Peter Bagge, the comics legend behind Hate!, Neat Stuff, Apocalypse Nerd and Everybody is Stupid Except for Me, joins us to talk about his new book, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story. We have a great conversation about why he chose to write about the founder of Planned Parenthood, how he made the shift from fiction to nonfiction comics, who his favorite "pre-feminist feminists" are, why he decided to stick with comic books over paperback books (and why he came around on the latter), what the strangest sketchbook request he ever received is, and how he feels about being a comics convention prostitute.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 22 - The Least Insane of Cartoonists
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can find The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes by searching for virtual memories and clicking through to the show's page. You can also post a rating and review of the show on iTunes, which I'd appreciate. The full archives of The Virtual Memories Show are also available at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. If you visit the site, you can also join the email list and make a donation to the show via PayPal to help offset my web hosting and travel costs and all other ancillary podcast expenses. My old man kicked in some money after last week's episode, for which I'm quite grateful. We're also on Twitter at VMSPod on Facebook at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and Tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumblr.com. And now on with the show. A regular listener is probably figured out by now that I'm a comics reader, and don't worry, that doesn't mean that I go to comics conventions wearing a superhero costume. I only wear the superhero costume when I'm walking the dogs around the neighborhood, actually. It keeps the neighbors guessing. But I do go to comics events, and in September, I attended SPX, the small press expo, in Bethesda, Maryland. While I was there, I got to interview two of my favorite cartoonists. One of the things that might not be apparent is that the cartoonists I like are artists I discovered in the 90s. At SPX in 2012, I found myself at a table with a veritable Mount Rushmore of cartoonists from that period, and I got pretty cowed, actually. I kind of hit at the other end of the table until some other cartoonist showed up, who I was on a little bit easier of a level with. But with a year of doing these interviews under my belt, and going back to SPX this year, I found them a little more confident at just shooting the breeze with great cartoonists. No matter how much their work is meant to me over the years. At this year's show, I actually fell into pretty easy conversation with Seth, a fantastic cartoonist from Canada. Last year I probably would have avoided talking to him for any number of anxiety-related issues, but we made general plans to record an episode next May when I visited the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which is the only comics event my wife will go to. This episode features one of those legendary cartoonists, Pantheon level great from my golden age of comics, and that man is Peter Bag. Now in the '90s, Pete wrote and drew this comic book called Hate, which with an exclamation point, which told the story of Buddy Bradley, a proto-slacker living in Seattle, and I should note that all Buddy's stories began before Seattle became the grunge capital. And in that vein, Bag had this total knack for skewing Generation X before we even knew they were the next big thing. It was pretty uncanny, and eventually, about halfway through the run, Buddy moves to suburban New Jersey and lives in his parents' house, which made the comic even more fitting for me. You can find the collected editions of Hate on Amazon and in some bookstores and in comic shops. Hate and the collections are both published by Fanta Graphics. And since he dropped Hate to annual status, Pete's done a lot of other projects, including comics like Apocalypse, Nerd, Other Lives, Resets, Batboy, this series of comics he was doing in the Weekly World News. He also has this ongoing comics reportage gig at Reason, a libertarian magazine and website. His work there is collected into a great book called Everybody is Stupid, Except for Me, and Other Acute Observations. And that one also comes from Fanta Graphics. And now, Pete has an original book out, actually it's out this week, Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger's Story. It's published by Drawin and Quarterly, and it's a 72-page comic biography of the founder of Planned Parenthood. And when I say comic, it's both drawn in a comic book format, and a number of the scenes are very, very funny. The book includes page-by-page annotations that back up every fact in it, so the Pete isn't just kind of extrapolating or fabricating, which is kind of important because Margaret Sanger's a really controversial and misunderstood, maybe deliberately misunderstood figure. Now, I have to admit that I didn't know anything about her before starting Pete's book during SPX weekend, but I found it's a great introduction into her life and the issues surrounding women's rights, especially in the first part of the 20th century. Actually, that's something kind of interesting happened at SPX. I was about to leave the exhibit hall at one point, and I noticed this older lady holding a page from a newspaper and looking around the hall kind of confusedly, and it was pretty packed, so I went over to see if I could help her with anything. She showed me the newspaper clipping, which was about Pete's book, and mentioned that it was going to be shown here at SPX. So I directed her over to the Drawin and Quarterly table, and she thanked me and headed over. The next day, on Twitter, I discovered that this lady was Margaret Sanger's granddaughter. She just happened to see the blurb about the book and the paper and decided to come out to the show and find out what she could about it. I don't think she managed to meet up with Pete during the show, but she did score a copy of her grandma's brand new comic biography, so that's kind of great. Anyway, here is the virtual memories conversation with Peter Bag, the cartoonist behind