them. Their comics’ aesthetic seemed narrow and specific, like the comics in The New Yorker are, and it struck me as being both exhausting and futile for me to try to fit into either. I also had no one to turn to for advice when it came to being a cartoonist. When I’d say, “I want to be a cartoonist,” I might as well have said, “I want to be a prostitute,” since cartooning still had a very bad reputation in those days. Teachers and relatives could see that I could draw and always say, “Go into advertising. Become an illustrator. Do anything, but don’t

CBC: And this was sequential material? Peter: Yeah, just meandering, unplanned comic strips. I’d draw it in a sketchbook or notebook. I still have some of them somewhere. I’m embarrassed to show them to you because the art’s so horrible, though you can still tell that I was the one who drew them. I would just keep drawing until I reached the end of the story, so the last page might have one panel on it. I didn’t even sweat over making it all fit, because, again, I’m just doing it to amuse my buddies, who would watch me while I drew it and shout out suggestions: “More zits! More puke!” CBC: Were you pretty sociable in high school? Peter: Yes. I wasn’t one of the golden children, of course. I wasn’t an athlete. I had no special talent. I was a horrible student, never studied, never did my homework, cut classes. I think my high school let me graduate simply didn’t want to see my stupid face again. Both my brothers were the same way. All three of us barely graduated high school, whereas my sisters were both straight-A students for some strange reason. We were all like Bart Simpson and they were both like Lisa. CBC: Did you just not give a sh*t?

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Peter: Obviously! Plus I resented making any extra effort, since whenever I did, no one seemed to notice. I once had an English teacher that I liked a lot named T.C. Boyle, who went on to become a successful fiction writer (he wrote the book The Road to Wellville, which was turned into a movie). I found his class somewhat inspiring, which was extremely rare for me. We read Flannery O’Conner and Catcher in the Rye, stuff like that. But, one day, I handed in an assignment that I really slaved over, that I was really proud of. I thought for sure he’d love it, but he give me a C-minus for it, and when he handed it back to me he asked me if it was supposed to be funny. Of course, it was supposed to be funny — I thought it was hilarious! — so when he asked me that, he might as well have just kicked me in the teeth. After that, I just stopped trying even in his class and just coasted along. Whether I tried or not, I still got C’s, so why bother trying? My parents would whine about my report cards, of course, but they never did anything about it. When I would come home from school, I played records and watched Looney Tunes, and no one said anything. CBC: Was music an influence on you? Peter: It’s hard to gauge how much it influenced my art.

Above: Two of the so-called “Spiegel Boys,” cartoonists Mark Newgarden (also caricatured, along with Drew Friedman, in the Bagge/Hellman strip seen below) and Paul Karasik co-edited the RAW-inspired Bad News, a short-lived but innovative oversize magazine of avant garde comics. The pair, who also taught at the School of Visual Arts, share a passion for the work of comic strip legend Ernie Bushmiller, as evidenced by their famous essay, “How To Read Nancy,” which appeared in 1988. Most renowned as a creator of the Garbage Pail Kids, Newgarden is, well, an amazingly creative, witty feller. Karasik is also an author, historian, and contributor to The New Yorker.

Above: The editor’s spot of Robert Crumb’s seminal comics anthology Weirdo magazine was handed over to Bagge with #10, who would help the “lowbrow” periodical until #17. Below: Bagge caricatures his hero R. Crumb for Seattle’s The Rocket, March 1991.

going to live very long. It put this huge dark cloud over his head, and made him wonder why he should strive for anything. He never verbalized any of this, but it was obvious that it contributed greatly to his “why bother” attitude. My brother also never knew what he wanted to do with his life. It took him years to graduate from college. Doug was also always trying please my dad, albeit in the most superficial ways. Plus my dad didn’t even know how to please himself, so it was like the blind leading the blind. He would always give my brother just the lamest advice. “Well, you like art. Take art history classes, go work in a museum.” Completely meaningless advice, all about the path of least resistance. “Just get a steady job with benefits so I don’t have to worry about you coming back home and living off of me.” So he did get a stupid art history degree, got a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a guard, and he hated it. He worked most of his adult life in art foundries, which he learned how to do by working at one before he even went to college! He also got a Class 4 driver’s license, so he could drive a truck, and then he never applied for a truck driving job. He kept doing things like that. Once I started self-publishing comics with my friends, we got him to do some stuff for us, but I really had to lean on him. His contributions were the best stuff in Comical Funnies. He got a lot of good feedback, but not enough to inspire him to persue a cartooning career like I was by then. He never said why, either. I can only speculate. Meanwhile, Doug starts going through a long series of soul-crushing, meaningless jobs, each one worse than the one before it, while I’m starting to get work published. Soon I’m making a living as a cartoonist, I’m married with a kid and a house, while his own stormy marriage falls apart. Not surprisingly, Doug became deeply resentful of me, and our relationship became extremely awkward. He would always pretend like there wasn’t a problem, but there was. I disliked being around him. He also started drinking heavily — which is suicidal for a diabetic — and even took up smoking, and his health deteriorated rapidly. He died at the age of 40 of what seemed to me to be a long, slow suicide. His situation was almost identical to Charles Crumb’s was portrayed in that Crumb movie: Doug was living in the attic of my mother’s house the last few years of his life. For a while he had a dumb job as the clean-up guy at a local supermarket in the podunk town my ma lived in, but after a while, he couldn’t even hold on to that job, due to his poor health and heavy drinking. It turns out I was the only person he’d ever allowed to see his attic living quarters. Our own ma was “banned” from going upstairs. He even had this long-time platonic girlfriend, but she’d never been in his room either. And with good reason: his room was disgusting. He had five cats that he wouldn’t let out of the house out of fear that they’d get run over, so there were cats and cat sh*t everywhere. All of his clothes were moth-eaten. He didn’t own a single article of clothing that didn’t have holes in it. And all over the floor were empty vodka bottles and crumpled empty packs of Marlboro cigarettes. I just assumed everyone knew he was drinking himself to death, but my ma claims she didn’t have a clue. CBC: Pardon my two cents, but there’s a passivity both

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When you’re a visual artist, how can you gauge how much music fuels it? But, yeah, I certainly was rock ’n’ roll crazy. I was a Beatles fanatic from the moment I first heard them, when I was only in first grade. Just like with Crumb and Charles M. Schulz, when it came to music, there were the Beatles and then there was everybody else. Gilbert Hernandez, who’s the same age as I am, once told me that his childhood “Holy Trinity” were the Beatles, Willie Mays, and Charles M. Schulz, and I couldn’t have related more to that statement. CBC: You did this great strip on the Beach Boys. Were they an influence on you? Peter: Yes. Well, when I was a little, all that “fun, fun, fun” stuff reminded me of jocks, and just because of that association I didn’t like them. The striped shirts and all that. But then, around 1970, not only did I hear some brand new music they made that really knocked me out, but I suddenly realized that their old stuff was fantastic as well. Thus I became a fanatical Beach Boy fan and bought everything they ever put out up to that point. CBC: Do you see a parallel regarding your brother, that he was squandering the natural talent he had with his drug use? Peter: It wasn’t the drugs themselves, of course. It never is. My brother’s biggest problem, by far, was that he was very insecure. He was very high-strung, and painfully self-conscious in public (though, in private, he could be extremely self-righteous and he had an explosive temper). He also had few close friends, even though everyone who met him liked him. He had this wacky, eccentric persona. What also made life even more difficult for him was, when he was 12, he came down with type 1 diabetes, the kind where you have to inject yourself with insulin. It also means you’re very unlikely to live to a ripe old age. He did get married at one point, but that was shortlived, and I think he was afraid to have kids just because he knew he wasn’t

your parents and your brother seemed to suffer. What made you different? Peter: Well, it wasn’t like I was an arrogant or cocky kid. I was a short, skinny, zit-faced runt. The few times I got into a fight, I got my ass kicked [laughs], usually by my brother. But I also had a really easy time getting along with people and making friends. I was much more comfortable with myself than Doug was. Throughout his high school years, he never hung out with friends after school, ever. He didn’t go anywhere, never went on a date. The first time he ever did anything social was after he had already graduated and I would invite him to hang out with my friends. They all liked him. Everybody liked him. He just didn’t like himself, I guess. CBC: But you did? Peter: Yeah, for the most part. I was a pretty shy kid myself, but I always felt okay about myself, and about life. I didn’t dread the future. It’s odd that we both grew up in the same house at the same time, but had such different outlooks on life. CBC: What about your relationship with your other siblings? Peter: I get along with them all fine. My older sister, Barbara, always was very academically inclined. She has more degrees than I could name. She and her husband taught in Beijing for six years at an English language school, followed by eight years in Tokyo. Now they’re doing the same thing in Lima, Peru. I think she’ll be the principal at this one. CBC: Wow! So Barbara’s got an interesting life, huh? Peter: Yeah! And she’s been everywhere. Every year she’s off to some exotic locale, either as a vacation or to attend or teach a seminar. She used to teach summer courses at Columbia University, and starred in instructional videos about alternative teaching programs. She’s the exact opposite of me, in that I can’t stand being in a classroom, whereas she thrives in that environment. CBC: You say you couldn’t stand being in a classroom. Do you think in retrospect you might have been what they would have diagnosed now as ADHD? Peter: Oh, yeah. I exhibited most of those now-pathologized little boy behaviors. To make matters worse, I started kindergarten when I was four-and-a-half, and I was so not ready. I was restless, inattentive, and unorganized. I also was — and still am — dyslexic, and I’m still a terrible daydreamer. I space out all the time. It takes me forever to read a book, since a certain passage will fuel all sorts of other thoughts in my head and off my mind goes. CBC: Do you meet your deadlines? Peter: Yes, I do meet them. I mean that, in the course of any given day, my mind is always drifting. It sometimes I drive my family crazy, though they’re used to it. CBC: Certainly compared to a lot of other cartoonists, I’d say that you’re pretty on the ball. You seem very practical, and there are not many artists who can boast of practicality out there. Peter: That’s shocking to hear because I don’t perceive myself that way at all. I’m always castigating myself for wasting way too much time and for spacing out. And while I don’t blow deadlines, I sometimes completely forget about a certain job, and then hustle like mad to get it done in time, castigating myself the whole time. I wish I could do a page a day, let alone two or three. I still could never do that, for any kind of project. I have to pencil things over and over and over again. It takes me two, three, four days to do a comic page. Even when I was doing that weekly Bat Boy strip, it took me all weekend to complete one. It took me two solid days just to make it look decent. A problem I have is I can’t draw for more than an hour or two at a time. I have to get up and do something else and then go back, otherwise everything starts to become a blur. My mind shuts down. I need a brain break, so I’m always walking away from the drawing table. But then there’s guys like Patrick McDonnell, who has no trouble doing a daily strip by himself, because he’s the type who, like my brother, Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

even can just sit down and go “whoop, whoop whoop!” with his crow quill pen, and he either doesn’t pencil at all or just very lightly, and produces this beautiful work. CBC: Does writing take you a long time? Peter: Not as much, especially ever since I’ve had a word processor. I used to write it all out in longhand, but now I use a scriptwriting program, the same software used to write a movie or TV script, with “character, dialogue, scene,” all of that. I’ll write an outline first, and then break that down into separate pages, and then write the finished script while referring to that. It’s still time-consuming, but compared to drawing, writing comes easy for me. Writing never even feels like “work.” I still have crisis moments where the story isn’t

Above: Though underwhelmed by his art on “The Reject,” Bagge concedes the Weirdo #11 story is considered by many to be his best work. In fact, on its merits alone, this eight-pager prompted Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth to offer the cartoonist his own comic book, resulting in the long-running Neat Stuff. Below: Another superb Weirdo tale was “In My Room” [#13, 1985] a title which gives a nod to P.B. fave, The Beach Boys.

Above: Younger sibling Peter was in awe of brother Doug’s cartooning and, despite some work for Comical Funnies and Wacky World, the elder would abandon all effort. Doug’s “Melvin Gigg” appears posthumously in Hate #26. Below: Two of Peter’s early published strips appeared in High Times (“Junior,” 1981) and Swank (“Studs Kirby,” 1982).

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coming together, or a certain scene isn’t working and I have to walk away from the computer for a bit to clear my mind, but it’s still a cakewalk compared to drawing. I feel like I’m in a wrestling match when I’m drawing — and that I’m always losing! There’s simply a lot of disconnect between what’s in my head and what my hand is putting down on paper, and I have to fight like mad just to come up with a reasonable compromise. It’s exhausting! He might disagree but, to me, it seems like there’s very little difference between what Crumb’s picturing in his brain and then what goes through his arm and fingers and

onto the paper. Whereas, compared to me, there’s a lot of static. The only way I get close to what I have in my mind is I have to keep penciling it over and over. But I never feel that way when I write. CBC: I would contend that your writing is equal to your art. You’re a really fine writer. There are very few writers in comics who can shock and profoundly affect me, and you’re certainly one of them. The deaths of Stinky and Buddy’s father are two moments that made me jump out of my chair, something I’ve only very rarely have happen when it comes to comics. That said, have you written material that other people have drawn? Peter: Yes, and I love to collaborate in that fashion! There was that kiddie comic called Yeah! which Gilbert [Hernandez] drew, and a few other things. In the late ’80s, I wrote a story called “Life in These United States,” something I could have drawn myself, but wanted somebody with a more dramatic drawing style to do it. So Dan Clowes drew the story for me, and I was really happy with the way that came out. Dan wound up drawing it in kind of an exaggerated, stylized style. He was an odd choice because, especially back then, his art was stylized, but he drew it more comically than I had in mind. But it still came out great. How could it not, though? He’s such a fantastic cartoonist — one of the best ever, in my opinion. CBC: Now, have you ever thought about writing steadily, even if it’s just work-for-hire? I mean, if it comes easy for you and you’re good at it… (I sound like your dad, huh?) Peter: Sure, if the pay’s as good! And I’ve had several very good-paying development deals with Hollywood where they paid me good money to just write scripts, plus there were comic books like Yeah! CBC: You know, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about your background, not so much about your work. Have you ever thought about doing autobiographical… Is Buddy Bradley autobiographical? Peter: He is semi-autobiographical. He’s definitely a stand-in for all my thoughts and impulses. But of course my life is not literally the same as his. I became a cartoonist and he didn’t. He became a retailer. [laughs] I’ve never done that. Yet we were both self-employed,

so there are some parallels. Buddy was always ten years younger than me, and even though on the surface a lot of things are different his life very much did parallel mine. CBC: Does your brother Doug play a role in Buddy’s personality? Peter: Mmmm, not so much, really… One thing that was horrifying, however, was, in the later full-color issues of Hate, I had Pops Bradley suddenly die. Right after that, my dad suddenly died. So it was life imitating art. Then I had Stinky, whose life was unraveling and he reaches a point where he commits an “accidental” suicide — as did my brother, right afterwards! It really made me think twice about killing anyone else off! By the way, Stinky’s death didn’t come across as clearly as I had thought it would. I thought I foreshadowed his death better than I did, so I didn’t expect it to be a complete shock to readers. While his death wasn’t a deliberate suicide, he was so indifferent about life, he was willing to play Russian roulette. If you want to live a long, healthy life, you don’t mess around like that. CBC: Is Christine more like Babs Bradley than Barbara? Peter: No. Babs was vaguely based on my sister Barbara, when Barb was an adolescent (hence the name “Babs”). They shared a similar temperament, and Barbara was a classic example of a girl going through her “awkward years” when she was 13 or so. She was dramatic and rebellious, always fighting with our mom over every little goddamned thing. “You’re not wearing that halter top to school!” “Oh yeah? Try and stop me!” Real typical mother/ daughter crap. The big difference, though, is that Babs Bradley is a bit of a dumbass, while my sister is very smart, obviously. [laughter] My other sister, Christine, is married to a contractor, and they live in this 250-year-old farmhouse that they’ve fixed up in the Catskills. She’s got three kids, and is a stay-at-home mom, for the most part, although she’s an artist, too. For a while she was doing architectural renderings, where an architect would design a building, and then she would do a line drawing and/or watercolor picture of what the building would look like once it was built. She would do the same for real estate agents, drawing houses for sale for their listings. CBC: What do your siblings think of your accomplishments? Peter: None of them really comment on it much, unless I ask them to. “Did you read this? Did you like it?” “Oh, yeah, that one was pretty good.” That’s it! [laughter] CBC: Do you think they’re lying? Peter: No, they mean it, but you’d think they’d have a lot more to say about the Bradleys, since so much of it was inspired by our family. I would even point out a story to, say, my brother, and go, “That character did the same thing you did way back when, remember?” And Tony would go: “Yeah, I noticed.” I’m like, “Are you flattered? Insulted? Do you even care?” He’d be the latter. “Why should I care?” [laughter] They’re shockingly indifferent about my work. CBC: Did you ever think about doing a flat-out autobiographical comic book? Peter: No. There’s no reason for it. Plus that’s a real sticky wicket! I do make cameo appearances, and occasionally do short pieces that are purely auto-bio, but to do something more involved, well, you’re never just writing about yourself. You’re also dragging your family and friends into it, and they might not remember things the same as you, or want that aspect of their lives talked about at all. It’s so much simpler to fictionalize things. It’s Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

more thoughtful, too, in that unless you get everyone to sign off on how they’re portrayed you’re really just using them in a way. My wife is also a particularly private person. She never objects when she makes a cameo appearance in one of my comics, but she’s never too excited about it either. It makes her a little uneasy. I have no urge or need to confess like Crumb or Joe Matt does. Crumb is extremely confessional, yet with both Matt and Crumb and a lot of other auto-bio comics, there’s a strong exhibitionistic streak behind it as well. They’re simultaneously confessing their sins and bragging about it. “Look at what I just did! I am one sick puppy! What’s to be done with me? Wheeee!” Drew Friedman’s dad, Bruce J. Friedman, did something similar in his Harry Townes novels (which Woody Allen shamelessly ripped of in his Deconstructing Harry movie, in my opinion), where he

Above: Finally the cartooning excellence of Peter Bagge would be widely recognized through his anthology series Neat Stuff, which lasted for 15 issues between 1985–89. Though the mag would feature a good number of developed characters, it would be Buddy Bradley who would become the ostensible star of the black-&-white comic book. Below: Video Games magazine featured Bagge work, including a one-pager starring The Video Kid and gag panels.

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My World and Welcome to It TM & © the respective copyright holder. Photo, Girly Girl TM & © Peter Bagge. TV Guide TM & © CBS Interactive, Inc.

