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 eter Bagge is the author of one of comics' greatest bildungsromans, the fifteen-year saga of Buddy Bradley. Originally appearing as a disgruntled New Jersey teenager in Bagge's '80s anthology comic Neat Stuff, Buddy reemerged as a still-disgruntled twenty-something in the follow-up series, Hate. Cynical, grimy, set in Seattle and first published in the early '90s, the comic was perfectly positioned to become a Generation X
These misadventures are presented in a hysterical drawing style, a loopy, painfully expressive rendering of the characters' angst, in which eyeballs pop out of sockets, gaskets pop out of heads, and limbs deform to wave spastically across the panels. The manic art makes a sharp contrast to the hilarious, but often acutely insightful dialogue (Matt Groening, who has called Bagge his favorite cartoonist, cites the Bradleys as an early influence on the Simpsons). However bizarre the drawings get, the pleasure of reading these stories is the shock of recognition, the realization that all piety aside, this is how people really act. New readers can find out for themselves in two compilations from Fantagraphics, Buddy Does Seattle and the forthcoming Buddy Does Jersey, which collect the first and second halves of Hate's run, respectively. Hooksexup spoke with Bagge about his epic achievement. — Peter Smith When did you come up with the Bradley family? Me and my girlfriend at the time, now wife, and an old roommate of ours, used to sit around all the time and just make comics to amuse each other. And one time I did a comic, just six panels, that said "Here's the Bradleys!" And I presented it and wrote it in a tone like it was introducing a new sitcom, like "Here's the Brady Bunch!" The tone was the Bradys, but the reality was the Bagges — I didn't literally draw my family, but I drew people that were all based on members of my family, like, "Dad's drunk again, Mom's doing this again, Sis's doing this again." I just drew everybody doing something very dysfunctional and violent and depraved and it was all based on my own family [laug
It's a pretty damning portrayal. Did you ever catch any flak from your actual family? No! [laughs] You'd think I would! But no, never. They don't rave about it either. Do you have a younger sister and a younger brother, like Buddy? I have two younger sisters, and then a younger brother, and then I have an older brother who passed away. He's the main reason I became a cartoonist, because he was really good at it. But he never worked at it, which drove me nuts. I had to work twice as hard to be half as good as him. Babs is vaguely based on the older of my two sisters; her name is Barbara. The only big difference is that Babs is like a total dummy who barely graduated high school and then got knocked up right away and now is a single mom and just a wreck, whereas my sister was an honor student and has a Ph. D. in education and is an administrator for an English language school in Tokyo . . . Oh, that's the only difference! [laughs] Other than that they were identical! Well, when they were thirteen, they were similar — the adolescent girl that's almost painful to watch cause her awkward stage is extra awkward. And Butch is vaguely based on my younger brother. When he was younger he had an explosive temper — probably my fault, because I would tease him to the point where he'd blow up. But at the same time, my younger brother has a real sense of humor, whereas Butch has no sense of humor. There's no nuance in the way he thinks at all. He takes everything literally. Basically, Babs and Butch are a lot stupider. One of the funny things about those early Bradley family strips is the depiction of Babs. It's so rare to see a teenage girl who's not overtly sexualized. She's like all of your characters, a grotesque.
Right. Although, I guess it doesn't matter how you draw a character, you're always going to get letters from people who are turned on. Robert Crumb used to find Bugs Bunny sexually attractive. It always shocked me, since none of my female characters, let alone the male characters, are supposed to be sex objects at all. But somebody always wrote in saying "She's hot!" One of the many things that's so funny about these stories is that sense of verisimilitude. In some ways the interactions are so outsized, so cartoonish, so absurd, but there's a constant ring of truth. That was something else I was working toward — trying to give the story some content, some depth and meaning, make it clearly from my own experience, and really try to dig as much as I can into the psyche of the characters, but at the same time present it in this "superficially superficial" drawing style, where there's a lot more going on than what you first see. I've always liked the artwork of Big Daddy Roth and Basil Wolverton, which is very garish and exaggerated, but the contents of the work tended to not go too deep, and made very little attempt to contrast with the content. Assuming there even was any content. A lot of people don't like and never will like my drawing style. They find it garish and unpleasant, and when they look at it, their reaction is the exact opposite of what I want. They'll look at it and think, "There can't be anything there." And it's because of the drawing style, which in my mind is supposed to be what hooks you in. It's very frustrating that some people will never want to read my comics just because of the drawing style, or they'll put off reading it because based on the artwork they just think it'd be really stupid. A lot of readers seem to think that Buddy should've ended up with Valerie, the foxy socialite, not Lisa, her unhinged ex-roommate. Yeah, they're always talking like they're Buddy's mom. Besides, Valerie, of all my characters, was the most violent. She would behave in a way towards Buddy in a way that, if you reversed the sexes, nobody
But I think in your work, you would put a woman in that position. [laughs] Yeah, I know! That's true! That strikes me as a kind of honesty. Well, yeah. I never liked the way even some of my favorite cartoonists would both write and draw female characters totally different from the men. Even Harvey Kurtzman, if you look at his early comics, the fantastic, really masterful stuff he did, these gag cartoons he used to do for old comic books back in the late '40s and early '50s. Everyone was super-duper cartoony and exaggerated and stylized, but the woman was always a very style-ish babe. She was never the buffoon. And that contrast kind of bothered me. So when I write female characters, I have them do or say things that I would do if I were in the same exact situation. Even the female characters are all extensions of me, to some degree. A collection of the New Jersey issues is coming out soon. I think those stories are really some of your best work. Yeah, those to me are better. I put more time and thought into those, and those were the most painful to write. They didn't seem to resonate with the public as much as the earlier ones did, but I thought that the later ones were stronger work. What was the difference in public reaction? Well, people compared it to the earlier Hates. And when the New Jersey ones came out, they were in full color. I didn't anticipate this at all, but for some reason, a lot of people responded very negatively to it being in full color. It was really weird. To them it was just like a sign of sell-out, which just made no sense to me. 'Cause then I started running ads in Hate, to keep the cover price down, and that was a sellout! [laughs] And I didn't
You're more interested in storytelling than many of your peers. How did you learn to tell a story? As a kid I liked to tell stories, and if I was good at it, it was only because of this compulsion to do so. I felt compelled to tell stories partly — if not totally — just to express my own worldview. So what do you see as the underlying worldview of your work? Well, I just don't have these black-and-white views about what makes someone good, or how someone goes about being a good person. Buddy, speaking through me, just has no tolerance for hypocrisy. I also like to laugh at people's foibles, because that in and of itself is an acknowledgement that nobody's perfect. Not that we shouldn't try to be good and try not to do horrible things, but it's just a fact that we're all going to. . . cut corners. For all the cruelty of some of these stories, there's a generosity of spirit to them. Right, just the fact that nobody's all bad. But I also try to avoid group-hug endings. It's so strange to me, such a sign of massive insecurity, that so many people need that. TV always has that. Mom can be having a crisis, on a sitcom or any kind of show, and she's behaving a certain kind of way. But she'll realize that and come to grips with it at the end of the half hour. And that just doesn't happen in real life. She might not ever come to grips with it. Or if she does, or acknowledges it or becomes aware of it, it might take years. So in my comics, I still try to make it funny and humane, and make everybody sympathetic, but I try to avoid the superficial in that regard. n°
©2007 hooksexup.com and Peter Smith. |
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