Woman Rebel, the Margaret Sanger's story. ♪ It's a handful, little girl ♪ ♪ The little book is her own world ♪ ♪ It's all there ♪ Pete, thanks for coming on the show. Great to be here. I guess we should start with the new book, if you can sort of tell us where the Margaret Sanger story comes from, what led you to decide to do a comic biography of her? Well, for people who are familiar with my work, but may not be familiar with what I've been doing within the last five years, it might seem incredibly strange that I'm doing what seems almost like stuffy in academic, this biography of Margaret Sanger. And also just her image, if people are familiar with who she is, regardless of what their opinion of her is, she is like a lot of historical figures. She no longer comes across as human. She's just this figure that represents something. And she very much, especially as she got older, she sold herself that way, you know, dressed and posing very formally. She would love to be posed next to Walsh, she was full of books. But basically how I wound up interested in her is I had started to, well, first of all, with Reason, I've been doing a lot of non-fiction work. And then I started to do, well, with Reason, I did a 12-page biography of a woman named Isabel Patterson, who was a novelist, but better known as a literary critic for 25 years, she was a literary critic for, I think, the New York Herald, I'm forgetting now. But also I shared her politics, that was one thing that led me to her. I was interested in the fact that modern American libertarian thought was, of which I adhere to, for the most degree, was pretty much defined by three women. Isabel Patterson grows wilder Lane and Anne Rand, although I personally have a lot of problems with Anne Rand. But that, when I read about these other two women, I began reading about them, and they both led amazing lives, so I wanted to do comic books about their lives. Like their lives are very entertaining. It's the stuff of movies or the stuff of graphic novels. So with this particular publisher drawn in quarterly, I thought that they'd be, as long as they were interested, I thought they'd be interested in publishing like a full-length comic biography of one of these women. And they were interested, but they also, they said, well, do whoever you want, whoever you want to do a book about, that's fine. But they said, who else did you have in mind? And I mentioned Margaret Sanger. And again, to back up a bit, the reason I started reading about Margaret Sanger is these women that I was talking about. Another one, too, is Zora Neale Hurston. These literary, female literary figures from the, from that era, particularly between the two world wars, they led incredibly free lives. They lived and conducted their lives like they were men, you know, and it's not, you know, it's not like they went around disguised as men, they were also very feminine. But they acted the way a woman would act after the women's rights movement. And they would, and it wasn't like they were in denial about the fact that they were women, but they pretty much only talked about it when asked. You know, they weren't self-consciously feminists. They were, they were feminists simply by the way they lived their lives, but it also was so not an issue to them. They were just all about doing what you want to do. But then, you know, I thought about why was that rare for back then. And then I realized with all of them, they didn't have babies and pregnancies. So that wouldn't free a woman up in a way that a man just simply by, for biological reasons, doesn't have to worry about. That got me interested in, did they use birth control? What kind of birth control was available back then? How easy was it to access? How common was it for women to use back then? Because I knew that there used to be legal issues with that. So that is when I began to read up on Margaret Sanger and I became overwhelmed by a number of things. One was just simply reading about her life. Her life was, it paralleled these other women's lives almost identically, almost, they were all like almost born the same year, died, probably the same year. They're all born like in the 18, late 1800s old, died around 1960. And so there was that. And also just her life was just packed with activity and adventure. The other thing that I became overwhelmed with is typing in her name in a search engine and 90% of what I get back is Margaret Sanger is a racist. Margaret Sanger is a monster. In my favorite, Margaret Sanger is a Nazi and a communist. It's the same person would call her a Nazi and a communist in the same paragraph. Or maybe he thought that was like her political evolution. She started out a commie and then grew into Naziism. My favorite of all is Margaret Sanger is the quote unquote inventor of abortion. No one had ever considered this till she came home. And the more I'd read about it, and this still keeps happening, people will still throw quotes at me from her or alleged quotes. And it always turns out it's one of three things. One is it's taken out of context, you know, a quote proving that she's some kind of a monster. Taken out of context or somebody else said it and it's attributed to her because she published a newsletter and she ran art. She would run articles that she didn't agree with just to debate the author within the pages. But people would pull quotes from the person that she actually was disagreeing with and attributed to her. Or else there were quotes that were completely made up. Like for example, something that crops up every now and then on the internet is you'll see like YouTube clips, somebody standing in front of a camera filming themselves, you know, who's very much against Margaret Sanger and talking about a book he just read called to create a race of thoroughbreds and he says it's a book by Margaret Sanger and basically gets all about how to, it's a book all about how the dream is to improve mankind to like we're all perfect, but perfect meaning, blonde hair and blue eyed. And everybody else slowly get rid of them, I called them. That book doesn't exist. But and there was a recently was a very good biography about Margaret Sanger written by a woman named Jean Baker. And I heard her talk on several radio