Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge Preview

comics introspective volume one

All characters TM & Š2007 Peter Bagge.

G PETER BA GE

As told to Christopher Irving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We had the indy comic book Hate.

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

Ordering two shots of whiskey with his

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was, after all, Seattle.

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

PETER BAGGE 15

An excerpt from Lameness, an autobiographical strip.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

PETER BAGGE 29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was Hate kinder and gentler? Hell, no!

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

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

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

A character from The Mooch. © 2007 Mirari Films.

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But just what is a libertarian?

Webster’s Dictionary defines them as:

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

anarchists, who believe in no government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Just Say No To Intellectual Property!”

2003 Pen and Ink

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

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

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

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

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

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

What clearly is an outrage to me obviously

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE

Batboy strip

Pen and Ink 2004

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

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Batboy strip Pen and Ink, computer coloring 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well, whose call is it, then?’

‘It’s my call.’

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

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

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

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

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

PETER BAGGE

one absurd compromise after another.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sweatshop #6 cover 2003 Pen and Ink, computer coloring

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

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

PETER BAGGE

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

“Relatives of yours, perhaps?”

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

“Ahh,” Hamilton concurs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PETER BAGGE

From his Seattle studio, Peter Bagge lets journalist CHRISTOPHER IRVING in on everything from just what was on his mind with his long-running Gen X comic HATE!, to what’s going on in his head as a political satirist. This book features an assortment of original photography, artwork picked by Bagge himself, and a look at where Bagge’s work (and mind) is taking him.

(128-page Digital Edition) $6.95

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COMICS INTROSPECTIVE

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