Above: The short-lived TV show My World and Welcome to It [1969–70] starring William Windom is a touchstone for Peter and Joanne Bagge (seen inset in 1985). Below: Yes, it’s Girly Girl in a Bagge illo from Big O magazine #82 [Oct. 1992].

would describe the most sordid, depraved acts in the first person with utter indifference. Don’t get me wrong, it all makes for great reading! But I have no inclination to do the same thing. Obviously, my real life is fodder for my work. Using aspects of my real life, the trials and tribulations in my daily existence, always makes better reading if I ponder it for a time. I think it’s a bad idea to write about what’s going on in your life at the moment. You need to digest it all, look at it more objectively, which is what I do with Buddy Bradley. CBC: Did you discuss going to art school with your family? Peter: I was such a bad student that, for me and my parents, what else was I going to do? I could have gone to a community college, but really didn’t have any interest or focus on anything else. I wasn’t even that focused on my art, to be honest It was just a way to get out of my hometown and out of my parents’ house. CBC: So you were looking to do what with an art career? Were you just looking to buy some time? Peter: I had no idea. I went to the School of Visual Arts. As a freshman they made you do everything: photography, sculpture, painting class, drawing class, etc. CBC: What made you think of SVA? Peter: They accepted me. They accepted everybody! [laughs] At first I thought “Oh, man, I can’t believe I was accepted! Everybody’s going to be able to draw circles around me.” But it was quite the opposite. Some of my classmates couldn’t draw at all, not a goddamned thing. I don’t know what even possessed them to go to

art school, since they exhibited no artistic ability at all. But their money was good, and that’s all that mattered to SVA. CBC: Did your guidance counselor tell you about SVA? Peter: No. My high school guidance counselor was useless. While working at an art foundry, I worked alongside this older man, He told me about SVA. I told him about my problems with Parsons, who accepted me but had me on instant “probation” due to my grades. He went to Cooper Union, where, if you do get in, it’s tuition-free. I was all for that! But I applied and didn’t get accepted. So I was whining to him about it and he said, “Well, why don’t you try SVA? They accept everybody.” Problem solved! [laughter] CBC: Were you looking for a cartoonist curriculum? Peter: No, I wasn’t. I would have loved to have studied and pursued cartooning, but not only did I get no encouragement in that regard, I just got open and consistent discouragement. Everybody was telling me not to be a cartoonist. They were adamant about it. So my first semester at the SVA, I was open to every possibility. My major was “media,” which is just commercial art. But while I was at SVA, I discovered underground comix, and that sealed the deal for me. I was like, “This is what I want to do.” My New Year’s resolution of 1978 was: “I’m going to be an underground cartoonist.” CBC: When there was absolutely no market for it! Peter: “I’m gonna be a rich underground cartoonist!” [laughter] I had no idea about the business itself. It took me a while to realize that most of these underground comix I was buying, the copyright date was before 1973. Once a year there might be one new title by Crumb or Bill Griffith or Gilbert Shelton, but that was about it. As it turns out, those were the only artists whose work sold at all, and at a tenth of what they were selling in their heyday. Then, after three semesters at SVA, I quit, mainly due to lack of funds, though with the vague intention of going back, but never did. CBC: Was SVA expensive? Peter: Not that expensive, but when you’re broke, what difference did it make? I didn’t get one red cent from my parents, yet I also didn’t qualify for any student loans. I got zero financial assistance, so I had to work while I was in school. Even when I was still living with my parents, for some crazy reason they were always so strapped for cash that they kept borrowing money from me — the money I was trying to save to go to college. [laughs] It took me a year-and-a-half to save up for a year-and-a-half of college. Plus I was paying rent. I definitely didn’t want to live in Peekskill anymore. That was a long commute. So I met my future wife, Joanne, while I was in art school, and I moved in with her. She had an apartment in the city. CBC: What’s Joanne’s maiden name? Peter: Connelly. She was a classmate, a fine art major at SVA, yet she was one of those rare creatures who thought that cartoonists were sexy. [laughter] CBC: Really? Wow! [laughs] Peter: Joanne was also a big Peanuts fan growing up. She loved Charles M. Schulz. There was a TV show in the late 1960s, early ’70s, that only lasted one season, called My World and Welcome to It, starring William Windom, that she just loved (as did I). Windom played a cartoonist who worked at home, where he lived with his wife and daughter. He had an attic studio, and his comics were based on [New Yorker cartoonist/humorist] James Thurber. So, Joanne, as a 10-year-old watching this, thought, “That looks like the perfect life. I would love to be the wife of a work-at-home cartoonist, and just having one kid.” Like me, she grew up in a family of five kids, so we both knew we would never have five kids. [laughter] She had also read that Schulz lived in northern California, so the whole idea of the Northern West Coast always appealed to her. When Dan Clowes heard this story he just started laughing, looked at me and he says, “For your entire adult life, you’ve just been a pawn in this woman’s fantasy!” [laughter] CBC: And being a passive-aggressive Bagge, you just sit

back and let it happen to you! Peter: So much for taking the bull by the horns. [laughs] No, fortunately for all concerned, that entire fantasy greatly appealed to me as well. I always had this thing about the Northwest and Seattle. Growing up in filthy, crowded New York, Seattle always looked and sounded like a great place. So the first time we visited out here, we both fell in love with it and made plans to move right away. CBC: Did you have renowned classmates that you recall at the time? Peter: In one drawing class there was a cartoonist named P.C. Vey, who wound up doing stuff for The New Yorker. I thought his drawing style looked great, and so I tried to befriend him, but he wanted nothing to do with me. [laughs] The best education I ever got in my life was after I dropped out of school and slowly started to meet other cartoonists. CBC: When did Eisner, Spiegelman, and Kurtzman come on board at SVA? Was it during your time there? Peter: Eisner and Kurtzman were already there by the time I arrived at SVA. After I dropped out, I sat in on their classes once or twice, just out of curiosity. To be honest, the only class that really seemed to be worth a damn was Spiegelman’s, because his was more of a comics history class. It was very comprehensive, and he’s very knowledgeable, he took his job very seriously. CBC: Did you establish a relationship with Spiegelman at all? Peter: Yes. When he started RAW, and I showed him my work — which wasn’t appropriate for RAW at all, especially back then. My work was still really crude, and I was having a hard time getting published by anybody, let alone trying to get published in RAW. And he said as much, but we talked for a long time. I would talk to him off and on until I moved away from New York. He’s mellowed out since then, but he was quite temperamental at the time. He blew his stack at me several times in those days. He was very opinionated, and didn’t always tolerate much dissent from his “Comics as Art” vision. And I could be quite the dissenter, what with my willfully lowbrow sensibilities, which he thought was both pointless and obnoxious. I once showed him some hot rod-inspired drawing that I was particularly proud of at the time, and he just shook his head and said “So, is that your grand goal in life? To be the next [hot rod cartoonist] Pete Millar?” I knew that was intended to be an insult, but at the same time I thought “What’s wrong with being the next Pete Millar?” [laughs] But he could also be extremely helpful. I got a lot of useful information from him. CBC: Did Spiegelman like your work, even though it wasn’t RAW material? Peter: Nah. Well, he must have seen something there or he wouldn’t have talked to me at all. But that whole snot-nosed, Big Daddy Roth aspect to my work… Plus, by that time, I had become very chummy with a group of cartoonists that was centered around John Holmstrom, the Punk magazine guy. CBC: Were you familiar with Justin Green’s [1972 underground comic book] Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary? Peter: Yes. I loved it, and was inspired by its brutal honesty, and I related to the Catholic guilt and even the superstitious OCD behavior to some degree, though he was way over the top on both counts. That comic made me feel normal. Obviously this was just stuff that had to come out, and that Justin Green was this extremely neurotic fellow who was very conflicted. So the whole thing was just one long, loud cry for help. And, while I also had — and still do have — this compulsive need to express myself, there wasn’t a similar singular primal scream in me that had to come out. CBC: Are you then less the confessor and more the wry observer? Peter: Oy. Neither, specifically. It’s more like I have a certain take on things, a take on life that I want to get across. I feel compelled to make myself understood. It kills me when I feel like I’m misunderstood. It all depends on the story. There are times, and there have been times all through the years where I’ll have an idea for a story, but it’ll touch on certain things that are either painful, or are embarrassing, or that I’m afraid will come off as embarrassing. So it would have to stew in my mind for a long time. I would have to weigh the odds: if I’m going to do this, and even if it’s a fictional character, if I’m going to include certain embarrassing revelations about myself, I had to make sure that it would work. I don’t just want to be confessional just for its own sake, like, “Look at me, I’m f*cked up!” Or “Look at how sensitive I am!” CBC: You want to be in control? Peter: I had to wait until the story simply worked, to be a good story as well as an “honest” one. There was a part of me that wanted to get this stuff out and express it, and I also knew that it would make the story more powerful. But that would only work if the story itself worked. The two instances that are the most along these lines are a comic I did for Weirdo called “The Reject,” and later on, in Neat Stuff, the first full-length story I did was a story about Buddy Bradley, called “Hippy House.” It was very much like working up your nerve to jump into a pool of water, doing those stories. That’s how Crumb described it to me once, in fact. Once you’re in, the water’s fine, but you’re still afraid of that initial shock. CBC: To discuss R. Crumb for a second, is there any way to parse his storytelling? I’ll betcha that, certainly in his acid days, he started a story without having any idea where it was going to go. Peter: Right. I’m sure he did, too. But he’s one of those rare, rare cases who could pull Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

This page: Though his work would achieve far greater success in Spain, Bagge’s Hate was translated to German, appearing in 1994–95’s Leck Mich (meaning “Lick Me”), with covers colored by Peter’s sister Christine, and seven issues of Krass [’98–99], the latter which featured Hate reprints plus new Buddy stories by German cartoonists Philip Taegert and Guido Sieber. The cover blurb for Leck Mich #1 reads in English, “The only sure remedy for pimples.” P.B.’s portrait appeared in Leck Mich. 53

Above: Daniel Clowes self-caricature from Eightball #8 [May 1992], a detail from “My Suicide.” Below: The Complete Eightball has just been released in a boxed set by Fantagraphics

Peter: Both of the Crumbs! I’ve unintentionally recreated entire passages from their Dirty Laundry stories in my own work. [laughs] I’ve done that with [the TV sitcom] All in the Family, as well. I was watching an old episode where Edith, Archie, and Meathead are all having some fight. I just cringed because I realize I used it. It’s not word-forword, but I practically ripped off the pacing of this entire argument with the Bradley family. But then the arguments the Bunkers had sounded exactly like the ones I heard in my own household. That show was frighteningly accurate. My dad’s mother even had that awful New York accent where “girl” is pronounced “goil” and “toilet” is “terlet.” All these misplaced R’s! CBC: Were you in the music scene at all when you lived in New York? Did you go to [legendary punk rock club] CBGB? Peter: No. That’s one club I never went to, believe it or not. I did go to other clubs sometimes, though. I liked most of that punk rock and new wave when I first heard it. It was a real breath of fresh air. But I preferred the more “new wave-y” clubs that the more hardcore punk clubs like CBGB. The girls were cuter, for one thing, and the crowds were much less hostile. I didn’t like the hardcore leather-jacketed punk scene. All those people had chips on their shoulders. And, for a bunch of alleged rule-breakers and rebels, they also had their own very strict dress code and rules of behavior, and they were willfully, perpetually obnoxious. I recently heard John Doe of the band X say that Johnny Rotten unintentionally “ruined” punk by creating this behavioral template that too many others slavishly emulated. I’d have to agree with that. They never gave it a rest! But I liked the whole idea of punk rock. I liked how irreverent it was; how it was totally in the face of all the self-righteous hippies. And I liked how willfully lowbrow it was. It was very cartoony. I really loved Punk magazine. Punk magazine epitomized everything I liked about punk rock. I eventually worked up the nerve to visit them and show them my stuff, because they had lots of comics in their pages. CBC: What was Punk magazine? Peter: It was the first fanzine about punk music. It practically defined it with that name. It was John Holmstrom’s magazine. He was the editor of it, and he usually drew the covers. He’s best known as the guy who drew a couple of early Ramones album covers. CBC: But Peter Bagge wasn’t in the mosh pit? [laughter] Peter: No, not at all. I’ve always been somewhat of an early bird. The headline act might not take the stage until one in the morning, and I liked to be asleep by that time. By midnight, I’d always be wishing I was home. [laughs] After a while, my wife and I moved out of the Lower East Side to the much nicer neighborhood of Chelsea. It was while I was living there when I went and met Holmstrom at Punk magazine, who responded really well to my comics. He sensed that we were kindred spirits almost immediately, and introduced me to his other cartoonist friends, and I started to hang out with all of them pretty regularly. Unfortunately, Punk magazine went out of business right around then, so I only appeared in one issue. But then we started up a new thing called Comical Funnies, a self-published rag. CBC: Was Punk a glorified fanzine? Peter: Yes, basically, but they were trying to go legit. It started out as a newsprint tabloid, but they started going to slicker paper, and it had ads. One thing that was fantastic about it, even though they did it to save on the expense of typeseting, was they hand-lettered a lot of the interviews. Holmstrom sometimes even turned some of his interviews into comic strips, which was just brilliant. It was labor-intensive, but still brilliant. CBC: John Holmstrom was a graduate of SVA, right? Peter: I don’t think he graduated, but he attended SVA for at least a couple years. He was really good friends with these other guys… Besides Holmstrom, there was his “right hand man,” a guy named Bruce Carleton — who was #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

that off, y’know? He’s the exception that proves nothing, other than “don’t try this at home.” When I was editing Weirdo, I’d get many samples of acid trippy work from people who’d say, “If Crumb could do it, why can’t I?” Or they’d send in scratchy looking drawings that they did in two seconds and declare themselves the “New Gary Panter.” However, when I’ve looked at Robert’s sketchbooks, I was surprised how carefully worked out some of the preliminary versions of his stories were. You could easily print those, they were so finished. CBC: And that was, he was doing it stream of… Peter: No, he was just basically working out the story in the sketchbook before he did the final version. It was just the late ’60s, when he was doing all the crazy stream-of-consciousness business, for the most part. CBC: Can you separate his abilities as a writer and an artist? Peter: Whoa, boy! That’s hard to do! Though I’d say he’s great at both. I think he’s underrated as a writer. I once considered re-drawing stories by other cartoonists in my own style just to see how they’d turn out, like a singer covering other people’s songs. Something like would give you an idea of how an artist’s stories would hold up once it’s separated from his or her artwork, though whether my drawing style would do them any justice would be debatable. CBC: I think “White Man Meets Bigfoot” is just one of the great statements of our time! [laughs] Peter: I have two favorites. One is “Cave Wimp,” which appeared in one of the ZAPs in the late ’80s, in which he imagined himself as a caveman, and what a failure as a caveman he would be (which also partially inspired my Apocalypse Nerd comic book to some degree). The other one is a story called “Pete the Plumber,” from Hytone Comix [1971]. It’s very lowbrow and ridiculous, and it takes the most preposterous twists and turns, but it’s also fantastic! Just the pacing of it, everything about it was just so brilliant. It’s about a plumber that winds up going down through pipes and gets stuck, and he winds up meeting a bunch of other people that got stuck, and they’re all covered with sh*t yet resigned to their fate, but Pete says, “We’re going to get out of here!” Another one of the sh*t-covered people says, “No, we’ll never get out. And you’re ruining everything by giving us false hope!” And then they finally do get out and they have this hilarious parade for themselves. [laughs] It’s a brilliant comic. CBC: Where does Crumb stand in your pantheon of cartoonists? Peter: He’s my all-time favorite artist, period, of any kind. His drawing style is instantly appealing to me, and it’s true of all of his work. Even in his very early Fritz the Cat days, when he was drawing with a Rapidograph [pen], doing all those long stories, and also doing those old greetings cards. I love that stuff. I think that his drawing style back then was beautiful. He complains that that stuff was too cute. And it was really cute, but it also was perfect in its own way. The same with his crazy hippie stuff, which was very old-time cartoony and Basil Wolverton-inspired, yet at the same time the subject matter was so intense and offensive. [laughter] His artistic sensibilities are incongruous yet perfectly balanced. He took on all this stuff that everybody had been repressing for decades, including himself. All this sexual, scatological, racial, politics stuff, and even stuff that people would be afraid to say out loud amongst the counter-culture for fear of sounding politically incorrect, it all came exploding out of him. Crumb also has a really funny sense of dialogue that I’ve unintentionally emulated. Lots of times I’ll read some old comic of mine and there’ll be some banter between two characters, and I’ll suddenly cringe where I realize it, the pace and the pattern they’re saying it, it almost is note-for-note from out of some old Crumb comic book. CBC: You swiped Crumb!

ries. I still wanted to experiment, and try my hand at different types of storymore of an illustrator and designer than a cartoonist. Bruce was also the art director of Screw magazine, and always gave me lots of work there. He telling. I started doing those crazy collaborations with this old roommate of mine, David Carrino, those “Martini Baton” strips? Holmstrom hated those eventually moved to Southeast Asia and is married with a kid in Vietnam strips, at now. Then there least at first. was Ken Weiner, They were who replaced too different Carleton as art from what director at Screw. he was used Ken eventuto from me, I ally moved to guess. But by Minneapolis and then I didn’t changed his last want to hear name to Avidor. it anymore, He still does so we sort of comics under that drifted apart. name, though his CBC: What work is generwas the one ally much more thing that you socially consciendid for Punk? tious now, espePeter: Oh, cially compared to just some the puerile, filthy “Studs Kirby” nonsense that he one-page and the rest of us strips. He and used to wallow all those othin. Ken always er guys liked was — and is — my “Studs a talented comic Kirby” strips artist, though. And the best. we later met and CBC: Who all became good was Studs friends with anKirby? other cartoonist/ Peter: He illustrator named was a reguJ.D. King. lar in Comical Everything Funnies, that I liked about and also one of the main characters in Neat Stuff. He was a right-wing Holmstrom and everything that was beneficial about my relationship with talk show host. That’s the short answer to that question. But back when him all came out the very first time I met him. He sensed that in some of I decided to be a cartoonist, I had two characters I wrote and drew all these one-page comic strips that I was doing, that I was pandering to a the time, usually in three-panel gags or one-page strips. One was “Studs small degree, that it had an overt left-wing sensibility to it, and he said to Kirby” and the other was “Junior.” Junior very much was an expression me, “You’re hoping you can get this published in The Village Voice, aren’t you?” Which was true, sadly. That or the equally lefty Soho News. He said, of my own timid, insecure, afraid-of-the-world side, something I was very much trying to exorcise myself of. To this day, when I write or draw Junior, “I’m not saying that the political points you’re making are wrong, but it’s smug and not very funny, and you can just tell that you’re trying to appease or talk about the Junior character, I’ll always tell people that I hate him, since he represents a part of myself that I don’t like: some liberal editor.” The cowardly side, the timid side that’s afraid to CBC: [Laughs] He nailed it, huh? take chances and just wants to hide. Studs Kirby Peter: Oh yeah. And then he gave me what was the exact opposite: a guy that talked and turned out to be the best advice anyone could acted before he thought. He was obnoxious and have given me at the time, which was, basically, offensive and he didn’t care. He also just naturally that nobody is ever going to change the world evolved into a right-wing talk show host. with a comic strip. He said, “Stop trying to make CBC: Is Studs diminutive? Is he a small guy? yourself look good by trying to save the world. Peter: He was a skinny, wire-y guy, though not Dare to be dumb for a change. It’s a lot more necessarily short. I dunno, I never measured him! cathartic, and a lot more fun.” Why? So, at that time, in New York City, here was CBC: I mean, because Junior is a big guy. Holmstrom on the one hand giving me that kind Peter: Yes, that’s true. I gave Junior a football of advice… and he was a very lowbrow guy, you player’s body as a visual joke, because mentally know. His whole life back then was dedicated he might as well have been two feet tall. to eating junk food, playing video games, and CBC: Do you really have a timid, afraid-of-thewatching professional wrestling. He was all about world side to you? championing the lowest forms of pop culture at Peter: Almost everybody does. When I was the time. in school, even though I had a lot of friends, I John was like a big kid. He was as stubborn was still pretty shy and quiet and didn’t speak as a kid too, unfortunately, and had a real “gang” out much, which would probably be shocking mentality, where he would really get in your face to people who know me now. Back then, I was if you did or said anything that strayed too far from pretty low-key. It was because I didn’t want to get his proscribed worldview. So hanging out with him beat up, to put it bluntly. When you’re a scrawny and working with him became a bit oppressive little runt like I was, and talked too much or too after a while. John and I wound up arguing terribly. This page: Artifacts of the 1993 Hateball tour loud, some bigger kid was sure to keep me in Even though I took his advice and became John featuring Peter Bagge and Daniel Clowes. At top is check by pushing me around or flat-out beating Holmstrom, Jr. for a bit, after a while I was getting by Bagge, centerspread of the ’zine Happyland #8. me up. So I had to learn to be invisible to avoid ambitious and I wanted to do more personal stoAbove is Pete and Dan’s Hateball flyer. Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

Above: The Hate cast. Below: Stinky (Leonard Brown to the authorities), despite being an outrageously entertaining character, would meet a surprising fate in 1997.