shows. And if it was a calling show, people would always call in and ask about that book. They go, I just read this book called to create a race of thoroughbreds. And Jean Baker was like, no, she was just like, she was like completely blindsided by it. She was, I don't know what you're talking about. She hadn't come across it in her. Yeah, she was. I never heard of it. Oh, yeah. And these people was like, I just read it, you know, and she's like, well, could you send it to me? Anyhow, all of this was all this negativity, this character assassination is a deliberate attempt to discredit the founder of Planned Parenthood. And it's been very effective. And what's interesting about it, the reason it's been so effective is the trying to discredit her to discredit this existing organization, like saying, look at what this organization is based on, how it was found, who founded it and what she was all about. But the thing is, all the thought crimes that they attribute to her are the left's biggest bugaboos. And, you know, so people on the left, especially these days, their favorite hobby is to think of other white people as racist. So, and also the thing that's such a horrible thing to say, that if anybody sits down on a computer and types so-and-so is a racist, that is such an awful thing to be and such an awful thing to be accused of that nobody would say that on the internet, if it wasn't true. So, people just now passively, even if you support Planned Parenthood, somebody told me that recently that they know someone that works for Planned Parenthood, a young woman, and she's also like, it's such a shame that our organization was started by such a monster. But again, so much of this as I dug into it and always went to the source to find out what exactly did she say, if she said it, what did it mean. One thing that I discovered is throughout her whole life, I mean, this is just for starters, throughout her entire life, Margaret Sanger has always been completely against abortion. She thinks it's murder, she thought it was murder, and also for medical reasons, just for health reasons, she had a visit, she worked as a nurse back before there were antibiotics. And I believe that it's for that reason that she has such a visceral distaste for any kind of- Operation, yeah, including abortion, just because she'd seen the horrible effects of infection. But yeah, but also for moral reasons. And the other thing too is this racism business, especially considering her time, the time that she lived, when you compare it to other people that she'd be debating with, people that had issues with her, she was within that world that she was moving in, you know, dealing with her in debating other academics, or debating academics, since it's not fair to call her one technically. She was like the least racist person of her time. I can't find, I've not been able to find anything that she ever said where it was, it made disparaging comments about groups of people based on their ethnicity, you know, so, or their religion. What was the biggest thing you learned about her, what was the biggest surprise, I guess, in research? Well, that, as she was so far off the curve. Well, it was just so the truth was so the opposite of what has become the meme, what everybody thinks of her now, you know, just passively thinks of her, you know, and so there's this huge body of work, this whole, this entire biography's written about her portraying her as a monster, and it's just full of misquotes and quotes pulled out of context. You have to assume it's deliberate. Yes, of course, yeah, it's absolutely, like here's the most famous quote, and it's something that she did say in a letter at one point, is there, and again, this is like another landmine in her career, was in the late 30s, she was involved with two projects, and both of them fell under the umbrella title of the Negro Project. There were two separate ones, but they tend to be linked. They also were both funded by Albert Lasker, if you know who he is, he was like the country's first advertising mogul, and he was Jewish, grew up in New Orleans, for whatever reason once he made his fortune, he was eager to fund anything that would improve the lives and well-being of black Americans. So he entirely funded both of these projects. One aspect of the so-called Negro Project was simply to start a clinic in Harlem. Sanger by then had already had a long-standing successful birth control clinic in Lower Manhattan on 16th Street, but the idea behind it, people always say it was her project. It actually was Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and W.E.B. Du Bois Project. They asked her to do it as well as Mary McLeod Bethune, I believe I'm getting her name right, and a female black woman doctor named Dorothee Therebe, I hope I'm getting all their names right, basically it was like a who's who of black leaders from the 1930s, and they asked her to open up a clinic in Harlem. A lot of things went wrong with the clinic, because of cultural problems, you'd name it, and also what was a persistent problem too, both then and now, is that people who were opposed to birth control, the Catholic Church, the Baptist Church, to a large degree, they obviously were trying to trip up Margaret Sanger every step of the way, always blocking or getting your arrested, so they realized too that with good reason, a lot of black people have it's easy to fuel into their black paranoia, what is this white women's agenda? So they would tell her she's coming up here to preach birth control simply because she wants to eliminate the black race, and some black leaders like Marcus Garvey did buy into that, and he was preaching it, he was telling everybody don't go to this clinic, they brought in this woman that wants to wipe out the black race, and of course the Catholic Church is telling him that, the Catholic Church is calling up everybody that people listen to and telling that, so that was one big problem amongst other things that made this aspect of the so-called Negro Project fall apart. The other aspect was, and again this wasn't her idea, but she was all for it, but the other aspect was to bring birth control information to black communities in the south, in the old south, and Sanger was involved