{"id":3954,"date":"2017-04-03T18:57:44","date_gmt":"2017-04-04T01:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3954"},"modified":"2017-04-03T19:02:48","modified_gmt":"2017-04-04T02:02:48","slug":"from-my-interview-archive-comic-artist-peter-bagge-creator-of-hate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3954","title":{"rendered":"From my interview archive: comic artist Peter Bagge, creator of Hate"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This year, I’m listening again\u00a0to\u00a0selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program\u00a0<\/em>The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast\u00a0<\/em>Notebook on Cities and Culture\u00a0between 2007 and 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

On trips to the library growing up, I’d make right for the comics section \u2014 around Dewey Decimal 741, if memory serves. The selection didn’t change often, so I took\u00a0out the same books over and over again: collections of early 20th-century strips like\u00a0Krazy<\/em> Kat\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Popeye<\/em>, which in the bland context of the 1990s seemed almost rebelliously\u00a0eccentric;\u00a0The Big Book of<\/a> Urban Legends<\/em>; plenty of\u00a0Zippy the Pinhead<\/em> anthologies; and more of often than most,\u00a0The Adventures of Junior and Other Losers<\/em> by a certain Peter Bagge. It offered everything I wanted at age eleven or twelve:\u00a0clearly the work of one man alone (then as now, I don’t spent much time on teams), it had a highly distinctive art style, stories and dialogue that seemed “real” (as opposed to the words and deeds of\u00a0funny animals and superheroes), and \u2014 most essential of all \u2014 absolutely nothing in it seemed aimed at, or rather down to, kids.<\/p>\n

Only later did I find out that Bagge, a longtime resident of the greater Seattle area where I myself lived, was a\u00a0comic-artist icon \u2014 or at least he’d long held iconic status in the field of “alternative\u00a0comics,” a movement to which Seattle back then represented, or had recently represented, a Mecca. He’d made his name with the series\u00a0Hate<\/em>, which throughout the 1990s chronicled\u00a0the life of a young slacker (to use the zeitgeist word of the time) named Buddy Bradley as he bounced between cities,\u00a0between scams and\u00a0quasi-legitimate jobs, and between frightening girlfriends and very frightening girlfriends. I first binged on it with\u00a0a phonebook-thick collection of\u00a0Hate<\/em>‘s first few\u00a0years purchased on a weeklong school trip to Ashland for the\u00a0Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The store, More Fun, had a slogan fourteen-year-old me certainly couldn’t resist: “Comic books for grownups.”<\/p>\n

And though my own growing up has in few or no\u00a0ways resembled Buddy’s, episodes of his thoroughly Gen-Xer life \u2014 some of which I’ve read through five, ten, fifteen times \u2014 still come vividly to my mind on a near-daily basis. On the way down to California, moving before college (not, for better or for worse, a chapter\u00a0of Buddy’s still-rigorous education), I stopped in on More Fun again to catch up on\u00a0Hate<\/em>. Around that same time, Bagge began contributing, in comics form<\/a>, to\u00a0the libertarian magazine\u00a0Reason<\/em>, a development that delighted me: somehow I felt relieved that he didn’t hold the Standard Pacific Northwest Liberal suite of political views, even though my own might lean slightly closer to those of the\u00a0SPNL than those of\u00a0Reason<\/em>. And Bagge himself has, over these past fourteen years of Reason\u00a0<\/em>work, revealed himself as hardly an ideologue \u2014\u00a0again to my relief.<\/p>\n

Given all Hate\u00a0<\/em>and the rest of\u00a0Bagge’s oeuvre\u00a0has undeniably\u00a0done to shape my very psyche, I knew I had to find an excuse to talk to him as soon as I got into the interviewing game. The first opportunity came in 2008, when a book about him and his work came out \u2014 not a book\u00a0by<\/em> him, but close enough for me \u2014 and the second came the next year, on the publication of\u00a0his first bound collection\u00a0of\u00a0Reason<\/em> pieces. The third took over half a decade to line up, but it made perfect sense, since I’d ended\u00a0The Marketplace of Ideas<\/em> and started the more place-oriented\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture.\u00a0<\/em>Recording\u00a0another interview with him in Seattle when I next happened to be there, I then used it\u00a0to promote the Kickstarter fund drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>‘s\u00a0Seattle-oriented sixth season. In the event, the money came up way short, but I did have what seemed, at least to me, a pretty\u00a0ideal guest with whom to end the show.<\/p>\n

EPILOGUE: I went back to\u00a0to More Fun on a West Coast road trip<\/a>\u00a0taken between\u00a0ending\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em> and before moving to Seoul. Naturally I stocked up again on Bagge material once again, making the transaction with the very same proprietor who’s stood behind\u00a0the counter on every single one of my five-ish-yearly visits \u2014 a little grayer than the first time, sure, but then I don’t exactly look like a teenager anymore myself.<\/p>\n