Babs” spread. You have this unsentimental, unromantic view of women, but it’s not mean-spirited. Where did you get that attitude? Was it living with sisters? It’s an interesting, refreshing approach… unvarnished, shall we say. Peter: You know what? Half the people I know are female! CBC: Funny, ha-ha. [laughter] But you actually talk to the opposite sex, Peter. Peter: The thing is, I always thought women and girls were as funny as men. I was dumbfounded to learn that some men felt otherwise, though that would explain why certain cartoonists or comic writers never had female characters never deliver the punchline. To them they’re just window dressing. CBC: Wouldn’t you think they’re afraid of women? Peter: Not necessarily, and they’re not necessarily sexist or misogynist, either. I don’t know how or why they feel that way. Ask them! Though I can’t help but think it’s mainly due to some complex sexual response. That they find it uncomfortable to laugh at someone they also might be sexually attracted to, or who is supposed to be sexually appealing. That you can’t be funny and sexy at the same time. Also, if humor is some man’s main calling card, how can he impress a woman who has the same calling card? But if a principal character in one of my stories is female, I never ever think, “What would a woman do or say in this situation?” Instead I think, “What would I do or say if I were in her situation?” I never think of her as some Other, who’s motivations are totally alien to me. Unless the character is having a baby or something, a female character’s experiences and motivations are 99% the same as a male’s: they both get angry, lonely, hungry, etc. CBC: Have you always been comfortable around women? Peter: Oh, I suppose. Pretty much. CBC: Don’t you think that’s a little bit unusual? Peter: Unusual? No! Well, it’s not like I never got nervous or self-conscious around them. When I was a teen I was painfully self-conscious and shy, but I was shy around everyone, not just girls. I don’t think I asked a girl out until I was 16 or so… though that’s a pretty young age for a cartoonist, ha-ha. CBC: Were you friendly with your sisters’ friends? Peter: Yes. CBC: Easily conversant? Peter: Yes, of course! We were all pals. My sisters were friends with my friends, too. Some of it led to crushes and dating, but we were all pals, first and foremost. “The gang,” as it were. What a weird question! CBC: Well, I bring this up just because many male cartoonists and comic book artists are of a type who don’t readily relate to the female gender. Robert Crumb notoriously objectifies women…. Peter: Well, in real life, Crumb converses with women very easily. I didn’t know him when he was 20 or 21, but he probably had a hard time even talking to most guys back then, too. There have been plenty of women I’ve know who’ve found Crumb’s work so sexist and offensive to a degree that they claimed to hate it, and hate him, but then when they meet him, they’re immediately disarmed. There’ve been several times where I’d think, “Oh, this is gonna be interesting when I introduce Crumb to so-and-so,” yet within five minutes they’re sitting next to him and talking and flirting and having a grand old time. In fact, it’s the women who are most offended by his work that are the most eager to get to know him. Maybe it’s partly to study him like a bug under a microscope, but they also will often be the most eager to get his approval and attention. It’s inexplicable! CBC: I think another aspect of the fundamental appeal of your work is that the female characters and the male characters are just equally absurd. Peter: Yes, well, Lisa Leavenworth certainly is an absurd character. She was my favorite character in Hate. An awful lot Hate’s readers, male and female, claimed that they #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

being bullied. But, by the time I was 20, I thought: “Here I am, an adult living in the city, and I don’t have to hide from jocks anymore, so I gotta rid myself of these timid tendencies.” I had to stop trying to be invisible, since by that point in my life, it wasn’t doing me a bit of good. CBC: Obviously an aspect of Junior is inside of you. Is there some of Studs Kirby, as well? Peter: Ha! Yes, of course, but not necessarily because I shared his worldview. It was simply that I got off on having Studs blurt out all of these impolite, socially unacceptable things. And even he wasn’t horribly or relentlessly racist or sexist; he was more… casually and indifferently racist and sexist. [laughter] He was basically saying stuff that might cross my mind, or that I’d find amusing, but would never say out loud, in part because I didn’t really believe them, but also simply from not wanting to not unduly offend anybody. Studs was also, a gross exaggeration of what rightwing talk show hosts were like back then, though soon those real life hosts became even bigger caricatures than Studs was. I remember one time turning on the TV and seeing this guy named Morton Downey, Jr., who, in every way — even visually — was more of a cartoon character than my own cartoon character! So I pretty much stopped working with Studs Kirby, because I couldn’t outdo what had become a reality. CBC: So Punk vaguely morphed into Comical Funnies. Were you part of the genesis of that? Peter: Yeah. It was Holmstrom and me, the two of us who, more or less, started Comical Funnies, and paid for its printing. The other guys chipped in some money as well. CBC: Where’d you get money? Peter: Good question. By scrounging and saving our pennies, basically. Comical Funnies was printed on the cheapest newsprint, though. It was the cheapest format imaginable. CBC: Did you have a day job? Peter: Yes. I went through dozens of day jobs. I kept quitting or getting fired just because they were all so awful and they all paid terrible. I worked in a Baskin-Robbins [ice cream franchise] for a half-an-hour; the stockroom of a Lamonts department store for about three days… Eventually I landed a tolerable job at a small branch of Barnes & Noble [bookstore] in Penn Station and, because a lot of their business was with commuters, they opened up at 7:00 a.m. I lived maybe ten blocks away, so I would walk there, and work there until 1:00 p.m., after which I’d go home and spend the rest of the day drawing. Dave Carrino worked there, too. He used to sing that country song “Take This Job and Shove it” at the top of his lungs while working the register, which never failed to crack me up! But it was a perfectly okay job, which is why I stayed there for three years. CBC: I was just reading “Minimum Wage Love,” along with the Neat Stuff “Playmate of the Month:

couldn’t stand her — mainly because she’d remind them of someone who’s caused them a lot of trouble and misery in their lives. She reminded a lot of the guys of their crazy ex’s. CBC: So you don’t see any fundamental difference between the genders in terms of behavior? Peter: Well, sure, but not a lot. But ever since the invention of the [birth control] pill, even the biological differences aren’t quite as great as they used to be. You know, it’s much easier for a woman to be “one of the guys” now. The Pill and other forms of birth control is what really liberated women, in that it truly freed them to live their lives as they pleased, and where no longer bogged down by unintended pregnancies. In countries where birth control is still unacceptable, such as in the beautiful Muslim world, [laughs] men and women are completely segregated. And, as a result, the sexes seem totally different. In this country, too, prior to the ’60s, day-to-day life was far more segregated along gender lines. CBC: You say you just simply put your feet in the shoes of a female character, and that’s how you do it. But a good number of cartoonists often have just extremely unrealistic female characters. Peter: Yeah, they’re called super-hero artists. [laughter] Well, I think that, for the most part, is one of the big differences between alternative cartoonists and super-hero comic book artists. When I was going to SVA, most of the cartoonists I knew wanted to be super-hero artists, and a lot of them had a real hard time incorporating female characters in their work. In life drawing classes, their efforts were laughable, since they’d make the model look so stiff and wooden. But then there were the more macho Frazetta-wannabe types, who were the exact opposite, in that they made all their women look über-sexy and idealized. CBC: How long did Comical Funnies last? Peter: We just put out three issues. Though after J.D. King saw the first issue, became fully involved, as much as Holstrom and me. CBC: Who was J.D. King? Peter: He’s a cartoonist. [laughs] Well, now he’s an illustrator. I was thrilled to have him, because I absolutely adored his drawing style. I loved the way he drew. He also was very knowledgeable about pop culture and all, but there was also an awful lot of “kid” still stuck in him. He was a lot like Holmstrom in that way, so not surprisingly those two agreed on everything, and I found myself constantly getting outvoted. After three issues of Comical Funnies, Holmstrom and J.D. decided they wanted to change the name and format, and they came up with this idea for a magazine called Stop. It still was newsprint, but was a magazine-sized format. It definitely looked nicer, and had a better, snappier name, but it was more of a fanzine, and not really a comic book at all. They wanted to have articles and reviews mixed in with the comics. And, for me, the whole point of doing Comical Funnies was not only to see my own work in print, but also so I could finally do something that was more than a single page long. To get my work printed elsewhere, in Screw or High Times or wherever, I was lucky to get even a full-page strip printed, and I really wanted to try my hand at longer stories. With Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

this new proposition, Stop, that was out of the question. There was no chance of doing anything that was more than a page, and I wasn’t gonna reach into my own pocket to pay for that, so I opted out of our informal publishing partnership. They were nice enough to run a one-page strip of my own in each issue, but they really only wanted “Studs Kirby.” I begged them once to run something else by me, but after that it seemed futile to do anything but “Studs” for them. CBC: What was the format of Comical Funnies? It was maga-

zine-sized? Peter: Comical Funnies was done in a newspaper format, just like The New York Times. [laughs] It was quarter-folded. It was folded twice so when it was stocked on the newsstand, it would be magazine-sized, 8.5" by 11". But then you’d open it up, and then open it up again. CBC: How many pages? Peter: It varied. The first issue was I think 24 pages, and the last was maybe 36. CBC: And you were in every issue of Comical Funnies? Peter: Oh, yeah. I was the most prolific of the bunch, so I’d take up a third or a quarter of the whole thing. I hogged up that sucker as much as I could with my amateurish scrawlings. CBC: John Holmstrom did some strips, as well? Peter: Yes, we all did comic strips. And that was still the case with Stop, but I thought it was so odd that a bunch of cartoonists were

Above: The title’s characters spell out Hate, from #5 [Summer 1991]. Below: Detail from the cover of Hey, Buddy! [1993], the first Hate collection.

This page: Peter Bagge’s Buddy Bradley might be the most sharply defined character in comics history and perhaps the most put-upon. Essayist Bob Mackey, writing about the character in an online piece for gamespite.net puts it smartly: “It would be easy for Bagge to vilify Buddy, but instead the cartoonist’s alter ego is rather sympathetic. He’s very real, very flawed, and ultimately powerless in the face of being peed on so many times by the universe. Reading Hate is an exercise in vicariously experiencing the joy of minor achievements and the ambivalent grumbling of loserdom — and really, isn’t that what life’s all about?” 57

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This page: You can’t argue that Bagge did not achieve some recognition in the 1990s, especially for an alternative comic book artist. His Hate series was much of that Grunge era, when, for a brief, shining moment, Seattle was the epicenter of youth culture. Nirvana, Sub Pop, and, yep, even Buddy Bradley were part of the scene. Bagge, cover featured on Entertainment Weekly, in April 1991, was deemed a hot new talent. The man is nothing if not pragmatic, as evidenced by these “Prisoners of Hate Island” panels, in which he brainstorms with Fantagraphic publishers Gary Groth and Kim Thompson to create a more commercial mag than the moderate-selling Neat Stuff. From Hate #1 [Spring 1990].

paying for this magazine, and yet they were limiting themselves to just one or two pages of comics apiece, while the rest would be articles about The Honeymooners or Soupy Sales. CBC: What were the strips that you did for Comical Funnies? Peter: For the most part it was all the characters who became regulars in Neat Stuff: Junior, Studs Kirby, the Bradley Family, mainly those three. I also would do dumb two- or three-panel gags. CBC: The Bradley Family goes that far back? Peter: Yes. CBC: What was the genesis of those characters? Peter: It started out as a doodle. For a while, David Carrino shared an apartment with Joanne and I, and sometimes we would just sit around and doodle these filthy comics just to amuse one another. We’d take a piece of white paper, fold it in half, and on each of the four sides we’d do a comic strip, and then put it all together to make a 12-page booklet, and we called it The Daily Dix. It was full of the most offensive, scatological, sacrilegious stuff we could think of. One day, while the three of us were just sitting around doodling, I drew this strip called “Meet the Bradleys!” I was presenting them like they were the Brady Bunch — “Here’s the dad, here’s the mom, and look at what the kids are up to!” — but even though the tone was light and sitcom-y, what they were actually doing was getting drunk, beating each other up, taking drugs etc. It was the Brady Bunch meets the Bagges. So I combined the two families — the fictional TV one with the all-too-real one — and sticking with the “B” theme named them the Bradleys. The end result was pretty funny, I thought, so I decided to do more stories with the Bradleys. Originally the stories were very slapstick, such as the dad used to literally choke the kids, not unlike Homer and Bart Simpson. There was one story where he got so mad at Butch that he hit him with a baseball bat and sent him flying over the house. [laughs] But I quickly moved away from surreal stunts like that, and made the stories more grounded in reality. CBC: Was [Robert Crumb’s] “Joe Blow” [ZAP #4, 1969]

an influence? Not that it was sexual, but it’s “Hey, kids!” exuberance? Peter: Yeah, I obviously was ripping that off, too. Not overtly, but obviously it was an influence — the way you would portray something absolutely disgusting and the horrid yet present it in a way that was charming and cute. I love that weird sort of mishmash. I try to do that with almost everything I do: to present a story or scenario that might be somewhat deep and personal, or even tragic or appalling, but I deliberately drew it in this ridiculous, exaggerated, cartoony style. To this day people always say that they’re surprised how deep and complex my stories can get, since judging from the artwork, they think it’s just going to be silly nonsense. CBC: Isn’t that really Crumb’s appeal in a nutshell? This incredibly complicated, deeply personal work done under a veneer of Disneyesque cheerfulness? Peter: Yeah, to some degree. Especially back then, since his art isn’t quite as cartoony anymore. It’s hard to pull something off while working on that dual level, but when it works it’s the best. I love any kind any art form that can do that, have that weird dichotomy going. Crumb’s gotten away from that approach though, and he’s often advised me to do the same. He wishes that I drew in a way that more closely matched the stories. He likes the stories and the writing, but wishes that my drawings weren’t so cartoony. Aline feels the same way. CBC: Martini Baton: where did she come from? Peter: I told you about how me, Joanne, and David Carriono used to doodle this filthy little comics together. Well, David’s comics were routinely the funniest. He had no interest in being a professional cartoonist, so his drawings were incredibly crude and simple, but they were so funny that it was my idea for us to collaborate, which basically just meant that I’d redraw some of the stuff that he was doing, and it turned into Martini Baton. I would do a bit of rewriting just to make it fit in the format. But, it was mainly his old Daily Dix strips verbatim, only cleaned-up for public consumption. However, I drew them in a half-page format for it since I had this crazy notion that it we should self-syndicated it, in the same way that Matt Groening and Lynda Barry were doing (and the way Griffy’s Zippy the Pinhead used to be syndicated), by sending them out to alternative weekly papers all over the country. But, man, what was I thinking? That comic was so offensive — with people f*cking in it, and sh*tting on each other, and wallowed in every ethnic and racial stereotype imaginable. Yet I still expected these papers to run it right next to their futon ads! [laughs] One or two alternative papers did run it, but they were the really underground types, not the yuppie weeklies full of personal ads that still exist in every town. [laughs] Shortly after [the avant garde comix magazine] RAW first came out, in 1980 the first issue of Weirdo appeared, and I was like, “Oh, look at that!” I was immediately struck

Above: [Left to right] Carol Hernandez (wife of Gilbert), Joanne Bagge, and Aline KominskyCrumb, outside a Thai restaurant, in 1991.

Above: Bagge watches R. Crumb draw on the Fantagraphics van, 1991. In Pete’s arms is daughter Hannah. Dan Clowes is between ’em.

world I was in. [laughter] Yet when he by the juxtaposition of [RAW co-editor] drew his own comics, he had so little Art Spiegelman trying to elevate cominvested in them that they were totally ics and have them taken more seriousunself-conscious, and as a result were ly as a higher art form in his magazine, [L–R] San DIego comicon dinner group, ‘96. Adrian Tomine, hilarious, and so irreverent. The stories while [Weirdo editor] Crumb doing the Reason editor Brian Doherty, Bagge, Dan Clowes, Painter/ meandered with little rhyme or reason, exact opposite, trying to drag comics performer Charles Schneider, Rick Altergott, former and his drawing style was very crude, but it right back into the gutter! [laughter] Fantagraphic art director Doug Erb, Doug’s was very charming and funny, too. So I tried CBC: Weirdo was the anti-RAW? friend Pete, and Ariel Bordeaux. to capture all of that, while re-drawing them, Peter: Yeah, at least at first. Eventually they while simultaneously turning it into something both evolved to the point that they were pracsellable and presentable. Working on them really helped tically the same magazine, at least content-wise. But I me as an artist, too. Collaborating with him really loosened up was much more drawn to, and so much more comfortable with, my own approach to writing and drawing comics. the spirit of Weirdo. I was also thrilled when I opened up the first issue CBC: What did David do and what did you do in “Martini Baton”? of Weirdo and Crumb’s mailing address was in there, because he always seemed like some reclusive, hidden mystery man to me. I figured I’d proba- Peter: David would just hand me all these scraps of paper, which would be literally anything: Old computer printout paper with perforations on the bly never meet him. So I thought, “Oh my god, I can actually write to him!” So I sent him Comical Funnies and other things I had done, half-hoping that side, or napkins, paper towels, etc. When Dave would get an idea, he would just grab the nearest white, flat surface he could find, and doodle away he would want to reprint some of it. At first, he didn’t reprint anything, but with a Sharpie or pencil or ballpoint pen. Sometimes he’d get a coherent wrote me an encouraging letter. Later he reprinted a story from Comical Funnies. And, as a way to appease all of us, he reprinted a story that Holm- thread of a story going, but other times the “stories” really meandered. I was always trying to nudge him to keep some kind of continuity going. I’d strom, J.D. King, and I all wrote and drew together. say, “In the last episode you had Martini Baton go to Italy and meet the CBC: It credited “The Bagge Brothers,” as well, right? Pope. So, for the next installment, try to stick with that somewhat. Don’t Peter: Yes, my brother Doug was involved with it, too. It was a ridiculous have her suddenly sledding in Alaska next, okay?” [laughter] He’d try, but comic. [laughs] his brain was going all over the place. If he couldn’t amuse and indulge CBC: Was Doug hanging out with you guys? himself completely from panel to panel he’d just as soon not bother, Peter: A bit. He was living in the city by then. I don’t think he ever hung y’know? So I’d have to cobble together some semblance of a story before I out with those guys without me around, though. It was mainly just social started on the final art. situations that my wife and I might arrange where Doug would attend. They all liked him and his comics. I remember both Kaz and Drew Friedman CBC: Can you characterize Martini Baton? Peter: The name came from an old classmate of his named Martina liking my brother’s work a lot. Drew especially was always telling me the stuff Doug was doing for Comical Funnies was the best stuff in there by far, Battan, who wound up owning a gallery in New York City. But, personality-wise, she was nothing like our Martini Baton. She’s very normal and which it was. doesn’t look or act like her at all. David just found her name amusing, so he Anyhow, I then sent Crumb a handful of “Martini Baton” strips we had done, and he loved it, and asked us to do more. We did, and they wound up changed Martina Batan to Martini (like the drink) Baton (the stick that you twirl), and drew a little hell-raiser holding a martini in one hand and a baton running in Weirdo #8, I think. in the other just to drive home the point. Her cheerleader outfit, I’m sure, Dave Carrino was a photography major in school, and he was and still is totally immersed in the New York fine art world, so he had next to nothing was just an extension of her holding a baton. CBC: What was the personality of Martini Baton? in common with the whole drunken, moronic heterosexual comic book

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This spread: [Peter Bagge contributed covers for fanzines and CDs, as well as a mini-comics for Seattle’s Starhead Comix, including Testosterone City, a primer on machismo for rednecks and stoners. The latter was published in two editions.