with that, she was encouraging it, one problem though is that she herself had no hands-on involvement in it because she had always refused to go to any state that had Jim Crow laws, in protest of the Jim Crow laws she just simply wouldn't step into a state that had those laws, so she wouldn't go, but there were other people that were going, now she wanted them, the people who were part of this project, she wanted them to deal with, to go directly to black clergymen in the south, because they are by default the black leaders of each community, she says you got to go and talk to them first before you do anything, but the people who are there are saying, you know what, they, the black clergymen are the ones who are the most paranoid, they're the most susceptible to the conspiracy theories, generally, this is generalizing, but I tended to generally be true, so she said, you know, so they said, that's the last person we're going to talk with, but she had, her fears came true, it is true that they were the most susceptible to these conspiracy theories, but once, once these clergymen saw that they were being worked around, that only fueled their paranoia, so again, the whole thing fell apart in the usual, just racial mess, but she, there was a famous quote, I'm not paraphrasing, but the famous quote that's always thrown out there is, she wrote to somebody else that was very involved with this project, and she told him in this letter, and she saved all of her letters, both that she received and she sent, she obviously made a copy of every letter she sent, even very personal letters, in which she said to this other person, she said, we can't let the word get out, that, that we're trying to, you know, commit genocide against the blacks, that we're trying to reduce the black population, and of course, there's two ways to take that, and when you don't know the backstory, you take it as don't let everybody know what we're really trying to do, of course, she's saying we can't let the word get out, that that's what we're trying to do, because that is, that is what is is happening, and that, that word is getting out, it's being spread by liars, you know, people who are against birth control, so, so that is what she meant, quite simply, so yes, like people say, you gotta admit she said that, yes, she said that, but it's not, you know, yeah, she goes, don't let this word get out, because it's a lie, you know, but it is something that she fought constantly, when she, with her very first failed birth control, it was America's first birth control clinic in Brownsville, and, and it was her and her younger sister, Ethel, and a third woman named Fannya Mendel, and who is a, she was a Jewish woman from Lithuania, but she spoke, like a lot of people from Eastern Europe, she spoke many languages, Brownsville then was very mixed, and she was fluent in Yiddish, Italian, English, Lithuanian, Russian, so she was, they needed a translator, so she translated for them. Very quickly the, that birth control clinic was raided, and you know, they were all charged, and the Sanger wound herself wound up spending a month in jail, and, but when they were charged, the, the prosecutor wanted to inflame the jury pool, so he announced, he let it be known to everybody, you know, who was a potential juror that, that only was this completely bankrupt birth control clinic, a huge money-making operation, but also that their purpose for, the reason they exist is to wipe out the Jewish race, which, and here she has a Jewish woman that was arrested, her lawyer, who her then was her, also her lover, was Jewish, I got to join a Goldstein, and what support did she have at the time, almost all of them were Jewish, you know, so you could just imagine what they all must have thought when they're hearing the prosecutor make this claim. Well, what was the, what was the shift like for you going to non-fiction, because you'd made your career in, in, well, the biggest work in your career was, was a fictional run of, of, of hate, and you moved to reason and started doing these comics reporting pieces and now biography. What was that transition like for you, having to work in this sort of reportage mode instead of a... Well, when I first started doing it, it was for a website called Suck, and it actually was essays. I wrote, they would send me somewhere, they would send me to like the Miss America contest store, the Indy 500, and so I would write a, I would write an essay about it and illustrate it, it'd be heavily illustrated. So but at first it was just mostly words. Then it switched into comic book reporting, well, I should, now I remember Art Spiegelman. At one point, he was working with Details magazine at the time. Oh, yeah, I remember those when he was sending Ben Kacher off to cover a surfing competition and things like that. Yeah, and I think he sent Charles Burns to cover and illustrate a fashion show. And he sent me to a, he sent me to the Aspen Comedy Festival that HBO used to put on. And that actually had been there before, so I was a little bit familiar with the terrain. But so I did a four page, for details of the four page comic strip reporting on this event. And I really enjoyed doing it. What I was doing wasn't totally unique, like Joe Sacco of Palestine fame. He's very well known for, and very accomplished. Pretty much that's all he does is comic book journalism. And so I did it in a smaller form with the details. The editor, then editor of Reason Magazine, a fellow named Nick Gillespie, he saw the strip, really liked it. He was very familiar with what I was doing for Suck. Where is he? I guess that's the maid. Probably. Yeah, I should have put the little slide in. So Nick was familiar with it. Yeah, he was familiar with what I was doing for Suck. So he wanted me to keep doing the four page things. I feel like that format that Spiegelman created with the details. Sorry. It's a perils of recording in a hotel. So that's how I wound up doing these regular four page features for Reason. Which it didn't always involve me going somewhere to report on events, but sometimes it did. Which are collected in this fantastic, "Everybody is Stupid," except for me and other astute observations as a collection. I've been dealing with phantographics who published the book, or shorthand for the book. It's just stupid. And then at one point, I conned them into letting me doing a 12 page strip for them about the aforementioned Isabelle Patterson. And I very much enjoyed doing that. The toughest part of the transition is making the pieces less verbose. I look at some of the earlier, in fact, most of this, when I re-look at the work I did for Reason. I always wish it was much more, there's too much verbiage. They're very, I was going to use the term "informationally dense," when I was reading because I thought it would be kinder than fencing. They're really wordy-pea, but can you be a little more concise? Yes. I wish I was more concise. And the problem is, too, I was trying to be concise when I did that. I noticed with the Margaret Sanger book, I read about half of it last night when I picked it up. It is much cleaner, I guess, in that respect. It's also, you do find comedic episodes and comedic pacing for a number of pieces so far and that part of it. I assume the second half is going to completely break away from anything I'm anticipating. Well, I still stuck with that format. It is very much, there's very few scenes that are more than one page. I've wrote it as, well, it's all these vignettes. And I do just out of habit, perhaps, that do end with almost, usually end with some kind of a joke. I make a gag out of everything that's going on in her life at that time. I surmise her that that decade of her life with a joke, but it works, I've felt it worked to do that way. At least so far, it works great in terms of expressing her as a human being but not becoming didactic, heavy, and dry, or anything. It does keep you going when you do find these humorous elements to pay off. Are there other biographical subjects you're looking at at this point? Yes, right now, I'd like to stick with that theme that I meant to do all along when I first approached Jordan Cordley about this, which is I still, just for that reason that they are female, but lived their lives in a way that most women didn't, yes. I still find that very, very fascinating. It makes them unique. I still would like to write something about the aforementioned women. I've already covered Isabelle Patterson, even though it was only in 12 pages, but the next one, I still keep going back and forth between Zora Neale Hurston and Rose Wilder Lane. Rose Wilder Lane was an author. None of her own books ever sold particularly well, but she had again lived a long, wild, crazy life. She is best known as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the little house in the Prairie author, and in fact helped write those books for her mother. I'd heard that story. Do you find any contemporary analogs to these figures now? Do you think we're in an age where that sort of just blithe lack of awareness, but living one's own life exists, or are we... It would take a while to assess all that. The modern day equivalent, I think of them, I don't think I would recognize it. There are people who might proclaim themselves to be on the class. I'm the equivalent, but they'll just be mimicking these women in a sense. Is there a sense of someone authentically living, whether male or female? Right, that's just that I don't think we'd recognize it until the years from now, how much they were out of step with the rest of us, and while at the same time being way ahead of their time. But the other thing too that all of these women have in common is why these particular subjects, why I admire them so, is they were very much all about autonomy. These other women, politically, it would be very easy to describe them as libertarian. You couldn't do that with the most part, with Margaret Sanger. In her youth, she was very much a socialist, a member of the Socialist Party. Your father was socialist. Her first husband was very involved with the party. As time went by, though, many of her supporters, it just didn't become pragmatic to be so closely aligned officially with the socialists, because for one thing, many of her most avid supporters wound up being wealthy women, and they financed her organizations. Originally Planned Parenthood was called the American Birth Control League, and she very much wanted it to be almost an arm of the Socialist Party, but most socialists thought the whole birth control thing was a distraction. It wasn't universally agreed upon that that was a part in parcel with the Socialist cause. She had to look everywhere to find supporters for her particular cause, and she did find it everywhere. There'd be devout Catholics that were completely in favor of her cause. No longer became pragmatic for her to have an ideology at all. What's interesting is people would say to me, like a libertarian would say, "Why were you writing a book about this woman that was a socialist?" By the end of her life, she wasn't. Her second husband was a multi-millionaire, so it'd be kind of embarrassing to quote yourself, "Socialist." Then she looked high on the high. I find a good number of wealthy people who consider themselves socialist. Well, she kind of stopped herself, at least defining herself as such, and then, you know, but then people on the left will say, "Well, did she know that she is a Republican?" And I assume they were referring to, by the 1950s, by then, the 1940s and 50s, especially in the North, the Democratic Party. Their biggest constituents were the working class who were overwhelmingly Irish, and thus were overwhelmingly, at least officially against birth control. So she'd only place, at least amongst candidates, the only person she could find that would potentially support her cause would be amongst Republicans. And in fact, the biggest advocate for legalizing birth control, or making it more accessible in the 1950s, was Senator Prescott Bush, which was George W. Bush's grandfather, ironically. He was very openly in favor of making birth control more accessible, and it cost him his third term. That more than anything else. Now, when you talk about libertarianism, do you feel that your political affiliation with that has affected your reputation or career in any way? Like heard it? Either way. Better than it or heard. I actually wrote down, you know, "affected/heard" in my notes, and I wasn't