Peter: On the surface she was just this rebellious girl from the Long Island suburbs, very much like the type of girls David was friends with and amused by growing up on Long Island (including my wife, since David and Joanne went to high school together). It’s hard to pinpoint Martini’s age. We never really thought about it, so she could have been under-aged the whole time she was f*cking and sucking her way across the planet. The bow in her hair would suggest she is very young, but she also has big boobs and does whatever the hell she wants. She drinks and smokes and has casual sex. So, she is basically an adult, but she has these little-kid aspects to her, too. Frankly, she was just an excuse — a cypher or conduit for us to go nuts. She was a character that could and would do anything. And she did. She was completely out of control and nothing fazed her. She never had any regrets. She would go have one crazy adventure with some new acquaintance, but as soon as things got boring, she’d be off with a new best friend and having new adventures. CBC: Were you familiar with the classic Sunday newspaper comic strips, which would often have one-tier unrelated strips running at the top or bottom by the same cartoonist? There was Sappo, which ran with the Popeye/ Thimble Theatre Sundays…. Peter: Yes, and with Jesus’ Critters, which ran below Martini Baton, I was deliberately copying that format. Jesus’ Critters was very inspired by Maw Green, which accompanied the Little Orphan Annie Sunday strips, even as

filler? Peter: No. It was an extreme exaggeration of our Catholic upbringing and what we were taught in Catholic school. Not just Catholicism, but any Christian literature directed at children, where they try to teach lessons to kids on how to be a good Christian. Such material is much more prevalent with Protestant churches anyway, since they tend to be much more kid-friendly and much more engaging with kids than the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has an almost hateful attitude towards children, [laughs] or at least they used to. CBC: And yet they didn’t believe in birth control! [laughter] Peter: Maybe that’s why they hated kids. We were all unwanted! I once attended a Lutheran summer Bible camp when I was a kid, at the urging of a minister neighbor of ours, and I actually loved it! It was all cookies and apple juice and re-enacting Noah’s ark! [laughter] The difference between that and my Catholic Sunday school was like night and day. CBC: Back to Martini…. Peter: Jesus’ Critters was sort of a cute, friendly [religious children’s TV show] Davey and Goliath approach to teaching children about the Bible and about being a Christian, but at the same time, the strip also had a heavy dose of the guilt and death culture of the Catholic Church. So it also was just us exorcising ourselves of all this Catholic crap we were raised with. CBC: Did you do anything else with David Carrino? Peter: Fantagraphics, at one point, published a magazine-sized oneshot comic collection of all the Martini Baton strips that we did in Weirdo, but Dave and I added some new stuff. We did a couple of stories of this character called Stretchpants — which also appeared in Weirdo, come to think of it — which was probably the funniest thing that we ever did together. Stretchpants was this extremely effeminate, overweight gay man, who was consumed with self-loathing. Even though David is not the least bit overweight or repulsive, as far as Dave was concerned, Stretchpants was completely autobiographical. In one of the opening panels, it shows Stretchpants saying, “Yes, I suppose I’ll just sit here in my apartment by myself, cutting out pictures of pretty ladies with make-up and fancy dresses on, and sticking them in my mindless scrapbook. And, yes, I suppose I’ll order a pizza and compulsively eat it all by myself.” I couldn’t believe when Carrino gave me this story and asked me to draw it. I said, “That’s you, Dave! You’re the one that has a scrapbook full of pictures of Liz Taylor, and you’re the one who, when you get depressed, eats whole pizzas by yourself!” [laughter] CBC: Do you stay in touch with David? Peter: Yes, and we still see him occasionally. He’s had many careers. He’s currently is a massage therapist, and was still enjoying it the last time we spoke.. CBC: Just to get an overall picture, what was the importance of Comical Funnies on the alternative comix scene, at the time? Peter: It wasn’t the least bit “important,” other than to me and my own career. Comical Funnies was where I started to build my own audience. There are people who still buy all my comics who saw it first in Comical Funnies. I don’t even count the stuff I did for High Times or Screw, because the stuff I did for those magazines was just filler. My work meant next to

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late as the ’70s. Chester Gould would sometimes satirize these new minimal strips that were coming out by doing a similar little add-on Sunday strip called Sawdust, which ran underneath Dick Tracy, where all the characters were just little piles of sawdust. [laughter] CBC: What’s the idea behind Jesus’ Critters? Was it just

nothing to the people who bought those publications. CBC: What was the work that you did for them? Peter: Oh, it was basically stuff I was doing anyway. There was an art director in the early ’80s at High Times named Jeff Friedrich who liked comics, and he was always doing everything he could to get more comics in there. But he couldn’t run anything more than one page in length, so it was just once every couple issues I might have a one-page strip or half a page. CBC: Was he the guy who was caricatured in that Crumb strip about being interviewed by High Times? Peter: No, my goodness, no! [laughs] This guy was nothing like that. You’d have to ask Crumb, but that might have been a take on the guy that started High Times, Tom Forcade. Believe it or not, that same guy wanted to buy Punk magazine. He was this dope dealing-type hippy guy, a totally crazy, reckless outlaw. I mean, you have to have a lot of balls to start a national magazine called High Times. The FBI was on his ass constantly. He was going to buy Punk magazine, and in fact, that’s part of how Punk magazine went out of business. He was going to pay Holmstrom a salary to keep putting it out, and make it a real, legit magazine, with an office and regular staff, and come out every single month. But then Tom Forcade blew his brains out, and that was the real end of Punk magazine. CBC: I look at Harvey Kurtzman as the godfather of underground comix, which begat autobiographical comics, jumping the form to a new level. Arcade held the ground for a little while, then there was RAW and Weirdo. RAW took the high road, while Weirdo embraced the “Punk school,” so to speak, a whole group of cartoonists who were a vanguard. Do you agree? Peter: Speaking for myself, I was just doing what was in me. But Crumb used to say an awful lot of the cartoonists my age all had a strong nihilistic streak in our work. That might be strange coming from him, but he definitely saw it as a defining characteristic, which he associated with the whole “punk” ethos. CBC: Was that good? Peter: I suppose, though he also meant it as a warning, that we shouldn’t wallow in nihilism. You’ve got to grow as an artist and a person or you’re stuck. And I agreed. I never wanted to wallow in it and just be a wise-ass to my dying day. I always wanted my work to always have this simple, lowbrow feel, and to retain the spirit and look of the artwork that I always liked, going all the way back to Bob Clampett and Basil Wolverton and Big Daddy Roth. But I also wanted to create good content and get somewhat deep. All through the ’80s, I was always walking this tightrope, trying not to fall too far on one side or the other. In Neat Stuff, I still would do stories that were just crazy nonsense with really exaggerated faces and bulging eyeballs. But other times I would try to tell more personal stories. I liked the mix, and wanted to keep it all mixed. But a lot of people who definitely liked when I was getting more personal. [Fantagraphics publisher] Gary Groth was like that, too. When he was publishing Neat Stuff, he didn’t like my “Girly Girl” stories, at least compared to the other stuff. He thought that stuff was too slapstick, with no depth to it. I knew what he was saying, but I still wanted to do ’em because those were by far the most fun to do. CBC: Well, there’s the word: “fun.” Peter: I wanted to draw stuff that was fun to look at, too. With the stuff that was more personal, I would occasionally try to draw things in, for me, a slightly more realistic drawing style, figuring it matched the content more. But I didn’t like the way it looked. Even “The Reject,” I don’t like the way it looks, even though, to this day, a lot of people tell me it’s the best thing I have ever done. I am proud of the story, but don’t like to look at it. I didn’t like the way I drew it. Of course, I can’t reject the positive feedback I’m getting from doing these more intense, personal stories, but I also had the problem of writing them, but still make it fun-looking, like the stories that Groth didn’t like. [laughs] I was trying to figure out how to combine the two, and when I started Hate, I finally pretty much successfully combined the two elements. CBC: I don’t want to sound academic (though probably I do), but do you think your collective approach wasn’t so much nihilist as post-modern? Peter: Whew. Boy, there’s a question. Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

CBC: You guys were a new generation. Peter: I guess you could say that in the same way that you might say punk and new wave were post-modern. By the 1980s, how could anyone not be “post-modern”? [laughs] CBC: Well, you ingested all this popular culture, plus you had some hindsight with hippies and underground comix and all that, and regurgitated it in such a sense that it was something new. Peter: Right. But what we call “pop culture” is, in fact, culture. It’s our culture. Growing up, everyone naturally absorbs their own culture, and then in turn “regurgitates” it when you create new art as an adult. One thing that really strikes me though, when I look at the work I did in the ’80s — and even more so with Dan Clowes in the early issues of Eightball — is how harsh it all is. It was the same with the Weirdos I edited: there’s a real harshness to my humor. It’s mean, you know? CBC: Angry, certainly. Peter: It’s like a kick in the stomach. In fact, just this past summer, I was on a panel with the Hernandez Brothers at a comic convention, and Jaime and Gilbert and Mario were talking about how cartoonists in the late ’80s and early ’90s, like me and Clowes and Dennis Worden — and later on Ivan Brunetti with Schizo — were so viscous and angry. They said, “You guys were the angry guys.” Not that they didn’t like it, but it was something they didn’t necessarily relate to. They pointed that out to me at the time too, but I was so drowning in my own bile at the time that I didn’t realize what they were talking about until now. [laughs] I look back at stuff I did 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and I think, “What was wrong with me?” Where was all this bitterness coming from? You know, it’s funny how people always use the word “bitter” with old men, i.e.: “a bitter old man.” But young men are far more bitter than older men. It’s generally something you have to work out, something to outgrow. CBC: I’m surprised to find out how long you’ve been married. I saw your ’80s work as being very angry, and it’s progressed over the years to becoming more wry. Peter: Right. CBC: You’re more settled inside your skin, and you’re more observational with a crooked smile. Is there a truth to that, do you think? Peter: Yes. Thank goodness! Now people complain that that intensity, that fire, seems to be gone from my work. But it seems to be gone from me, y’know? What can I do? You can’t fake it. I’m 61

This page: Peter definitely has a fascination with the Beach Dad, Murry Wilson, father of Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, and uncle of Mike Love — The Beach Boys. With comedian Dana Gould, Peter developed Flash animation episodes about the mercurial Wilson patriarch for Icebox.com (available on YouTube). Above is Razor magazine strip; below is CD cover art by P.B.; and inset right, spread from Peter Bagge’s Rockin’ Poppin’ Favorites CD book. Next page: Top is Bat Boy from P.B.’s Weekly World News strip; bottom is cover art detail by P.B. from the music ’zine Scram [1998].

me nuts. [laughs] But Crumb was fantastic. He felt guilty for saddling me with this thankless job, so he tried to make it as easy as possible for me. CBC: Why did Crumb leave the magazine? Peter: For the same reason that I wound up leaving: too much work, not enough money, and he wanted to just be an artist, and not a “boss.” He did it for as long as he could, but once it got to be a drag he passed it on. CBC: So it really wasn’t hand-lettering all those letter pages? Peter: Oh, that too. That was a pain too. [laughter] CBC: Did Ron have any reason to act the way he did? Peter: Aside from wondering why he was suddenly stuck with me, I think he was just copping an attitude. No matter what I did, he was never happy with it. He never would say “good issue.” He’d either say nothing or just go, [whiny voice] “Why is this in here and why do you keep running work by that guy?” Just taking all the wind out of my sails. Whether it was deliberate or not, that was the effect. CBC: Did you make any money? Peter: No! It was, ridiculous, the money. The page rate was $50 a page, and on top of that, being the editor for the whole issue, it might be $1,000. CBC: How much would you work on it? Peter: Oh, it took up way too much of my time. That’s another reason why I quit: just a year or two after I started doing Weirdo, Fantagraphics let me have my own comic book, which was really what I was aiming for. So I started doing Neat Stuff and I still was doing Weirdo at the same time, and it was physically impossible for me to keep doing both without both of them suffering. The last couple of issues of Weirdo I edited weren’t particularly strong. I used to go digging for material, looking under rocks to find stuff to publish. But, once I started doing Neat Stuff, I didn’t have the time to do that anymore, so I was just going with whatever fell in my lap. I myself did very little art for the last two issues, and so I was like, “I can’t keep doing this.” CBC: What made you think that you should do it? Did you have any other editorial experience? You know, putting together a publication? Peter: Just working on Comical Funnies, where I was, like, a co-editor. CBC: So you were there when they would do a final layout, putting the “paper to bed”? Peter: Yeah, for everything, including dealing with printers and distributors. Holmstrom taught me how to cut Rubylith, a skill that nobody needs anymore. [laughs] CBC: I do remember that! Galley type and waxers and all that. “Did you remember to turn on the waxer?” Peter: Yeah. “Waxers,” Jesus Christ. All that old school crap. Zip-A-Tone. And dealing with typesetters, who were always offended by what I was asking them to type… Do you remember glue? [laughs] CBC: That’s right! And X-Acto blades. Peter: Every page number in Hate was glued on by hand by Roberta Gregory when she was a staffer at Fantagraphics.

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not 25 anymore. Back then, I worked so unbelievably hard, yet it wasn’t until 1989 that, for the first time in my life, I made a five-figure income. [laughs] I also moved to Seattle, a self-consciously intellectual place, where everyone considers themselves to be open-minded, and open to all forms of artistic expression. But when I moved here, so few people got what I was trying to do. A lot of folks couldn’t get past the way I drew. Even my cartoonist friends, would look at my drawing and say, “This is puerile.” That was a word I used to hear a lot about my work back then, that it was “puerile.” I remember my new Seattle friends, like Mark Zingarelli and Mike Dougan, telling me that they were glad when Aline took over Weirdo, because Aline’s approach was more mature and more sophisticated than mine — which was strange to hear from them, since I was the first one to publish their work. [laughs] But they just didn’t like that snot-nosed punk aspect that I brought to the magazine. CBC: How did you become associated with Weirdo? Peter: I would send my stuff to Crumb, and he ran a few things, but then, out of the blue, he asked me to take over as managing editor. He explained how it paid next to no money, and was not as fun as I would think. But it was a good way for me to raise my profile, make more of a name for myself. CBC: Was your head in the clouds? Facing the opportunity to work with the greatest cartoonist of all time? Peter: Yes, and he was great to work with. But it was very difficult working with some folks, whether you were accepting or rejecting their work. Some of the artists were just impossible. It’s pretty ugly when you reject someone that can’t handle rejection. [laughs] I also had a really hard time dealing with Ron Turner, the publisher, because he kind of resented my existence. Ron thought he was publishing a Robert Crumb magazine, and all of a sudden Crumb foisted this young creep from New York on him. Now, ever since I quit editing Weirdo, I get along fine with him, but the whole time I was editing it he was extremely difficult. He could be very moody and prickly. God, he used to drive

CBC: Do you miss being an editor? Peter: No. You kidding? Maybe in theory, but in practice, no. I started taking submissions with Hate in the last five issues, but it was all friends I specifically asked to contribute. I asked Rick Altergott to do a regular Doofus strip in the back of Hate, and that was true with everybody else in there. I would give them a page or whatever and say, “You can do whatever you want with this page of yours.” So that was an easy way to do play editor. But then the old Hate went on hiatus, I mentioned in an interview that I was thinking of starting up a new anthology. A lot of young cartoonists read that interview, and I immediately got bombarded with a whole bunch of submissions, all of which were terrible! [laughs] So I thought: “I’m not going to go through this again.” CBC: Did you have an idea for an anthology refined at all, or were you were just talking off the top of your head? Peter: You know, it would have been what I was already doing in Hate, only expanded to make it more of an anthology, where I myself might not necessarily be doing Buddy Bradley stories. CBC: Did you have a title for it? Peter: Yeah, I did. It was going to be called Let’s Get It On! Which was also the name of the last story in Hate #30. CBC: [Sings] “Let’s get it on.” Peter: Yeah. Everybody hated that name. [laughs] I still like it. Later I thought of starting a humor anthology that would simply be called Jokes. I remember proposing that title at a dinner party once. I said, “Isn’t that a great name? Like, what would you think if you saw a magazine on the newsstand called Jokes? Wouldn’t you buy it?” To which Kevin Scalzo’s wife Djerba said “No, because I’d think it was a magazine full of bad jokes.” [laughs] CBC: So you put the issue of Weirdo together on your kitchen table? Peter: Yeah. CBC: How did the Fantagraphics deal come through? Peter: In a nutshell, Crumb and I weren’t sure that Turner was going to keep publishing Weirdo when I took it over. Ron eventually relented, but until then I was looking for another publisher. I was also shopping around other anthology ideas, and since Fantagraphics was the only official alternative comic book publisher in driving distance of New York at that time, I took a trip up to their then offices in Connecticut and showed them my work. I had already done the strip “The Reject” by then, and I showed it to Gary Groth and he loved it. It was based solely on that story that he asked me if I’d want to have my own comic book for them. CBC: That was a red letter day for you? Peter: I thought he was lying! [laughs] It was also a moot point for a while, since I soon moved to Seattle and they moved to L.A., so we were both out of touch for about a year. But once we were both settled in our new homes on the West Coast, I called him up again and Gary said, “Yeah, I’m serious,” so I started doing Neat Stuff. CBC: What was your thinking behind Neat Stuff? Peter: It was just a one-man anthology. I wanted it to be like Crumb’s old comics. I didn’t like the magazine-size format. I wanted it to be the traditional comic-book format that Crumb used to work in, which I still prefer over any and all formats. But up to that point every comic book Fantagraphics published was magazine sized, and they wanted to keep it that way simply because visually it separated it from all the Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

super-hero schlock. There were a several other comics in that format back then, like Weirdo and American Splendor, and they’d be in their own rack. But the problem was, there were a lot of comic shops that didn’t own a magazine-sized rack. [laughs] I also kept stressing to them that aesthetically I like the traditional comic format better. Then Clowes went from doing Lloyd Llewellyn to Eightball about a year or so before the first Hate came out, and when I saw that he got them to switch to the [comic-book] size, I insisted on doing the same thing. CBC: Was your wife working? Peter: Yeah. She always loved to cook, so every time she’d get a waitress job in New York, she’d then switch to being a cook, and then wind up managing the place. What made our move Seattle possible was she had a sister that lived out here already, so she and her sister started a New York-style deli. She made a decent living off of it too, but by the early ’90s I was starting to make more money than her, and we had a kid and everything, so she sold the deli and has been a stay-home mom ever since. Well, now she’s a part-time nanny and colorist as well. She colors most of my work, and the Peanuts Sunday strips for the Fantagraphics collections. CBC: Did you do outside work at all during Weirdo? Peter: No day jobs, but I’d take any freelance job I could find. Back when I was trying desperately to find any kind of commercial work, and I was always the one making phone calls, though I rarely ever got any takers. And when I moved I might as well have fallen off the edge of the earth as far as any of my old New York contacts were concerned. And there was no work to be found in Seattle back then, so I just gave up and concentrated on my own comics. But by the time I started doing Neat Stuff and then later Hate, all of a sudden my phone started ringing with job offers. By focusing so much on my own work, it helped my reputation. It was like I was playing hard to get and it paid off, even though I never expected it to work out that way. CBC: How did you know about Fantagraphics? Peter: Just through The Comics Journal and, later, Love and Rockets, and one or two other books they were publishing, one of which was called Hugo. I knew the artist, Milton Knight, who he lived in New York, and he gave me their contact info. CBC: What did you think of them? Peter: When I met them? I thought they were weird. CBC: [Laughs] No, that is, what did you think of the company and what they published, and The Comics Journal. Peter: [Laughs] Oh! Well, The Comics Journal back in those days mostly was about super-hero stuff, which I wasn’t interested in. They would rag on super-hero stuff for the most part, but even still I had no idea what they were talking about, so I rarely read it. But then they had a huge issue devoted Harvey Kurtzman, and it was fascinating how in-depth they went. I’d never read anything like that before, at least not with a comic artist. I also couldn’t believe how undiplomatic [laughs] Gary and Kim were. The three of them, Gary and Kim and Kurtzman, all started talking about this one artist/self-publisher in particular that I happened to know, and they pretty much tore him to shreds. Not that they said anything about him that wasn’t true, but I recall Harvey describing his art style as “the third generation of nothing.” [laughs] And, of course, Groth and Kim loved that, so they 63

bunch of 20-year-olds. Dan might have even still been in his teens when that thing came out. All of their styles were in the embryonic stage, so I couldn’t even distinguish who drew what in that magazine, since it was all still very crude. And then I didn’t see anything by Dan at all until Fantagraphics put out the first issue of Lloyd Llewellyn, and that came out, about a year after I started Neat Stuff. I went nuts over that thing, though. Llewellyn immediately was my favorite comic book. CBC: What made it your favorite? Peter: Oh, just everything. I looked at the drawing in it, and like you were saying before about him being a quintessential cartoonist, you could tell that he has absorbed everything. I could especially sense the influence of Bernie Krigstein, a sort of a cartoony version of Krigstein, and even like the way Dave Berg drew in his early days, when he was more stylized. But you could also tell that Dan just read everything — super-hero comics, MAD, underground comix, romance comics, Christian propaganda comics — it was all in there. But he wasn’t just mimicking these people. He was using it all to his own ends. CBC: When did you start up an acquaintance with Dan? Peter: I met him just once really briefly at a comic convention when we all still lived in New York. He was with Mort Todd when I met him, and Mort, not surprisingly, did all the talking. [laughter] Dan just stood there and smiled and nodded. Dan looked like a very tall, skinny 12-year-old. But when Lloyd Llewellyn came out, I wrote Dan a fan letter right away, and we kept writing back and forth. So all the way back in those days, before email, we were writing to each other constantly. CBC: Was he shy? Peter: Not when it came to writing letters, he wasn’t. He was very chatty. Face-to-face, he’s rather soft-spoken. I don’t know if you ever spoken to him on the phone, but he’s barely audible, he’s so low-key. I know people who’ve taped interviews with him on the phone, and when they’d listen to the tape later they couldn’t make out a word he said. [laughter] CBC: What was the content that appealed to you of Lloyd Llewellyn, beyond the stylized cartooning? Peter: It was smart and funny. That’s what I liked about it. I strongly related to his sensibility. It had a very strong misanthropic streak running throughout the whole thing. [laughter] It was very mean, but also self-critical and very self-aware. When I look back at some of his early work now, he comes off as even angrier than I was, as if that’s possible. But the thing is, it was so much a part of our makeup that we didn’t even realize how angry we came off. And we both thought we were making our anger palatable by infusing it with humor. By being “wacky.” CBC: Was it an important part of your development that you felt marginalized, that you felt the comics world wasn’t really responding to you, that you were fighting with comic book shop owners to get. Shelf space? That you were on a mission, for instance. Peter: There was that, though I felt marginalized by everyone and everything back then. It was easy to feel alienated back in the ’80s. I was alienated! Plus I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I had no marketable skills. So I was stuck, though I was very fortunate that my wife was willing to support me as long as I worked at it, and she saw how hard I was working, and so her feeling was, “Don’t worry about it, just keep plugging away, and whatever happens, happens.” I also was new to Seattle at the time, and as much as I liked the city, it took me a while to fit in with the #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