sure of which. Well, it benefited me in that I get work from reason. Yeah. That's why I kind of hemmed it hard. That's good. You know, that's been a positive. If it's hurt me in any way, I am not aware of it. You know, nobody has ever said to me, you know, "We were considering hiring you to do this illustration," you know. But we're not going to, because... We can't abide your Milton Friedman field. Right. The only reason that... I wonder, maybe it has, is because people ask me that question all the time these days. And when it really became a bit of a sore point, where it became like a really bad word is like roughly around the time that Obama was elected, because I guess anybody who always believed or they're instinct is to believe that not just government, but specifically the federal government, is who is should be solving all of our problems, both societal problems and our own personal problems, they thought, "This is our moment. This is our moment in the sun." You know, we just elected Mr. Hope and Change. And so they were filled with promise, like, "This is our moment and we're going to show you how it's done." And at that for a while there, it was at least in the blogosphere, being a libertarian was like being a leper, at least amongst certain people. Basically people who didn't agree with my politics, they felt very comfortable and totally castigating my political opinions. It wasn't like personally directed at me, but it was just these people, they're so stupid, there's such credence, they're so horrible. Now because things have gotten to be such a mess, now at the very least people who don't agree with it, they're kind of like, they're having a harder time arguing with me. I was going to ask, next, because libertarianism of one's stripe at least, is having its moment. Yes. Of course, it's always difficult to figure out which stripe of libertarianism is actually which, but has that brought more appeal at all? Do you get either calls for quotes or, "Hey, I was reading this comic of yours about subject acts, and somebody who wouldn't have read your stuff five, ten years ago, because under Bush things were so much better or different?" I don't know. I don't know. I mean there was nothing remotely libertarian about the Bush administration. I know. Nothing. It's just, I guess, more naked now. If you ask me, we're in Bush's fourth term, you know. And to me, the big defining line, ironically, is abortion. That seems to be when push comes to show that is now how we separate Republicans from Democrats. Which is so strange. It's a very strange, but that always is, that's like the one that always seems to be the dividing line. And, you know, ironically, it isn't. There's so many people who vote for Democrats for other reasons that personally are against abortion, but they'll be very quiet about it, you know? Like blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, but at least half of the black Americans are opposed to abortion, or they say they are. That's the other thing too with that subject is there's the gray middle. There's a lot of people aren't, most people aren't totally for it, totally against it. You know, most people, you know, it's kind of like when you have somebody, if you start to date someone, you say, "Well, you know, she's had like four sex partners before you." And you're like, "Oh, so what? I don't care." All right. But what if it was eight? What if it was 16? After a while, people are like, "Okay, wait, wait, no." And people have that same, they're moral feelings about abortions, you know, like how many months along? Yeah. It's becoming the end. What is the reason? What is her reason? You know, like I personally am like, "Do you don't need a reason? If you want abortion, go get one, you know, why should I have to explain to anybody?" And if you do need a reason, you're just going to lie, you know? It's like, "Oh, I found out it's a girl and I want a boy." You know, you could make that illegal, but they'll just give you another reason why. Right. Now, what's the critical reception been like so far for a woman rebel? Well, believe it or not, it's not in bookstores yet. This is a very advanced copy just for this XBX. Okay. I wasn't sure if they've gotten any early reviews. Yeah, so yeah, that's exactly. So it's like a count on one hand, the number of people have actually read it yet, and they love it. Okay, I enjoyed the first half so far, so that was good. Going back to the early days, actually, let's go back to the very early days. How did you get started in cartooning? It was default. I don't have any other, I have no marketable skills. I was a terrible student, absolutely a horrible student. If I was a kid now, they diagnosed me with everything. I was severely dyslexic, still in, I'd have ADHD, you name it. But back then, all of that fell under the umbrella of lousy student. Yeah. And troublemaker, that's all. Well, I was quiet, you know, I tried to make myself invisible. I was very much related to something I read in a Jean Shepard short story years ago, and it was all about, he was talking about being a kid in class, and it was very funny. He convinced himself that it worked, where if the teacher asked a question, and he didn't know the answer, he'd start to sweat out of nervousness. But he said, he was, I soon realized if I sweated hard enough, I'd create this Mr. Army where the teacher couldn't see me, and he goes, and it worked. And I was like, I'm always trying to create, I'm always like, if I don't move a muscle, you'll never know I'm here. Yeah. I wish I could change a chameleon, my body to whatever the color of the wall is behind. Oh, I have protective coloration, I even keep a completely gray Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap in my car for when I'm traveling, just because I'm not a Blue Jays fan. But if I'm walking around anywhere like that, I just, I'll wear this. No one will think I'm anybody, they'll just see how it's a gray, the Blue Jays. Who cares about the, you know, I'll just walk right by. Nobody hates the Blue Jays. It's just Philadelphia. And they're, you know, bad people. Yeah. In Philadelphia, you'll get beaten up for wearing a Philadelphia filly sack. Yeah. To find a reason. But yeah, the protective coloration