all dogpiled onto the guy, and I was like, “Jesus!” [laughs] So, on the one hand, it was very entertaining that they weren’t pulling any punches and didn’t care at all about making enemies, but at the same time I also thought, “I’m afraid of these guys!” [laughs] CBC: So it was the work in Weirdo that attracted Gary? Peter: Yes. I also proposed doing an anthology that was geared more towards kids. But he wasn’t interested in publishing stuff for kids. He said that that was a whole kettle of fish he didn’t want to get involved with at all, how they’re better off making their identity as an adult publisher, which made perfect sense. CBC: When you saw Love and Rockets, were you impressed with that? Peter: Yes, though I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I still don’t! [laughs] I remember looking at the cover and at the title for the first time and being confused by it, because it looked very mainstream at first glance, but you also could tell right away there was something else going on with it. It looked like genre stuff, but it also wasn’t. I didn’t totally get into it until Gilbert started doing those Palomar stories, and I went nuts over those. Before that he was doing something called “BEM,” which looked great, but was a bit like a Heavy Metal sci-fi story. But “Heartbreak Soup” was a real masterpiece. After that, I was partial toward Gilbert’s work at first, but I soon grew to love Jaime’s work as well. I’ve loved everything they’ve both done ever since. CBC: So basically you had no interest in genre at all? Peter: Yeah, I wasn’t against it at all; it just wasn’t what I was looking for. And, to be honest, back in the early ’80s, I resented all that stuff just because the comics shops were clogged full of them, and not only could I not find anything I wanted to read, but it was hard for me to get my own stuff in a lot of comics shops. That’s still the case, sadly, though it doesn’t gall me as much since I manage to make a decent living in spite of it. But, back then, I had a real hatred [laughs] for super-hero and genre stuff, because I felt oppressed by it, you know? I was always on the outs. I had to put up with so much sh*t, so much fighting and arguing with comic shop owners just to carry one lousy copy of my comic on consignment, while they’re standing there all day long talking about Jim Shooter. CBC: While ordering 1,500 copies of Uncanny X-Men, right? [laughs] Peter: Right! CBC: Well, let’s think positive, Peter. What were you picking up at the time? Independent comics were starting to catch on. Peter: Yes, largely because everybody was starting to self-publish. Literally everybody. Like, there was a comic book called Psycho that Dan Clowes and his friends from Pratt put out, and that’s where he got his first exposure, along with Rick Altergott and Mort Todd and Cliff Mott. CBC: So there was a little school of alternative cartoonists over at Pratt? Peter: Yeah. It wasn’t too different from what me and my friends were doing in Comical Funnies except that they all worshiped the early MAD magazine artists. You can tell by looking at Rick Altergott’s comics that he was very inspired by Wally Wood and that Dan Clowes was inspired by Bernie Krigstein. CBC: You know, Dan Clowes in some ways seems to be a quintessential cartoonist. He just really has a very accessible style that looks based in the commercial world of comics creating. Not the content at all; I’m just talking about the visuals. Was Psycho the first time you saw Dan’s work? Peter: Yes. Those guys were really young when they put out Psycho, a

locals. I felt like a fish out of water for a long time here. CBC: When did you move to Seattle? Peter: The middle of 1984. CBC: Eighty-four? Did it have, comparative to what it turned into by the ’90s, a more small town vibe, so to speak? Peter: A bit, yeah. It’s not that much different. It’s definitely bigger. It’s always growing. And it’s a lot more expensive than it used to be. It still was a bit off the radar screen. The grunge business had a lot to do with it being “discovered,” but there were lots of other reasons as well: Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. There were many reasons why Seattle started attracting the whole world’s attention, which inspired even more people to move here. But, for the most part, it still very much feels like the same city I first moved to. CBC: Do you think the exodus to Seattle in the early ’90s was akin to San Francisco in ’66, ’67, ’68? Peter: Yeah. And it’s funny you should mention that. In 1991, there’s a big fine art establishment here called COCA, or the Center of Contemporary Art. It used to be managed by this guy named Larry Reid, who for a while was the PR guy at Fantagraphics back in the early ’90s. When he was still with COCA, he put on this huge comprehensive alternative comics show. It was called Misfit Lit, which he curated in conjunction with Gary and Kim, because by then Fantagraphics was in Seattle. So it had artwork by all the new alternative cartoonists, as well as a lot of the old underground guys. And, as is typical of Larry, he made a big multimedia event out of it. A group of actors reenacted one of my comics stories on stage, for instance. CBC: Get out! Peter: It came out great! [laughter] It was a story called “You’re Not the Boss of Me,” about Ma Bradley and Babs Bradley, and it was really well done. The late Jesse Bernstein directed it, a brilliant writer and poet who killed himself shortly thereafter. And they had bands playing and stuff like that. They also brought in the Crumbs, Robert and Aline, to attend the opening. It was a big “happening,” with all sorts of writers, actors and musicians in attendance, and not just cartoonists. All sorts of creative types were mixing and mingling, which really struck a nostalgic chord in Crumb. He kept commenting afterwards about how much it reminded him of San Francisco in 1967 — how everyone was full of optimism, and everything was loose and fun, with these different creative types were hanging out, and what they were doing things strictly out of a creative impulse, and they weren’t obsessed with their careers, it wasn’t all career- and money-driven. But then Crumb turned to me and said, “It’s not going to last. Mark my words.” He goes, “I’m telling you now, the same thing that happened in San Francisco in ’67 is going to happen here. You’re going to attract people from all over the world, not just musicians and cartoonists, but everyone who’s gonna want a piece of the action, the exploiters and the phonies, and they’re going to ruin it. Soon the rents will skyrocket, while other people will be committing suicide or OD’ing.” And he was 100% correct! [laughter] CBC: Crumb was already seeing the dark side right when he arrived at the pinnacle of optimism? Peter: Yeah. Well, he said, “You’re all ripe for the picking. A bunch of sheep. And here come the wolves. They’re always right behind.” [laughs] CBC: Was the Misfit Lit show around the same time Nirvana hit it big? Peter: Yes, almost exactly. Crumb’s prediction came true incredibly fast. It only took six months to a year for it to all come true. CBC: How did the opportunity to move to Seattle arrive? Was it just simply planned? You said you always had an interest in the Northwest, right? Peter: Yeah. Well, what happened was, my wife’s younger sister was married to a professional football player. They were high school sweethearts, and the guy’s name was Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

Mike Tice. He’s pretty well known if you follow the NFL at all. He was signed by the Seattle Seahawks after college, back in 1981 or so, and has been out here several years before us, and they loved it out here. So we went out to visit them for a vacation. We also took a side-trip to California, where I met Crumb for the first time. Our first time west of Pennsylvania, in fact. I loved Seattle, so does my wife. Her sister and her husband decided to open a New York-style deli together, and my wife would help run it. Being a native New Yorker, my brother-inlaw used to complain that he couldn’t find a good pastrami sandwich anywhere, so he decided to open a place that made them. [laughs] So we went back, got everything together that summer, and moved out here. Originally we lived with them until the business was up and running. CBC: Did you drive across the country? Peter: Yeah, we rented a U-Haul, with our neurotic cat. CBC: Was it hard to leave the East at all, or was it just time to go? Peter: It was time to go! [laughter] I missed some people there, I still do. But a funny thing about New York City is it’s almost like the whole city suffers from PMS at the same time. They’re not even aware of it because it’s such a claustrophobic city, and everybody is so piled up on top of each other that it’s hard to separate yourself from the goings-on of the city itself. But sometimes I would go back there and everybody would be in a great mood and I’d have a great time. And when I say everybody, I mean every single person, all my old friends, relatives, total strangers — everybody’s in a great, lively, funny, chatty mood. But then there’s other times where it’s the opposite — and I’m not exaggerating — where everybody is a pain in the ass, bitter and argumentative. [laughs] Everybody’d be so nasty and so sarcastic that I’d find myself on the verge of tears. [laughter] CBC: How would you characterize the people in Seattle? Peter: It’s the opposite. Well, the natives are extremely friendly and polite. They’re almost the opposite of New Yorkers, where if you move into an apartment building your neighbors at first might be somewhat hostile, since they don’t know where you’re coming from or if they can trust you, so they’ll really have their guard up. But as soon as they sense that you’re okay, then all of a sudden they’re telling you their life stories, you know? [laughs] Then they’re over-sharing their heads off, and you suddenly know way too much about them.

Above: Print produced for the rock band The Flaming Lips [’02]. Below: Peter contributed a seven-page Jar-Jar Binks’ story in Star Wars Tales #20 [June ’04]. Previous page: For a brief period in the early ’00s, Peter was invited to do his take on some Marvel super-heroes, though only his Spider-Man would initially see print. The Hulk story would finally be published, years after completion, in Strange Tales #2 [Dec. ’09].

Below: By our count, there are 37 variant covers for the recently released Archie #1, a reboot of the Riverdale “typical teen,” and we were delighted not only to know that our local retail chain, Newbury Comics, had enlisted Peter Bagge to do their variant, but also to see that the cartoonist did a smart take on Bob Montana’s splash panel of the very first appearance of Young Andrews, back in Pep Comics #22 [Dec. 1942] — albeit with a more modern take on Betty Cooper! Frankly, it’d be a hoot to see our pal Peter do a full-length story on the whole Riverdale High School gang, huh?

success with it. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the translation or what. Several Italian publishers have released their own editions of Hate as well — all without my permission, and without ever paying me a dime. [laughs] F*cking wops! And now for the first time my work is being published in French, after all these years, and I’m told it’s doing pretty well so far. CBC: Do you think that it’s globalization, to a degree — the MTV-ing of the world — or that they’re exposed to daily American culture more? Peter: That may be true of Spain, though they made a mad rush to embrace all things American from the moment [former dictator] Franco died, which happened a good 20 years before my comics were published in Spanish. [laughter]. From my experience, the Spanish are the most enthusiastic fans in the world — not just of my comics, but of everything. So many Seattle bands have told me that they were treated like Elvis when they toured Spain, as opposed to their hometown, where they can’t even get their best friends to hear them play. But the Spanish are the most enthusiastic audiences. And it’s especially charming and amusing to see how some of them openly love and embrace punk rock without putting on defiant “f*ck you” attitude that goes along with it. Remember how I was describing what New York punk audiences were like, where everybody kept this nasty exterior going? I used to describe their leather jackets as turtle shells — how inside they’re just as vulnerable as a turtle without its shell, and, once the don this exterior, they’re hoping that everybody will think they’re as tough as nails and not the scared little wimps that they really are. But, in Spain, they’ll listen to the same music and wear the same costumes , but they’re also very open and friendly about it. Like, being into punk doesn’t mean everyone who isn’t is your enemy. They just love punk rock! End of story! They relate to the music, and they see the humor and irony behind it, but they don’t use that as an excuse to act like a prick. [laughs] CBC: How are you received by fans? Peter: They’re always friendly. All my experiences in these foreign lands have been positive. I’d get a bit more “attitude” from some folks in, say, England and Germany, but it’s nothing that I’m not accustomed to with American fans. No one can compete with the Spaniards for sheer exuberance, though. I’ve got a real warm spot for them, obviously. CBC: So see an obnoxious streak in American fans, comparatively? Peter: Yes, but only because I’m not a foreign “guest” here, so they’re less shy about telling me that I’m a washed up sell-out now. [laughs] But most comic fans I meet, even in America, aren’t obnoxious. Some might be socially inept to various degrees, but so what. Anyone who goes out of their way to meet me and have me sign something I made that they paid good money for is okay in my book, even if their breath stinks a little. CBC: So you’ve had, overall, pretty good experiences going to conventions? Peter: Yeah. It all depends. Long lines of autograph seekers can be grueling, but it sure beats the opposite. Nothing’s worse than sitting at a table and being totally ignored for eight hours. [laughs] Another big difference — between my attending a convention overseas as compared to here — is that in Europe or elsewhere all my expenses are paid for: travel, hotel, food, everything. The organizers will wine and dine me, and treat me like royalty, as opposed to over here. [laughs] Well, I usually have most of my expenses covered, but rarely everything, so the pressure’s on for me to make some money at my booth in order to justify the time I’m spending away from my drawing table at home. CBC: Were you privy to the sales numbers of Neat Stuff? Peter: Yes. In fact, I was obsessed with it. I constantly nagged Fantagraphics for years about what the latest sales #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CBC: “Okay, enough already.” Peter: About 10 years ago, I was working, at MTV for a month or two, developing Hate into a TV show, so I was hanging out with all these old New York friends and acquaintances. I’d go to these parties where I’d see the same people a lot. They weren’t all necessarily cartoonists. In fact, the common denominator was that everybody, including myself, had worked or was still working for the porno industry. [laughter] A lot of these folks were or had been staffers or contributors for various porn magazines or websites. But the other funny thing was that almost everybody at these parties was of either Irish or Jewish descent, and that all the Jews were in and out of therapy, while all the Irish were in and out of AA. So they’re all confessing and “sharing” their heads off, only in different venues. [laughter] CBC: When did you and Joanne get married? Peter: In January of ’83, though I moved in with her when I was in my second semester of art school, in the summer of ’77, and we’ve been together ever since then. We lived in sin for about five years after that we got married. We got married by a judge in Hoboken City Hall, and it was just our parents and any friends who could make it. We didn’t have the money, and neither did our parents, to have a formal reception, so we just had a great big party in our own apartment. CBC: Did a lot of cartoonists come? Peter: Yeah, of course. [laughter] And our families were there, so it was lots of fun. And for our honeymoon we went to Washington, D.C. [laughs] Real romantic. CBC: How is your work perceived in the international community? Peter: Well, starting in the late ’80s and through much of the early ’90s, my comics were translated into a lot of Northern European languages: Swedish, German, Finnish, etc. Which was great, but I couldn’t understand why for the longest time it was never in the Latin languages, French and Italian and Spanish. I was told that people from Latin countries wouldn’t relate to it — that it had too much of an American sensibility, and that northern Europeans could relate to it more than the southern Europeans could. But, by the mid-’90s, a Spanish publisher called La Cúpula started translating my work, and it was a huge success for them, far more than it was in any of the other countries. In fact, it’s the only country where all of my work has been reprinted, and remains in print. Two different German publishers tried their hand at translating Hate, and neither of them had much

figures were, and how can we get them up. The same with Hate, I also was always nagging them to get their titles sold in non-comic shops, and how can we sell more outside of the direct sales market ghetto. I was really pushy in that regard, always trying to figure out better ways to market their line, since trying to convince all the super-hero retards who dominated the direct sales market seemed like a totally lost cause to me. It was a lost cause! And Gary and Kim agreed, though exactly what to do about it was another matter. The direct market is what they were used to. Even though they were constantly at odds with the mainstream comics world, they were also still very much a part of it. They came from that world, and had no idea how to get out of it at that time. After the success of the Misfit Lit show, they hired Larry Reid, who put together that show. Larry had some experience and contacts with the indie music biz — the press and the music stores and such — which was a big boon for us at that time, especially for my comics, along with Eightball and Love and Rockets. We had a ready and eager “cross-over” audience in the indie rock world, which Larry helped to bridge. Distributing our comics to these indie music stores was hardly a simple matter, since they were reluctant to deal with comic distributors — who at that time were always pressuring them to order boxes and boxes of “The Death of Superman” and that other over-hyped collector-mania garbage that they and their customers wanted nothing to do with. Fanta started dealing with more retailers directly, which was more profitable, though it took a while for them to get efficiently set up for the role of self-distributor. But it was good timing, in that all forms of art and music that for so long seemed hopelessly marginalized and isolated were starting to draw more attention, and indie comics were now associated with all of that. All of a sudden, Fantagraphics and their ilk were considered cool, as opposed to being an almost universally despised or overlooked oddity that they had been previously. Our “profile had been raised,” so to speak, and for the first time I was feeling very optimistic about not just my own career, but the future of “alternative” comics in general. We slowly were getting carried by more bookstores, too, at that time, though they were always much more interested in square-bound collections than anything in a periodical format — all of which is pretty much Fanta’s bread-and-butter at this point. Larry Reid also generated a lot of press for us — mostly in low circulation, indie music zines, but there was a lot of that at the time, so it had a cumulative effect. He especially generated a lot of hype for me and Dan, and the Bros, too. Other artists probably felt poorly served by Larry in comparison, but the four of us were relatively “easy sells” at the time, so he took as much advantage of that as he could. He helped make us all “famous,” albeit in a weird little world where Lydia Lunch and G.G. Allin were also “famous.” [laughs] CBC: You mentioned to me that Larry Reid said that you were the first person to use the phrase “alternative comics.” Is that so? Peter: So he claims! [laughs] I don’t recall coming up with that godawful phrase at all. [laughs] My hunch is I was probably the first person that Larry himself heard use it, y’know? CBC: You never talked to Larry about it? Peter: Yeah, and we argue about it constantly! But I’ve given up. I’ll take the “credit.” [laughter] When I started out I thought I was making “underground” comics, but some former underground artists, like Robert Williams, seemed to resent someone like me adopting that term, since he felt that back in the ’60s they were “underground” in the same way the French Resistance was. [laughs] He told me that then-Governor Reagan was building secret concentration camps to put people like him in! Meanwhile, other folks, like Spiegelman, seemed eager to shed that word for other reasons, since it evoked a very specific kind of comic book, Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

like Dealer McDope or Dr. Atomic. No one quite knew what to refer to this sudden new wave of self-published comic books as, so for a while some people were called it “Nu Wave comics,” and Nu was spelled N-U. [laughs] I recall a special edition of The Comics Journal dedicated to “Nu Wave Comix” from around 1984 or so — a term that was used to describe both Gary Panter’s work as well as Jim Valentino’s, simply because they both printed their comics up at Kinko’s. CBC: You self-published Comical Funnies, which was a local New York City audience, right? Was that locally distributed? Peter: Yeah. Holmstrom knew this Mafia-owned newsstand distribution company that used to distribute Punk for him in the New York City area. They did a pretty good job of it, too! CBC: There was no thought of hooking up with a dealer or distributor, Kitchen Sink or Bud Plant? Peter: Yes, and at least some of them took a handful of them. Phil Seuling’s old company took the most, back when he was still alive. Later I tried to get Denis Kitchen to publish my work as well as distribute it, with no luck. He was reluctant to take chances with crude unknowns like myself… or the Bros, or Dan Clowes and countless other people. He passed on all of us! Of course, years later, he told me, “I wish I did publish your comic.” No hard feelings, I understood it. We were all surprised that Fantagraphics didn’t tell us to take a hike!

This page: Beware having preconceived notions about Peter Christian Bagge, folks! The man likes what he likes, so assuming he fits into any Seattle stereotype behooves no-one! For one thing, his appreciation for the Spice Girls is quite sincere, as evidenced by the above full-page strip that appeared in Seattle Weekly [’98]. He extrapolated the experience into a three-page story in Spice Capades [’99].

CBC: What is the Action Suits? Peter: Only the best band ever! By 1996, Eric Reynolds had Larry Reid’s old job as the PR guy at Fantagraphics. Eric and I became friends as soon as he started working there, back when he was still an intern. He was living in a house not far from where I live, in this big, cheap, junky rental with a bunch of other guys, most of whom also worked for Fantagraphics, or had something to do with comics. Anyhow, a bunch of them formed a band: Eric, his friend Andy, and the cartoonist Al Columbia. Another cartoonist, Jeremy Eaton, must have been involved at one point since he was the one that came up the band’s name, but Jeremy has this thing about never playing the same song more than once. [laughs] He’s Mr. Freeform, while the others were trying to compose and play actual songs. None of them were real musicians; they all bought these cheap, second-hand instruments and were teaching themselves how to play. I had no idea what they were up to until I saw them at a Halloween party at Jim Woodring’s house and he let those guys play in the basement. They would rotate instruments because they all wanted to play guitar, and none of them really could play drums very well. So, at one point, I started playing the drums for them. I had a drum kit when I was in junior high and high school, and I still knew how to play, somewhat. I told them I’d join them only if they got a paying gig. So then Larry Reid stepped in and said, “You can play at this bar I work at downtown for $50.” Meaning a total of $50, so I was like, “I get $12.50?” [Jon laughs] “Well, you didn’t say how much. You just said a ‘paying gig.’” [laughter] CBC: So, do you still play? Peter: A bit, off and on. But what happened with the Suits was, I thought we were starting to sound pretty good — good enough for me to stick around beyond that first $50 gig. I also thought Eric was a good songwriter and, as the songs took shape, I developed a strong desire to record them. Making a record was something I always wanted to do — much more so than playing live in front of people, which I don’t particularly enjoy. Somehow we convinced a producer friend of ours named Steve Fisk to record us, who made us sound much better than we actually were. We eventually put out four 45’s, and I think we played one or two times after that, but then I quit. I was a lot older than my bandmates, and I was getting pretty self-conscious about this whole being in a band thing. Plus they wanted to play louder, and get more “grunge-y.” So I quit and they kept going with another drummer for a while, and then gave it up themselves. Anyhow, ten years later, my Japanese publisher asked if I wanted to put out some kind of a CD project. They had done that with Woodring, where he got some of his musician friends to write music that was either inspired by or could accompany his own comics. And they asked if I wanted to do the same thing, only instead I asked, and they agreed, to put out a complete Action Suits CD. The only problem was that we had to record more songs to make a complete CD. So I asked the Action Suit guys if they were up for it. And there were a bunch of songs that we had left over which we never finished and we all liked, so we recorded five more songs and put out the record. But that’s it. There’s been no shows or anything like that since then. CBC: How did it do? Peter: I think it sold terrible! Which is largely our fault, since we did next to nothing to promote it. It’s a shame, too, since I think it’s a really good CD for the most part. I’m very proud of it. CBC: Did you ever get a check for it? Peter: They gave us an advance, out of which we paid Fisk, who also recorded our final songs. We did it in his house, which is three blocks from mine. CBC: You did a bunch of artwork for the CD, right? Peter: Yeah. Well, Eric inked it and Joanne colored it, and we reprinted our old 45 covers and other nonsense in the CD booklet. That was the other fun thing about making records: drawing and designing the covers! In fact, #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

CBC: Did you think of self-publishing your own work? Peter: I did. After we stopped doing Comical Funnies, I was building up work to do my own comic book, and it turned out my friend Ken Weiner was doing the same thing. So, because we were friends and hanging out all the time, we decided to pool our resources, and put out a two-sided comic book. This is 1982 and we called it Wacky World. It had two covers. On one side, I did the cover, and it was my work all the way to the centerfold. And then if you flipped the book, it was The Wacky World of Ken Weiner, and it was all his work going all the way through his half of the book. We thought it was a clever format at the time, but it proved to be an awkward one. Also, at one point Ken decided the entire book should be rated G, and he wanted to market it to kids, which I was totally opposed to, especially since I was almost done with my decidedly un-kid friendly side of the book. Plus, if I was gonna pay to have this thing printed, there was no way I was gonna censor myself. But, when Ken would get a bee in his bonnet, there’s no dissuading him, so he scrapped everything he had done up to then and made his half all-ages appropriate anyway. So, by then, the book was a bit of a miss-match. Why we didn’t just make it two separate books by that point is beyond me. Laziness, I guess. CBC: You wanted to self-publish and wanted to sell the thing, right? Did anyone know your name? You called it The Wacky World of Peter Bagge and Ken Weiner. Just from the name itself. Peter: Just the people who were already familiar with Comical Funnies and Stop magazine. We printed 2,000 and sold them all eventually. CBC: Were you at all interested in the mini-comics stuff that was coming out. You did Donna’s Day… Peter: That I did years later. A local named Donna Mathis sent me a bunch of her autobiographical mini-comics. The art was very crude, but the stories were great — very straight-forward and honest. I suddenly got inspired to re-draw one of her stories, just to see how it would come out and she gave me permission to do so. She must have thought I was nuts. But I did a few mini-comics before then. I collaborated with J.R. Williams on one. J.R. was from Portland, and was sending me his mini-comics while I was still living in Hoboken. I liked them a lot, and after we moved out here he moved in with us for a month or two. We were both going through a Basil Wolverton craze at the time, especially his over-the-top, doomsday-ish sci-fi stuff, so we did a satire of it called Eat Sh*t or Die. Michael Dowers published it for us. I later did one on my own called Testosterone City, which Mike also printed it up for me. I never printed up a mini-comic on my own. Even Donna’s Day was published from someone in England named Pete Pavement. He did it in this odd format where it can be sent like a postcard. CBC: Now, one of the things that obviously plagued underground comix, and certainly plagued the Seattle scene, was drugs. Was that ever a problem with you? Peter: With me personally? [laughs] CBC: Well, yeah. Peter: No. I can barely handle pot. I just rely on good old-fashioned booze and an occasional cigar or cigarette to shave years off of my life, thank you very much. And to be honest, I never noticed hard drugs being much of a scourge among cartoonists. We can’t afford it! A lot of pot smoking, which no one has ever died from, but that’s pretty much it. That and acid. Does that count as a “hard drug”? I never touched that stuff either. When I first moved to Seattle, what was rampant here — as well as everywhere else back in 1985 — was cocaine. It was generally considered harmless back then, so I tried it a few times just to be social. But I really didn’t like it. It just made me speed. It was probably lousy cocaine, too, it made my heart race, and I didn’t like that, either. And coming down from it was the worst. What a stupid drug!

at one point, in the late ’80s, someone asked me to draw a record sleeve for them, which really excited me, since that was something I always wanted to do, but I also thought no one would ever ask. And I’ve since done a lot of record and CD covers. Every year I do at least a couple, it seems. CBC: And you still like it? Peter: Yeah, I love doing that. The bands that ask me are almost always very garage rock, very raw, crude, grunge garage type music, though. Which is understandable, because my art style more or less matches with that whole approach. And that music is fine, but it’s not my favorite kind of music. I’m a real Beatles/Beach Boys kind of guy. I like a lot of pop with my rock. But, for whatever reason, nobody who does that style of music has ever asked me to illustrate their record. CBC: We were talking about marketing and your interest in the sales figures of Neat Stuff. Do any trends come to your mind, like certain covers did well, or anything, with all the questioning that you gave? Peter: Yeah, all of which lead to my switching to Hate. Fantagraphics would have been happy with me continuing to do Neat Stuff, since each issue sold better than the one before it. Where the first issue might have sold 5,000, by the time I quit, it was something like 9,000, so it slowly was going up. And they were starting to put out book collections of the individual characters from it. But one change I definitely wanted to make was to switch from a magazine to the comic-book format. I figured that would help sales, plus I like the way that looks better. I also wanted not only a new name, but as short a name as possible, one that would make for a short, catchy logo. Another was to have the focus on one character and make the comic about him or her. The ground-level guys that were self-publishing, like Dave Sim and Jeff Smith, their comics were doing extremely well, and they were focused on one character, y’know? The titles were one name and it was one character. I was going to name my comic after its main character. I was gonna call it Hey, Buddy! But, in a moment of madness, I settled on Hate. [laughs] I just thought that would be even easier to remember and I liked that it was a short, punchy name. It proved to be a problematic name because it’s about as negative a word as you can conceive. And to make matters worse, the word “hate” was becoming increasingly politicized, and more and more synonymous with racism. So for a while there, I found myself constantly having to explain myself about the title. CBC: What, the Aryan Nations ordered a lot of copies? [laughs] Peter: I wish! Seriously, though, I found the whole thing very annoying and self-righteous. Like, how do you criminalize a verb? And who doesn’t hate someone or something? Don’t all good progressive left-wingers hate Nazis? And that being the case, are they guilty of “hate speech” when they speak of them? Don’t get me wrong: I totally understand the logic behind why it’s applied to certain groups and I’m sympathetic to the motives behind “hate crime” laws. But all people are equally capable of violence and tyranny, regardless of your background or ideology. And if you’re murdered in cold blood by Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

someone of your own race, how is your death any less tragic than if you were killed by someone of a different race? Are you less dead somehow? Does your mother miss you less? CBC: You say it was a sticky wicket to have the name Hate. Was it explicitly problematic at any point? Peter: Not at any one point, but it did seem to become more of a problem as time went on — to the point that I was reluctant to tell strangers what the real name of my comic was! I even considered changing it when I switched to color — call it Hey, Buddy! #1 or something, but I decided to stick with it. It’s a great name for a comic book, and it at least sort of describes what a cynical smart-ass I am, so what the hell. CBC: And you still stand by it. Peter: Sure. Well, why change it at this point? Though if I were to start over, I probably never would have called it Hate in the first place. CBC: Was your intention when you came out with Hate: okay, you’re going to focus on a single character, specifically to take on the Gen-Xers? Peter: Well, no, actually. That demographic term didn’t even exist yet. I simply had so many ideas for Buddy. Over the course of the run of Neat Stuff, I was not only doing more and more stories with the Bradley family, but even more stories that featured Buddy — the obvious reason being that he was the most autobiographical of all my characters. I assumed that that’s why his stories in Neat Stuff always got the best response. So it was a no-brainer. And the other thing was, by that time, by 1990, I had already been married a while, and was starting to make a semblance of a living off of my comics. Plus we owned a house by then, and we had a kid on the way. So, all of a sudden, this whole aspect of my life, my former identity as would later be called a “slacker,” was all very much behind me: being a young man new to the city, living on your own for the first time; having no money, living on canned soup — all of a sudden that was completely in my past. Thus, I was able to look at the previous ten, 15 years of my life objectively. I was no longer stuck in the middle of it, and it immediately became a source for hundreds of story ideas. When I was in the middle of it, it wasn’t funny. It was stressful! But once I was free of it, then it was funny. As Mel Brooks says, “Comedy is when you slip on a banana peel, and tragedy is when I

This page: Gadflies were all abuzz when Peter Bagge began using inker Jim Blanchard and went from black-&-white to four-color starting in Hate #16 [Fall ’94]. Above is a panel featuring one ticked-off Buddy from Hate #27 [Apr. ’97]. Hues by Joanne Bagge. After the final issue, Bagge commenced Hate Annual, starting in 2001 and lasting for nine issues, in 2011. That’s Bagge and Blanchard inset, drawn by P.B.

slip on a banana peel.” [laughter] I was no longer slipping on that particular banana peel, so now it was comedy. [laughter] CBC: It was ten years’ perspective. Peter: Yeah. And I already had this character that people knew and liked, so I might as well keep him and build on him. I aged him a bit and pulled him out of New Jersey simply because I no longer lived in Jersey. Actually, I never did live in the “real” Jersey — I grew up in Westchester County, New York. I picked Jersey over Westchester as the Bradley’s home just because of what those two names evoke. Both places are suburbs of New York and they both have their own rich and poor areas, their pretty and polluted areas. But when you say “Westchester,” people think of Scarsdale, but when you say “Jersey,” people think of Rahway,

you know? CBC: And New Jersey’s just plain funnier. [laughs] Peter: Yeah. New Jersey is always funny, to paraphrase Sam Henderson for the millionth time. [laughter] Westchester County is never funny. [laughter] But, by 1990, I hadn’t lived in New York or New Jersey in over five years and my memory of the East Coast was getting both fuzzy and dated. But I still wanted to keep that sense of place, so I was thought Buddy Bradley could move to Seattle for more or less for the same reasons that I moved. It’s often been suggested that I placed him here simply to exploit everything that the word “Seattle” evokes but, in 1990, Seattle didn’t evoke anything, other than rain. That all changed a few years later, of course, what with the Nirvana phenomenon, and next thing you know the city’s full of German journalists passing out in bars. [laughs] You would think, well, maybe Hate wouldn’t have done as well if it wasn’t for the association, but that wasn’t true, because Hate right out of the gate was selling almost twice as well as Neat Stuff ever did, and the second issue sold even better. And again, this was all before the whole grunge/slacker/Gen-X nonsense took off. It predated all of that. In fact, by, like, 1992, ’93, sales pretty much of leveled off. So for all I know Hate suffered from the association! The main reason why I used to be so obsessive about sales was that with Fantagraphics, that had everything to do with how much I earned. Hate was pretty much my sole source of income throughout the ’90s, and I was paid is a percentage of royalties, so the more it sells, the more money I make. It’s still the case with Hate Annual, but that only comes out once a year, and a lot of it is reprinted material from other sources. But other than that: with the work I’m doing for Reason, and the work I do with Dark Horse, or when I do something for Marvel or DC, I get a flat page rate, so with them I never bother to ask how my work is selling. I know how much I’m gonna make paid either way, so what do I care? [laughs] CBC: Was there any time during when you were doing Neat Stuff when you said, “This should be comic book-sized, really.” Peter: Yeah, right from the beginning I wanted it to be comic book-sized.

CBC: Do you attribute the relative boffo sales of Hate #1 as compared to Neat Stuff as because it was comic-sized? Peter: That, plus I never even considered how perfectly Buddy Bradley reflected alternative comics’ core demographic: college age, urban dweller, white, male, etc. Something that became more of a problem for me since then is that when I do comics that reflect my more adult life — like, say, in the form of Chet and Bunny Leeway, or even the Buddy stories I’m doing now — your typical alternative comic reader doesn’t relate to it at all. In fact, they’re put off by it, based on the feedback I get. It’s “boring.” And former Hate readers who would relate simply don’t read comics anymore. They don’t go to comic shops. They’ve got more pressing concerns on their mind… CBC: Mortgages. Peter: To say the least. That’s why so many of my old fans love the fact that they can see my recent stuff online. In fact, at the last few conventions I’ve been to, people talked to me about my recent work for Reason magazine far more than anything else, simply because it’s all online. A lot of younger folks who approached me only know me because of Reason! CBC: Why did Hate go to color? And you even got Jim Blanchard as an inker, right? Peter: Well, alternative and underground comics were always in black&-white for obvious economic reasons. I always preferred underground and alternative comics because of their content, but I also always wished that they were in color, or that they at least had the option of being in color. Color was the one thing that mainstream comics had over alternative comics, though I understood that undergrounds and alternatives don’t sell as much, and they don’t get the revenue from all the Hostess Twinkies ads, which could cover the cost of printing in full color. But, by the mid-’90s, Hate was consistently selling a certain amount, and coloring costs were becoming much lower thanks to Photoshop, which also made coloring much, much easier. I worked out the math with Kim Thompson, and he said, “Yeah, this looks do-able. We probably could do Hate as a full-color comic book.” So we did! It was something I always wanted to do, and to this day I was flabbergasted at what a negative reaction it got. For some reason, adding color to the interior, constituted a “sell-out.” I don’t understand that at all, other than color’s association with mainstream comics. But the color vs. b-&-w has nothing to do with what makes a comic good or bad, “alternative” or “mainstream.” It’s the content, it’s what the comic is about. Besides, every single alternative comic book has a color cover. So if we’re anti-color, then why is it okay for every single comic book cover to be in full, lurid color? No one’s ever suggested the covers should be b-&-w as well! The reason I decided to work with Jim Blanchard was three-fold. One, I wanted the stories to be denser. The format went from being three-tiered in

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

This spread: Peter and Joanne Bagge moved to Seattle in the late 1980s, just prior to the “Grunge era,” when a few years after the young couple’s arrival in Washington state, the city would become a center of Generation-X culture for a period, best epitomized by the success of the rock band Nirvana and other “Seattle sound” groups. This page top left is a Bagge drawing from Noah Van Sciver’s sketchbook; top right is an interesting P.B. commercial job; above is a panel from a 2005 strip. Next page features, at top, Bagge’s rendition of Fantagraphics’ history, making mention of the recent passing of co-publisher Kim Thompson; and inset is a detail from the cover of Buddy Does Seattle [’05].

the black-&-whites to four-tiered, which meant there was going to be a lot more “story” per page, and more visual information on for every page. So, in that sense, it was going to be busier. Blanchard’s line work was a lot cleaner than mine. Mine was a bit jagged in comparison. So I thought that it would look be more legible, in a sense, if he inked it for me. Two: I thought I could keep the pace up easier with his help, because I knew between coloring it and having denser stories, I knew it was going to be more labor-intensive than the b-&-w issues and it would take me longer to do an issue. So having an inker would save me on some labor and I could still maintain that quarterly schedule I was on. And three: Back then I didn’t know how to use Photoshop, but people told me that, to make coloring a lot easier for whoever is doing the production work, it’s important to have everything “trapped,” everything delineated into neat shapes in each panel. You can’t have any broken lines or open lines. You have to trap everything so that you could use that paint bucket tool and just go “bloop, bloop, bloop,” and drop the colors in. For that reason, too, I thought that Blanchard’s inking would be better suited for that purpose. CBC: How was it working with him? Peter: Fine! I’d already known him for years. He was a production guy at Fantagraphics, and he’s a very unflappable, reliable fellow to work with. CBC: He’s got some insane artwork, doesn’t he? Peter: Yeah, his own stuff, yeah. [laughter] He’s very drawn to all things creepy and off-putting. Which gives him a bit of a wild-man, weirdo persona, but he’s actually a very regular, easy-going guy. CBC: Now, with your lettering, did you reach a point during Hate, did you come up with a font? Peter: No. I have a font that was made by one of my German publishers, just to make life extremely easy for them when they translated it. CBC: Oh! So it was all hand-lettered throughout? Peter: My own lettering? Yes. I only use the font myself for the captions in my Reason features, not only because they’re so wordy, but also because my Reason editors ask for changes and corrections right up to the last minute, which made doing it all by hand nearly impossible. They’re insane sticklers when it comes to grammar and fact-checking and accuracy. They’re real killjoys, the way they never let me tell big whopping lies to make my point. [laughter] Other than that I lend out the font to publishers to use in ads for my own work and such. CBC: But other than that, all your American stuff has always been hand-lettered? Peter: Yes. Even the word balloons in the Reason strips are hand lettered. CBC: Even Bat Boy? Peter: Yes. CBC: Did you say sales of Hate plaComic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

teaued when it went to color? Peter: Yeah, before that, even. There was a small jump when we made the switch, but they were flat after that, and then even started to trend downwards — which I found frustrating, because I thought I was making a superior product, and I also thought it kept getting better. We started taking ads after five or so issues, but we used that ad revenue to start running back-up strips by other artists, and collaborations and what-not, as well as keep the cover price fixed at $2.95. The last issue of Hate was, like, 48 pages long, full-color (or mostly in color), all for a measly $2.95. It was such a great buy! Plus those last five issues of Hate were the best thing I’ve ever done up to that point. Anyhow, doing that comic book still took up 90% of my time, so the slight dip in sales was a frightening omen. Meanwhile, I was getting more and more lucrative other offers from elsewhere. That was the time of the dot-com boom, and I was getting all these ridiculous offers to work on all sorts of online nonsense, along with various showbiz possibilities: MTV and HBO and FOX after that. CBC: When was Hate #30? Peter: That was 1998. CBC: Were you the best-selling Fantagraphics comic book? Peter: Back then, through most of the ’90s I was, but not by much. It wasn’t like there was a big gap. Hate, Eightball, and Love and Rockets were all pretty close, and later I think Chris Ware’s comic outsold all of us. CBC: How does the Annual do? Peter: They do all right, but it’s back down to Neat Stuff numbers, like 7,000 or so, I think. I’m not sure! CBC: So it’s really the hardcore Peter Bagge fans, do you think? Peter: I guess. Whoever that is. I don’t know if you can make any generalizations about who’s buying the Annuals. It’s probably some weird mish-mosh of people. Anyhow, what’s selling for them these days are books. It’s not comic books. Bookstores are where the money is for them these days. CBC: Oh, I’m sure. With Peanuts, I’m sure they do. Peter: Right. Or anything with an odd format: super-huge or skinny and long, etc. Bookstores seem to be going for novelty, as far as format goes. They’re marketed as curious objects as much as they are something you might want to read. With Hate Annual’s format I was still trying to think about keeping the cover price down, such as by making the cover stock and interior pages the same paper stock. It’s heavy, shiny paper, but it’s all the same. It has no separate cover stock. But I gave up trying to keep the cost down, since it doesn’t seem to matter what you charge for it. The same 7,000 people will buy it anyway, within reason. CBC: When MTV called, did any of this go to your head? Peter: [Laughs] Not really. At least, I don’t think so. I just remember being very stressed out throughout that whole thing. Hate had been optioned many times before that, so it was nice to 71