thing, I understand completely, but how to cartooning itself. Well, it was something that I liked. I had an older brother who's passed away, but you've seen the Robert Chrome documentary. That was my life. Not as extreme, not quite as extreme, but I had a military father, three boys, two girls. I mean, the parallels are unbelievable, like a passively Catholic, you know, Catholic by default. I'm talking about my whole family, not just me. You know, by the time I was 13, I just said, I told my folks, I'm not going to church anymore. And I thought it was going to lead to a big fight. And they were like, why? What do you mean? Why not? And I said, because I don't agree with anything. And the priest is saying. And they were like, okay. That was that. And then my siblings went, hey, one second. We want to watch Wonder Rama too. So my older brother was a really good cartoonist. It just came really naturally to him. So I always had to work twice as hard to be half as good, but it gave me a work ethic towards it being a cartoonist. Still I never took it very seriously. And I was constantly, I didn't have that single-minded passion about it. And because of that, it was very easy for the adults in my life to distract me from it. Like my own father would be like, oh, you have artistic ability. You should go into advertising, you know, or be a cartographer. You should make maps. You like to join you, like to look at maps. Why don't you make them? And the same with both in high school and then later I went to art school and went to art school and both while I was in high school and the short time I was in art school, all of my art teachers hated comics. To them it wasn't art. They were quite clear about it and this was true across the board. Comics were not art at all. These days I wouldn't say it doesn't have a negative reputation at all anymore. But when I started, it had a very seamy, sleazy reputation. No cartoonist teaching at SVA? Actually, SVA was started by cartoonists and there were cartooning teachers there. I dropped out before I signed up for their classes, but then I held on to my student ID card and I would go whenever I felt like it's so for free and it's sit in. Because I thought the Margaret Sanger book says you're a graduate of SVA in the bio. They may have gotten that. You know what? This is terrible. People keep throwing the- A graduate of the School of Visual Arts. Here you go. I didn't read that. I didn't ever read that stuff. People keep throwing quotes at me about what the promotional literature says about the book and I'm like I don't even know what that means. Just sounds good, but I go I guess I should vent these things instead of just letting them throw it out there. Your 50s or bio is your bio. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, no, I didn't graduate. It's funny. Of course, I never preferred to SVA as my alma mater since I didn't graduate. It was funny as the moment I became somewhat successful, it's the moment I got a name for myself. SVA started sending me- Oh, the donation request? They wanted money. Yes. Yes. And they were calling me. They listed me as one of their- Distinguished alumni. Distinguished, yes, exactly. I think you're technically an alumni if you actually went, but not even if you didn't graduate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I would sit on the- They had very talented teachers, Art Spiegelman, who, he was incredibly intense back then, but he was an excellent teacher. He was just a fount of information. So I got to know him outside of school, largely just to milk him for information because he was just, he knew everything. Everything I wanted to know, he knew, that went beyond drawing, you know, talking about where to get- How about your living and- Or know where to get something printed, you know, what to expect from a printer, how to promote, how to write a press release, just things like that. He would always like normally, when I'd ask him, he would just bark at me, or he'd tell me, "I don't know. I don't know the answer to his questions." I'm like, "Yes, you're doing this." "No, I don't." But then the next time I'd see him, you know, it'd be like, "Hi," you know, "And how's the weather?" And then he would- Then he- If he was in a better mood, then he would answer a question he refused to answer a month ago. And the other teachers, they were Harvey Kurtzman, who was, seemed to me, he was just babysitting. And- Very late in his career at that point. Yeah. And a few times I sat in an eisner's class, it seemed like he was always surrounded by a click of sycophants, you know. I was told he was a very good teacher. But sort of recreating a studio in a classroom setting. Yeah. Well, it just seemed like certain people were hugging up all of this time. Yeah. It was always the superhero guys, you know. So. And that was never an interest of yours. Two years? No, I liked comics. I loved comic books. I loved the format of them and the feel of them. It's a shame now that now I was very resistant to this whole switch to square-bound books. And now we know called it graphic novels. Yeah. I know. Which still sounds like this. Isn't that sound like a dirty book? A graphic novel. Yeah. Isn't that a porno book? D.H. Lawrence's early. It was a very graphic novel. But I've given up. They're not coming back. They don't make economic sense for the publisher or the artist. So I don't even think in terms of comic book anymore. Well, you do prefer working in a serialized format as opposed to a fully complete. You know, at this point, I like the serialized format because I would be getting feedback while I was still working on it. And I like that. You know, you can see how, you know, and that would make adjustments accordingly. But I literally just simply love the feel and the format of a comic book. It's like the perfect, like you said, you just read half of this so far. If it was a comic book, you would have read all of it. If it was a 32-page book. Yeah, for me, it was like the perfect thing to read in one sitting. And like the way that it felt and, you know, great to have next to a toilet, roll it up, stick it in your back pocket. You know, it wasn't precious, you know, now it's now the format demands that it be taken seriously. For