Peter: Yes. We just made this animatic, which is like a storyboard with a voice track accompanying it, though the Hate animatic had a lot of movement to it. It’s based on the first issue of Hate, where Buddy introduces himself and his roommates. And that’s all. It’s literally like all of the characters being introduced. They showed it to focus groups consisting of high school- and college-aged kids, along with another animatic for another show that I was in a horse race with. I wanted to attend these focus groups myself, but was told not to, since they said creators tended to have nervous breakdowns at these things [laughter]. Instead, my co-workers had nervous breakdowns, over-reacting to every criticism these kids made about the animatic. They panicked, and told their bosses that they thought Hate had to go back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, the company that runs these focus groups issued a report claiming that Hate tested well, and that strongly recommend MTV greenlight it, based on focus group‘s response. So I thought I was in the clear, but everyone at MTV went with the other show, and sent Hate back to the drawing board. We did some more work on it, but, by then, the die was cast. They only had a budget for one new animated show, and Hate wasn’t it. So I went through the motions for another week or so before going home for good. I was pretty disappointed by that experience. I felt pretty let down by a lot of people I had put my trust in, but I was mostly disappointed in myself for not always following my gut instincts, and worrying too much about not bruising anyone else’s ego. Mike Judge warned me about that very thing going into this, but I didn’t take his advice enough to heart. CBC: What did you want out of all this? Peter: To get a TV show, obviously. Comic books are very laborious. I didn’t want a future that was more of the same: chained to a drawing table with diminishing returns from all my efforts. A TV show seemed like the best way to cash in on all my efforts, since the rewards are potentially huge. Even now, the only way that I could ever be rich or envision retiring comfortably is via Hollywood, either a TV show or a movie. I’ve figured out other ways to make decent money in the meantime, but none of them could ever pay off like a TV show potentially could. So I still go through this routine every time the possibility arises, though the results have always been the same, obviously. I don’t let all the ups and downs get to me like I used to, though. It’s not worth the aggravation. I still put my best foot forward, but now when it all goes south I’m like, “Eh, whatever.” I remind myself that 25 years ago the idea of someone like me creating a TV show was completely out of the question, so who knows what other kinds of twists and turns are in store for me over the next 25 years. So now I just try to keep myself busy doing this and that, and let the chips fall where they may. It’s funny: I thought my one shot at the Big Time was through when my MTV deal died. But then a comedian friend named Dana Gould, who back then was the king of dead pilot deals, told me I was being silly, and had his agent wife take me on as a client, who in the blink of an eye got me a development deal HBO that paid twice as much as my MTV deal. But that went south, too. [laughs] But, by then, I learned that good money can be made in the business of not making movies and TV shows, [Jon laughs] and that it’s nothing to lose sleep over. I’ve worked on dozens of outlines and scripts that’ll never be made, but I usually got paid decent money to do it, so who gives a sh*t. It’s what Elmore Leonard called the Golden Welfare Check. CBC: A world of options. Do you ever try to come up with concepts and, y’know, new characters and work it? Peter: Only if there’s money involved. I don’t want to work on spec, and doing something new almost always involves spec work. Besides, that’s what comic books are for! [laughs] If I have a good idea for a new character, I might as well try him or her out in comic-book form first, and develop it that way. Make a few sheckles off of it as well while I’m at it. I’m way too #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

reach the point of having a real development deal for the first time, but the money was hardly great. I was losing money by working on that pilot rather than staying home and working on my comic book. Plus I was getting pulled in countless directions: producers and lawyers and agents all positioning themselves for maximum profit should the thing take off. You try to make everyone happy when your in that situation, but it’s impossible. To be honest, the weirdest adjustment for me was when I suddenly became a successful and relatively famous alternative cartoonist, since prior to that such a creature barely existed. This was the early ’90s, when Hate started selling well. I was far from rich and hardly famous in the real sense of the word, but you wouldn’t know it from the way people started acting towards me. Suddenly it was all extremes: gushing fans who go overboard in their praise for you and their eagerness to please, mixed with severe resentment and an eagerness to assume the worst about me. And sometimes this would all come from the same person! It messes with your reality, like you’ve suddenly been transposed into another person’s body. You can’t believe it’s the same old you that they’re talking to. All your life people treat you a certain way, for the most part, which forms your identity. Then all of a sudden, everyone’s acting differently towards you, and telling you that you’re the one that’s acting different, which may be true to some degree, but there’s a lot of projecting going on as well. It’s extremely difficult to get used to. It doesn’t surprise me at all that young pop stars or athletes go off the deep end so often. I can’t imagine how anybody could deal with that level of fame at such a young age. I certainly couldn’t have. CBC: So what was the MTV pitch? How did that come about? Peter: Oy. Around ’93, ’94, I started getting lots of phone calls — almost always an independent producer who wants to option Hate to turn it into an indie flick, which is still the case. I’ll usually sign on with one of these guys at some point, for the option money. I’d hope for the best, of course, but sometimes the guy I signed on with would turn out to be such an incompetent moron that I’d be praying that no movie gets made. The option time can’t run out fast enough in those situations. Anyhow, in the wake of that Crumb documentary, Terry Zwigoff suddenly had some clout, and he wanted to do Ghost World. He also called me about the rights to Hate, but it was optioned by someone else at the time. Once that option lapsed, I called Terry to see if he was still interested. He had already started working with Clowes on Ghost World, so he was preoccupied, but he set me up with some friends of his who have an independent production outfit called Bona Fide. They only had one or two movies under their belt at that time, nothing too remarkable, but since then they produced that movie Election, which I loved. And more recently they produced Little Miss Sunshine. So I met them and liked them a lot, so much so that I agreed to let them pitch it without an option. They were the most together producers I’ve ever worked with, before or since. CBC: They must have made good money with Little Miss Sunshine. Peter: I’d imagine, but I haven’t seen them in ages, so who knows. Anyhow, they pitched Hate to MTV’s movie division, and the guy there liked it, but he had to run it by his bosses in New York, and said, “Don’t be surprised when I show them the source material that they might decided to turn it into a TV show.” And that’s exactly what happened. I got really excited over that prospect, because the idea of doing a movie never really appealed to me. I never could see Hate as a movie. But it always seemed like a natural to not only do it as a TV show, but do it as an animated TV show, since that would most reflect what it’s like as a comic book. So against the preferences of the guys from Bona Fide, who were movie guys, I pushed for it to be a TV show. So after months of painful negotiations to work out a deal, I wound up in New York for a month or two, trying to develop Hate as a TV show. CBC: As an animated TV show?

old to work on something for free. CBC: But you did Studs Kirby, you’ve done Junior, you’ve done Girly Girl, you’ve done all these different kinds of characters. I’d almost argue, isn’t there possible life in Girly Girl, for instance? Peter: She’s been optioned in the distant past, but she also wound up on TV in disguise. There was a cartoon show called Eek! the Cat, this Saturday morning cartoon show [1992–97], and the main characters was this cat. But the cat lived with this very aggressive little boy and girl, and the girl was Girly Girl, and the boy was a young Butch Bradley. They completely and blatantly ripped me off. [laughs] I contacted my lawyer and tried to sue. But she said, “Y’know, you could push this if you wanted to, but it’s going to be expensive to sue, and there’s a really good chance you won’t win.” It was Girly Girl from head to foot, but they just changed some of her coloring. Her hair was red or something. So, on that alone, a good lawyer would sway the jury that she’s a totally different character because her hair is red. They would also portray me as somebody who’s going after the network’s deep pockets, which happens often enough, and it would cost me $10,000 in attorney fees by the time I lost. So, for that reason, I didn’t sue and they got away with it. “Stewie” on the family Guy is a total ripoff of Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan as well. I eventually always run into some low-rung animator years later who worked on the show and will fess up to knowing about these rips offs – of being there and taking part in it — after it’s too late to do anything about it. They also always act surprised that I find such thievery annoying. So, yeah, of course I think Girly Girl could wind up on TV, because she already has! [laughter] She also was in development for a while with Klasky Csupo, and that never wound up on the air either. They pitched it to CBS, but CBS went with another show Klasky pitched to them instead. It was about Mexican insects or something and it was as awful as it sounds. It was on the air for about a month. CBC: You obviously have a style that can appeal to little kids. Peter: Right. Well, some kids. I’ve met some very young admirers of my MAD work. CBC: What about you developing your own kid-friendly characters? Peter: That comic book Yeah! was for kids, girls specifically, even though I didn’t draw it… CBC: Was that creator-owned? Peter: Yes, technically. It’s creator-owned in DC Time/Warner corporate language, which means I own it unless or until DC decides they want to do something more with it. Yeah! was once optioned as well, but DC made me wait for a month to decide if they wanted to develop it for TV instead, which of course they didn’t. It felt like they had given themselves sulking rights. Anyhow, I got a very lucrative development deal with Will Smith’s production company, of all people. [laughs] I can’t even remember if it was supposed to be a movie or a TV show. I got paid like $50,000 to write a script, and then I wound up never having to write the script. So I got paid $50,000 for doing absolutely nothing. CBC: Dude! Peter: I know. Will Smith found out about the deal after the fact, and said, “I don’t want to make this!” [laughs] But by then the check was cashed. CBC: Keep not makin’ sh*t. [laughs] You’ve got to get that annually, though. You seem to be a natural screenwriter. Peter: Annually would be fantastic! And, yeah, I’m a natural when it comes to writing nothing. CBC: Have you ever had any work produced? You Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015

said that staged that thing at COCA. Peter: Ha! Yeah, my five-minute long play. Well, probably the most complete thing I ever had produced were these animated cartoons that were made for the Internet called Rock ’n’ Roll Dad. It was about Murray Wilson, the Beach Boys father, of all things. I co-created and wrote those with Dana Gould. I was really happy with the way those cartoons came out, too. They were done in Flash, which can look cheap and awful, but the company that made them knew how to work with Flash really well. They were this start up company called Icebox.com, and like everyone else they were throwing money around like crazy. They even offered us stock options in the company in lieu of payment, which I reluctantly declined. I needed the money, but Dana opted for the stock options instead, which wound up being worthless once Icebox.com went belly-up. Six months later, I’m watching a Simpsons episode that Dana wrote, where some fast talking dot-com start-up guy is offering everybody stock options — which he’s pulling off a giant roll like it’s toilet paper [laughter]. The next gag was of someone whose actually using said stock options as toilet paper. CBC: Peter, what was the Rockin’ Poppin’ Favorites? Peter: That was one of several ridiculously high-paying gigs I was offered in the early 2000s. My “salad days.” EMI Records in England called me up with a dream job where, for an outrageous amount of money, they were offering me and other cartoonists a chance to pick out a bunch of our all-time favorite records, which they’d then get the rights for and put it on a CD compilation, and then we would illustrate the accompanying CD cover and booklet. I remember Clowes being super-jealous that he wasn’t offered the same deal — which was a shame, since a lot of the other artists put surprisingly little effort into their CDs. I slaved over mine, and I’m sure Dan would have, too. CBC: What was Yeah!? Peter: A kiddy comic I wrote for a while for DC. A Vertigo editor named Shelley Roeberg (now Shelley Bond) called me and she asked if I wanted to try my hand at writing something for Vertigo. I was willing to give it the old college try, but Vertigo was very Goth back then, with all that dark, moody Neil Gaiman business, and I couldn’t come up with anything that would fit in with that at all. But, at that time, I was still in the midst of my Spice Girl fever, and listening to a lot of teenybopper music I was really into as well, all these great singles coming out that I loved. And my daughter was a real girly-girl at the time and she was visually put off by my work back then. She used to always say, “Why don’t you draw something that a little girl would like?” It was like she had thrown down a gauntlet, you know? [laughs] So I ran the idea by Shelly, who was intrigued, and we went back and forth until we settled on something that was a quirkier version of Josie and the Pussycats. We also agreed to make it an all-ages title and not put it out on Vertigo. Quite a stretch from what she originally asked from me, but they also seemed keen on making yet another effort to attract younger female readers. And, as always, that effort failed. [laughs] They didn’t want me to draw it though, so I convinced Gilbert Hernandez to draw it for me. Gilbert was about to become a father, and was thinking he could use the regular paycheck, so I didn’t have to twist his arm as much as I would have in the past. In the past he would have told me to f*ck off! Yeah! was a lot of fun to work on, and I personally, was happy with it. I also loved that it was so different from Hate, but Hate’s readers were repulsed by it for that very reason. So there was very little crossover appeal going on there. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but… of course, DC was hoping that the people who were buying Hate would also buy this. [Jon laughs] CBC: I bet you a lot of them didn’t even know it was… Peter: Yeah, a lot knew nothing of Yeah!’s existence. 73

CBC: Was your editor Joey? Peter: Yeah, Joey Cavalieri. CBC: What is the Reason gig? What were you doing for them, and how’d you get it? Peter: Again, it started from one of those weird opportunities that kept coming my way back in ’98-99. There was a website called Suck, which basically was just a different humorous essay written by a rotating cast of contributors every day, usually under a pseudonym, and a couple of them were friends of mine, like former Journal editor Tom Spurgeon. They asked me if I would also write essays for them, but also illustrate them myself. What I did for them was quite different from what everybody else was, which were simple thousand-word essays. But, with me, they would even send me places. Like, they sent me to the Miss America pageant, to the Indy 500, and have me write rather extensive journalistic features on what I saw. Did you know that infomercials have their own Oscars? [laughter] They sent me to an infomercial awards ceremony. I traveled on the cheap for them, but it was amazing that they had money to send me to these places at all. More dot-com madness that eventually lead to ruin, since they went belly up like everyone else did. Anyhow, a lot of the people writing for Suck also write for or work for Reason magazine, which is a libertarian-leaning political and social commentary magazine, and since my own political leanings go in that direction, Reason’s editor figured it be a natural to have me start working for them as well. The only difference being that instead of doing illustrated essays, I would work in regular comic strip format. The prototype was actually a four-page strip I did for Details, where I covered an HBO comedy festival in Aspen. The whole idea was Art Spiegelman’s originally, who talked Details into letting a different cartoonist try his hand at playing journalist in each issue. It’s like cartoon journalism. Originally I was doing monthly one-pagers for Reason, but then they started having me do an occasional four-page feature, like the Details strip I just described. A lot of what I cover is local, but they occasionally send me to places, as well. It’s exhausting work, both the reporting and the execution of the strip, which is a real workout. They’re the most difficult things I’ve ever done, logistically speaking. But I guess it’s worth it, since I get a very good response from them, CBC: What was Bat Boy all about? Peter: An editor with the Weekly World News named Garry Messick asked me to try my hand at doing a strip for them. I was too intrigued and amused by the prospect of appearing in the notorious WWN to say no. So, after a long, drawn out back and forth, we decided the simplest thing to do would be for me to do an Adventures of Bat Boy strip, since I recall there being potential hang-ups about me or anyone else retaining the rights to anything appearing in WWN. Bat Boy was a popular faux-“real” character of their “news” stories. I did the strip for two years. It was fun to do and I was happy with the way it turned out. But I never intended to do it for very long, so once they announced that they were going to slash all pay rates (one of many signs that they were going out of business), I stopped doing the strip. A young cartoonist named Danielle Corsetto took over the strip after I quit and did it until the paper finally went under. Though they retained the copyright, the pay was decent and they gave me a lot of creative freedom, so I thought it was worth a shot. I also had never done a regular comic strip before, and wanted to give it a try. For a while they had the beginnings of a comic section, with weekly contributions by myself, Ernie Colón, and Sergio Aragonés. I passed Sergio’s booth at the San Diego Comic-Con at the time. He was busy signing autographs, but he saw me, held up a copy of WWN and shouted: “Hey Peter! How low can we go?” I said “We can’t go any lower! We hit rock bottom!” By the way, this year IDW is releasing a book collection of my Bat Boy strips, and it looks great, I must say! CBC: Why the Hate Annuals? Peter: The Annuals existed for two reasons: As a way keep the Hate characters alive, and to collect the many freelance jobs I do over the course of a year into one place. Sales were much less than the old Hate’s were. I still have tons of ideas for Buddy and company, but the relative lack of interest made it uneconomical for me to devote much time to drawing more of them. CBC: What was Apocalypse Nerd? Peter: I approached Dark Horse about doing a series for them after Sweatshop got killed. I still wanted to do a regular series or mini-series of some kind, but I also wanted a guaranteed flat page rate, which Fanta is disinclined to offer, and they agreed. #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

But of those who did, god, how they hated it. They thought I had lost my mind. Well, the problem, too, is everybody kept looking for irony in Yeah! They assumed I was trying to be ironic, or subversive, but I wasn’t at all. I was totally playing it straight. CBC: Well, that’s what I thought I saw in SpiceCapades, but, hey, I’m wrong there, too. [laughs] Peter: They were looking for a wink and a nudge for them, and it wasn’t there, because it wasn’t for them. I wanted to do something that was totally irony-free. I was sick of irony, which had become a plague during the ’90s. I wanted it to be totally sincere. My target audience was my daughter, who, of course, is not the target audience of Hate. Still, I thought that or more of my former readers would have been able to take it at face value and enjoy it for what it was. Some did, but not many. CBC: Was it ever collected? Peter: Yes, a year or two ago. Once DC’s publishing option runs out on it I can do with it as I please, and Fantagraphics already said that they would love to reprint it as a book collection. The same thing went for Sweatshop, a humor series I did for DC a few years later. Sweatshop was also creator-owned, but the contract reads more like a work-for-hire contract than anything else. I wonder why I even signed the thing. Oh, that’s right, I needed the money. CBC: What is the premise of Yeah!? Is it Josie and the Pussycats? Peter: Yeah, basically, though it didn’t start out that way. I had some other slightly quirkier, stranger ideas. But in the process of making it less weird and more familiar it also became more Josie-like. Well, they’re a three-piece all-girl rock band, so there you go. And one, the blond, is a ditz, though the ditz I was basing her on was the cartoonist Dame Darcy. [laughs] But the whole idea is when they play in outer space, they’re like the Beatles times ten; they’re the most popular group in the universe, ever. But because they’re human, they can’t live up there, and when they’re back on Earth, it’s the opposite. Here they’re the most unpopular band of all time. But because they’re human, they’re stuck on Earth. CBC: So it’s like a female Cheap Trick or something? Huge everywhere else, but at home… [laughs] Peter: Yes, and outer space is their Japan. They’re just three total losers who work at fast food chains. And their manager’s a total screwed up, a messed-up old loser. One problem with working for DC is that they insist that the titles come out monthly. I wish they didn’t. Neither I or Gilbert were used to doing anything on a monthly schedule, and even though we were dividing the labor we still were both working on other projects, so we couldn’t give Yeah! as much attention as we would have liked. Even a bi-monthly schedule would have been preferable, so we wouldn’t have had to blaze through each issue like lunatics. We had somebody else lettering and coloring it. They also insisted that someone else letter it, which Gilbert considered a relief, but I didn’t like it. The lettering didn’t match the art like it should have, and the balloon placements always seemed haphazard and awkward. When I later did Sweatshop, I insisted on doing the lettering myself. They thought I was nuts, since that’s the last thing most people want to do if they don’t have to, but I know it would have really bugged me otherwise. I specifically requested that the book be Comic Code Authority approved. I wanted to see if I could submit scripts that wouldn’t need any censoring — a perverse goal that I’m perversely proud to say I succeeded at 100% of the time! Sadly, it was all for naught. CBC: Was it a grind? Peter: Yeah, of course. Everybody hates to letter. It hurts your hand! CBC: What was Sweatshop? Peter: It was another series I did for DC about an old cartoonist, who does some real bad Garfield-like daily comic strip, and his crew of young assistants. Each assistant did his or her own comics on the side, and each was a different comic book prototype: the super-hero guy, the indie chick, the strident political guy, etc. It was set up as a way for me to make fun of every type of cartoonist imaginable. Once again, Sweatshop was a monthly, so there was no way I could do all the art myself. I did some of it, and I wrote all of it, but I had different artists collaborating on it with me. Eventually we’d settled on Johnny Ryan doing one story per issue, and a penciling-writing team of Stephanie Gladden and Jim Blanchard doing the other feature story. Plus Bill Wray would draw occasional one-pagers. I was really happy with that particular bunch, but after only six issues, the title was suddenly and unexpectedly cancelled, so that crew I just named only got to work on two issues. They greenlit it as a favor to my editor, it seems, and from what I was told it sold better than expected, so I don’t know why they yanked it out from under us so quickly.

The editor I approached there was Dave Land, who was working with Tony Millionaire at the time, and whom Tony spoke highly of. I pitched two ideas to him: One being the main story thread of Apocalypse Nerd, and the other being a comic book about the Founding Fathers. Dave suggested we combine the two, and when I considered how the two ideas sort of complemented each other — one being about the beginning of our country, and the other being the end of it — I thought it was a brilliant suggestion. Apocalypse Nerd was a six-part mini-series later collected into a graphic novel that I worked on between 2003–06, roughly. It was the first project I’d ever done for Dark Horse. It was inspired by the run up to our invasion of Iraq: the constant war drum beating by the press and our government — Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” (which turned out to be a lie) and what a grave threat he posed to U.S. security, etc. Meanwhile, at that same time I heard a news story where a spokesperson from North Korea said his nation now possessed the ability to nuke Seattle, which made me think of two things: one, we’re freaking out over the wrong country; and two, I live in Seattle! That later led to a lot of what ifs: Could someone like me survive a nuclear attack? And if so, how? Thus a “graphic novel” was born. CBC: Seeing Peter Bagge doing Spider-Man and Hulk stories was startling, to say the least. What were those assignments all about? Peter: The idea for me doing a one-shot Spider-Man — and later, the Hulk — comic was my editor’s, Axel Alonso. Marvel was floundering at the time, so they were willing to take insane risks, apparently. Originally, the idea was that I’d just write the Spider-Man comic, and someone else would draw it. I asked both Robert Crumb and Dan Clowes and both of them seriously considered it before passing. At that point, I couldn’t think of anyone who’d be ideally suited to draw the story that I had in mind for it, so I asked Axel if I could draw it myself and he agreed. That Spidey comic sold fairly well, thanks to it coming out in the wake of that hugely successful Spider-Man movie, when even a turd with Spidey’s logo on it was likely to sell. In fact, it also was the single best-selling comic I’ve ever done, though I was told it also was the worst selling Spider-Man comic in that character’s history! Still, they made money off of it, and it also attracted buyers who don’t buy Marvel comics otherwise, so it was agreed that I’d give the Hulk a similar treatment in time for that movie’s release, and possibly the same for the X-Men, etc. I actually dropped the ball by being way too slow to get started on the Hulk comic for it to come out in time for the movie, since I was preoccupied with Sweatshop at the time. Axel let me finish it anyway, but the new owners of Marvel killed it once I was finished with it, since they claimed I was “messing with the Brand.” Which I was, of course, since that was the entire point. The new bosses also thoroughly white-washed my story while I was still working on it, yet even that wasn’t good enough for them. Once those new owners sold the company to Disney it eventually appeared in a Strange Tales collection ten years later. CBC: Are you continuing to “live the life,” Peter? Is it “Bagge’s World and Welcome To It”? Are you content where you are or do you have plans for the future? Peter: I still make a comfortable living, so I have no real complaints. I also like the fact that I’ve been able to try my hand at so many different things over the past decade, while getting paid for it at the same time. Some of these projects have been total commercial failures, of course, but, still, never a dull moment! I also wonder how long I’ll be able to get away with being Mr. Scatter-shot, trying my hand at this, that, or the other thing, since doing so tends erode one’s “identity.” I keep thinking that one of these projects will take over eventually and thus define who I am for a good long while. The Reason strips, or something like it, seem to be the most likely candidate at the moment, but Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

you never know. CBC: To round this massive interview out, let’s talk about some recent projects: What is “Can You Imagine?” Peter: Can You Imagine? is a band I’ve been in for the last eight years. It’s made up of a bunch of neighbors of mine, basically, and the only “real” musician in the group is our keyboardist, Steve Fisk (who played on and produced all the Action Suits recordings). I was the drummer in the Suits, but in this band I play guitar (more “creative control” that way!). We started out just covering obscure ’60s songs, but we put out two full-length CDs of original material, as well. Very ’60s inspired power pop. It’s just a weekend hobby thing and we play out once every few months. But I’m very proud of the recordings we’ve made and even managed to get one song licensed for an Internet ad. So we’re trying to make a few bucks while having fun as well. CBC: You’ve contributed to MAD magazine? Peter: That started in about, oh, 2000 or so. I have ever since, though my contributions have been very irregular. At their suggestions, I’ve submitted a few story ideas as well, but none passed muster, to my annoyance. I really don’t know how to come up with whatever it is they’re looking for, so I gave up trying. I liked drawing for them, though. The folks in their art department — Sam Viviano, Ryan Flanders — are great to work for. I, of course, don’t get much out of the magazine itself these days, since, like all former readers, their “golden years” happen to coincide with my own adolescence. Still, it’s MAD, so I can never turn them down when they offer me work. CBC: What do you think of the state of the alternative comics? Peter: The biggest change in the world of alternative comics to me is the huge format change from little floppy magazines to books. I have nothing against “graphic novels,” per se, and I love the fact that cartoonists can routinely work in a long form format now. But I miss the unself-conscious spontaneity that the comic-book format seemed to inspire, as well as the conciseness and shortness of them. Too many graphic novels are drawn-out and thus a bit dull, in my opinion. Still, there seems to be more “alternative” comic artists than ever, which is great, and I’m glad to see a recent expansion in style and storytelling approaches recently. For a while, a certain generic sameness was taking over the genre. It became just another genre, basically, when the whole point of the scene originally was to be anything but. That sameness still exists, but to a much lesser degree. CBC: Overall, what’s your assessment of your experience with the big boys, DC and Marvel?

Page 72: The cartoonist’s “Vomit Glossary,” from Neat Stuff #1, is used on a promotional barf bag. Page 73: A selection of Peter Bagge books from the last decade or so. Previous page: Background image is a P.B. self-portrait. Above: Page from one of P.B.’s Reason magazine assignments, this own decidedly autobiographical in tone. Below: A lamented DC series from the early ’aughts, Sweatshop was a look at the world of mainstream (read: assembly line) comics. Next page: Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story will be P.B.’s next book. His latest, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story, is also a graphic biography. Page 77: Portrait by Greg Preston.

CBC: “Location! Location! Location!” [laughs] Peter: So the idea behind Other Lives was it’s four people in real life who’s lives are connected, albeit in some cases tenuously. Like there was a couple, a guy and his girlfriend. They were two of the people. CBC: These are characters in the story. Peter: Yes. And then the two other characters were very tenuously connected to those two. And, in real life, they’re all going through different stages, like one guy used to be a mess, but he’s straightening his life out. He’s finally become a relatively healthy and productive person, but then the other guys’ real lives are going in the opposite direction. Like one guy develops a gambling addiction and he’s just ruining his life. He starts to gamble online. He’s playing online poker and keeps getting more and more in the hole. But then he also likes to go on Second Life and pretend he’s a king. So, in real life, he’s losing everything; his family, his home, his job… everything. But in Second Life, he has his own kingdom. So it’s all about how all these people’s lives collide, both in the real and the virtual world. And even though it’s about four people, you could say it’s really about eight people. So, the guy who has a girlfriend, the girlfriend starts going on Second Life. But to her, it’s just a giggle. To her, she completely separates this fantasy from reality. So she’d be kinda flirty with the gambling addict guy whose life is falling apart , and whom she knows in real life. But then in real life, he’d see her and he’d grab her ass and she’d be sincerely shocked. “What are you doing? [chuckles] Are you out of your mind?” But to him her Second Life flirting was very real. So what they want to get out of it is completely different, and it’s almost like they’re talking past each other. And things just compound themselves from there. CBC: What is Reset? Would you say it’s science-fiction? Peter: Not exactly, since everything that happens in it is plausible. It all could happen in the here and now. This one is about it a middle-aged guy who was a successful comedian. He even had a bit of a movie career. You could call him a C-Lister. But then his life and career fell apart. Now he’s scrambling just to get by. He winds up approached by these people who want him to take part in… well, they sell it to him as a “game,” where he’s immersed in this virtual reality world where he gets to relive his life. And they figured he’d be the perfect candidate for it, since his life is such a mess. So, for example, he could go back to a time in college or high school when he asked this girl out and she said no, only ask her again, but phrase it differently and see if she says yes and then see where it goes. “What would my life be like if I married that girl instead of the woman I did marry?” And you could keep following that thread all the way through. “What would happen with my career?” You know, you could play “What If?” forever with it. But needless to say, it all goes awry. CBC: So do you have something specific in the future that you’re starting to germinate, perhaps? Peter: I plan on doing more biographical comics for Drawn & Quarterly like the one I did about Margaret Sanger. CBC: This was the birth control advocate? Peter: Yes. She had the most amazing life. It s almost like she had ten people’s lives. Her focus, ambition, and energy were beyond belief. CBC: You worked for Reason magazine and you’re a self-professed libertarian. How do you reconcile being a darling, of sorts, of the Seattle grunge art community with its crunchy granola, radical politics? Peter: Well, first of all, nowhere in this country will you find such thing as a libertarian culture and community. If I #10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Peter: I’ll gladly consider working for either of them because from my experience so far, I’m a bit surprised at how much creative freedom they give me. Even when I’m doing adult material like, say, Other Lives, there’s certain things you have to know going in that they’re never ever going to be okay with, like full-frontal nudity. But other than that, they’ve been pretty good about my material. There can be some second guessing or panic decisions from the powers-that-be at times, but I always felt like my editors were supportive and on my side. With a few of the projects, there came a point where my editors’ bosses looked at what I was doing and went “Wait a minute… we agreed to publish this?” [laughs] Then they’d either cancel it or start gumming up the works. CBC: You said The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man was the lowest-selling Spider-Man title ever and it still did well for you. Peter: Yes. It’s also the best-selling thing I’ve ever done [chuckles]. It sold about 55,000 copies, I’m told. Hate #1 might have sold 40,000, grand total, including reprintings, which is a lot for an independent comic book company. And Marvel had to have made a profit off of my Spider-Man comic, or they wouldn’t have let me follow it up with a Hulk comic. CBC: Can you talk about Other Lives? Peter: I think I got to work on it around ’06 or ’07. For a long time, I’ve been very aware of how much peoples’ personalities can change when they go onto the Internet. CBC: The anonymity thing? Peter: Yeah, the human detachment. It changes peoples’ personalities. Some people start to do and say things they would never do or say in real life. Not necessarily in an evil way either, but they re-invent themselves. Then I was heard about this game or community called Second Life, which at that time was very newsy. It suddenly became a phenomenon. Now I’m sure it’s “over” since things come and go so fast. But five or ten years ago it was all the rage. CBC: In what sense? Peter: The newness of it, the novelty of it. Not that it was for everyone, but most people of a certain age at least tried it. When you go on it, you appear as an avatar. You can constantly redesign the way your avatar looks. You can be either sex or an animal or even a toaster if you’re so inclined. Not surprisingly, most people’s avatars looked like either Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. Yawn. [laughs] And, if you want, you could buy land. It has its own currency called Lindens. CBC: Were you on for a period of time? Peter: Yes. For about six months, to research this book, but also I found it fascinating. And I saw how people used Second Life for very different reasons. Some people made money off of it, while others simply honed or showed off their computer designing skills. Like, women who designed jewelry in real life would design virtual jewelry and sell it in Second Life. And if people liked it a lot, they could contact her in real life to buy her real jewelry. The amazing thing, too, is that there was a currency exchange rate between real money and virtual money. Ten Lindens was roughly the equivalent of one real dollar, so people can convert their earnings back into real money. Some people were making an actual living off of Second Life, especially off real estate. I kid you not. CBC: “Virtual real estate”? Peter: [Laughs] Yes. And all for the same reasons as “real” real estate: It’s got a view; it’s waterfront property; it gets plenty of traffic. “This would be a great spot for my sex club!”

moved to the suburbs or even out to the boonies — places where everybody makes fun of how left and progressive Seattleites are — I’d still be an ideological outcast. For completely different reasons, they’d be just as confused or put off by my libertarian views as people in the city are. Libertarians are fiscally conservative and a socially liberal, to put it mildly. I think I’m more liberal in the true sense of the word than most of my city friends. CBC: For instance? Peter: I’m for legalizing all drugs and legalizing prostitution, for example. I also believe in more freedom for small businesses and property owners and much less gun control, which to me are very liberal positions, but politics have contorted that word so much that few people would never define those positions as such. CBC: Do you have like-minded people or what’s it like? Peter: In Seattle? Wherever you go, no matter what community you’re in, there’s always going to be a smattering — like five to ten percent of the population — who have a very libertarian world-view, even if they don’t define themselves as such. We’re like left-handed people — roughly ten percent of the population wherever you go. What’s weird, though, is that libertarians are not particularly inclined to get together. A joke amongst Libertarians that with us, two’s a crowd. [Jon laughs] It’s like do I really want to get together with somebody who’s going to tell me what I already know? [laughs] CBC: Liberals need to get together for mutual affirmation. Peter: Right. Or to protest something, which nine times out of ten is all about shaking someone or something down for more money. Or religious conservatives, who get together in church and remind each other of what they believe in. CBC: They even have their own media. Peter: Yeah, their own news channels. Everyone has their own news channels now, spinning every story to reaffirm all their prejudices. My Facebook feed is unreadable at times, the way most people I know re-post the Obama administration’s latest talking points without questioning any of it. It’s completely Orwellian. CBC: Have you always been a libertarian? Peter: Yeah, I’ve just always leaned this way. I didn’t know there was a word for it. I always instinctively leaned that way. CBC: Westchester was a hotbed for supporting the New Frontier, Kennedy liberalism, civil rights… Peter: Yes, I was all much of that. I was all for civil rights and women’s rights, at least as far as it meaning equal rights under the law. I still am. I’m a civil libertarian as well, naturally. My mother tended to lean left, not that she ever defined herself as such. She was just inherently a liberal. She was quieter about it when my dad when he was still alive. My dad voted Republican usually. But he was a moderate Republican. An old fashioned Northeast “Rockefeller” Republican. Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

CBC: A Goldwater Republican? Peter: He voted for Goldwater, actually. What my dad disliked about the current GOP is the influence of the Religious Right, even though he understood that’s how Reagan and Bush pretty much got elected. But he couldn’t vote for Reagan, just because of the social-conservatives. He considered people like Jerry Falwell to be Neanderthals. The way Reagan and Bush pandered to them, he couldn’t stomach it. CBC: So how’s your family? Is your mom still with us? Peter: She just passed away at 94. Lived at least five years too long, sadly. Not much quality of life, but she sure was terrified of dying. She thought dying was “stupid.” Her words! Only sometimes it isn’t. And caring for her exhausted my sister. CBC: Does Christine have kids of her own? Peter: Yes. Two of them are adults now. Her oldest is an animator in L.A. CBC: Was your other sister affected by the [2011] earthquake and tsunami at all? Peter: Oh, they had a rollercoaster of a time. [laughs] They were totally affected by it. They said that the most amazing thing about the earthquake wasn’t so much the strength, but the length of it. They said that it knocked everybody on their ass. You couldn’t stand up for two whole minutes. And when you’re in an earthquake, two minutes feels like two days, so it was a bit alarming. And it threw their school into disarray. CBC: How about your own family? Peter: Our daughter Hannah just got her masters in education and is new applying for a teaching job at local elementary schools. CBC: Has the freelance life been good for raising a family? Peter: I suppose. I got to stay at home, so I had more of a hand in caring and raising our daughter than most dads, I’d imagine. Though that could also be hard when you’re trying to get work done. CBC: When she was growing up, did she have any interest in comics? Peter: Not really. When she was younger she thought my drawing style was disgusting. [laughs] CBC: Did she ever think that you were cool? Peter: Well, I’m her dad, so of course I wasn’t “cool” to her when she was younger. She’d get completely flustered when she’d hear or see or read other people describing me or her mother as “cool.” “Your dad’s a cartoonist. How cool!” Or, “My dad loves your dad’s comics. He thinks your dad’s the coolest.” That would totally baffle her. She’d think, “You obviously have never met him.” CBC: [Laughs] And what’s her interest now? Was she difficult as a teenager or a responsible kid? Peter: She’s always been pretty straight-laced, at least on the surface. Not much of a partier, which at least is a relief for her parents. She’s also become obsessed with dance lately, especially swing dancing. That’s her social and creative outlet, it seems. 77

The Mark of Kane is coming to CBC! COMIC BOOK CREATOR #11 presents a long overdue celebration of the art and life of THE MAN CALLED KANE, as we feature a retrospective

coming attractions: cbc #11 in the winter

on GIL KANE, one of the true comic book greats whose dynamic artistry had a huge impact on the super-hero genre. Co-creator of the modern-day Green Lantern and Atom, Kane was also an the history of the form, and simply one of the finest artists and visionaries to ever work in comics. Behind a Kane cover newly-inked by one of his most accomplished collaborators, KLAUS JANSON, we gather remembrances and insight from friends and associates, assistants and aficionados, as well as collaborators and dedicated fans. And, of course, we include a gallery of Kane artwork guaranteed to knock your socks off. Rounding out the issue is a remembrance by loved ones for the late Herb Trimpe; the conclusion of our STAN GOLDBERG interview (both postponed from this ish); a look at Mel Smith, publisher of Gumby and Rock ’n’ Roll Comics; the latest HEMBECK installment; and other entertaining features.

Full-color, 80 pages, $8.95

#10 • Fall 2015 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

early progenitor of the graphic novel, a man dedicated to sharing

a picture is worth a thousand words

TM & © DC Co

mics.

Once upon a time, Ernie Colón was known primarily as the preeminent artist on Harvey comics like Richie Rich and Casper, The Friendly Ghost. But astute readers knew better, being familiar with his work at Warren on Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella; as well as his own “Manimal” strip. So those of us on staff at DC Comics in the early 1980s were overjoyed when Ernie came on board as both editor and illustrator, and I jumped at the opportunity to work with him when editor Karen Berger asked if I wanted to color Ernie’s art on his Amethyst maxi-series. Ernie liked my coloring, and kindly gifted to me the original art you see on this page — the series’ villain, Dark Opal — one component that made up the front cover of the Amethyst free preview that appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes #298 [Apr. ’83]. This ominous visage has graced my studio wall for over three decades now, where he continues to admonish me and frighten small children. — TZ

Comic Book Creator • Fall 2015 • #10

from the archives of Tom Ziuko 79

E-Man & Nova TM &© ©Peter 2015 Joe T. Staton. Femme Noir TM & © 2015 MillsBurden. & Joe Staton. All characters ™ and ©2015 Bagge. Madman TM & 2015 Michael Allred. Flaming Carrot TM Christopher & © 2015 Bob

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THE NIGHT BROADWAY WENT TOTALLY COSMIC!

No. 10, Fall 2015

Cover art by Peter Bagge