the bookshelf. Yes. Exactly. Coffee table material. It's a coaster material. So I miss that. So superheroes, no, I never got into them. The one except, I loved the Batman and Superman TV shows when I was a kid. I love those shows. But I didn't like the comics. I like those more Wisinger comics now, you know, from the DC comics from the '60s because I could see there's this really wry, odd, sensitive humor that was deliberate. But that was lost on me when I was a kid. And, and I now like the artwork of Kurt Swan. But back then I thought it was incredibly dry and just so dry, so square. And also, I remember when Marvel Comics first came out when they started, when they... In 1961 or so. In 1964, I remember seeing like the very first Hulk son neighbor kid had all of them. I didn't even know they were like the very first issues until I saw them re-print it and I go, yeah, these are the ones I used to see all over the floor of my friend's brother's bedroom. And what I loved was Jack Kirby's artwork. To me, there was amongst superheroes, there was Jack Kirby and then there was everybody else. And his... And I didn't even know his name. I would just like go through everything just to look for anything that he drew. Because his art just leapt off the page. I just couldn't believe how dynamic it was. I still can't believe how dynamic. What I hated about Marvel is it always ended with To Be Continued. To me, it was like, what a rip-off of this scam. They had you with the soap opera. They would just keep you going for a permission to use you. With soap operas, though, you'll find out what happens the next day. Yeah. With those, you have to wait a month. And when you're a kid a month is like a century. Now, let me ask, you mentioned the crumb movie. At one point early in your career, crumb tapped you to be the managing editor of an anthology called Weirdo. What was it like meeting crumb for the first time? Well, when he asked me to help him edit Weirdo magazine, I had never met him. We were corresponding. Yeah. In fact, I was like submitting work to Weirdo, and first he rejected it. Then he started accepting a few pieces of mine, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he asked me if I wanted to be the managing editor. I thought it was very strange just because we had never met. When I asked him later why he asked me, and I was young, I was new, when I asked him later, he said, well, based on the cartoonists I know and the ones I correspond with, you were the least insane. I would have hoped for most confident, but yeah, least insane is probably the best you can hope for. But and again, I hadn't met him yet. He seemed wonderful based on the correspondence we were having. But I only had a handful of friends that actually knew him, who had ever met him. And they, you know, Speakerman was one, John Holmstrom, who I was working with, he used to do punk magazine. He was another, he had met Crumb in the past. And they both, and there was a few other people who I knew that worked with Crumb. And they all told me, without exception, they said, this is great, go ahead and do this with him, but, you know, Crumb is a notorious flake. Don't be surprised if he just pulls the rug out from under you, just drops the whole thing, you know, just be prepared for the worst, because this guy is kind of, he's a flake. And he wound up being nothing of the sort. I wound up walking away from the magazine that was not walking away. I had to quit because by then I had my own comic book going, neat stuff. And both were suffering from me trying to do both. So I thought it was best for everybody if I stopped working as a managing editor. And Crumb was quite upset with me when I did that. But did you patch it up? Yeah, no, no, he wasn't, it was not that level. He was disappointed, it was all, yeah, it wasn't really angry. And by then to his wife, Eileen Crumb, they had a young baby, but by then she was in grade school. So Eileen is like, look, the kids in school now, you know, I have some free time, I'll take it over. So she kept it going for like, we each did it for three years, managed it for three years. But he was, he was totally reliable, he was the best mentor I've ever had, just gave me the best advice, you know. His advice was always consistently just be true to yourself, you know, whatever it is that you're working on. Even if it's like just hacky work for hire, he says, are you getting something out of it? Is it fun? You know, do you think that it'd be something that you could look at later and say, yeah, that was good. He says, if that's the case, go ahead and do it. He says, I don't do it, but I don't, you know. He doesn't need to. Yes. He says, I used to and I resented it. You know, he said, I used to have no choice, but but yeah, he became, I've never met an artist who more stubbornly did what he wanted to do. And at the time I met him, he was broke. He had very, well, they, they lived, it's not like they had this fabulous lifestyle. They lived in like a gussied up shack, basically, this old migrant farm worker shack that they kept expanding. And how they would expand on it is whenever he or she saw abandoned lumber, they'd take it home. And then when they had enough lumber, they'd ask a carpenter friend of theirs to add another little room to the house. The glamorous life of cartoonists. Yes. He's fabulously wealthy now, you know, and back also back then I couldn't believe how many people didn't know who he was. That movie didn't awful lot to raise his profile. And now his original art just goes for a fortune. So I could only imagine that he's a millionaire by now. And trading the sketchbooks for home in France was one of those signs of, yeah, there's a great value to this. And now one of those sketchbooks gets him several homes in France. And they own like seven or eight pieces of property in France and all paid for in cash. Elene particularly hates banks. She hates loans. So all of it was paid for in full right up front. They never had a mortgage payment. Yeah. That's yeah, just another world for me, but were there any cartoonist you were ever utterly starstruck? Well, Chrome is my all time favorite artist of any kind. That's why when I met him I couldn't believe, well, I was warned ahead of time, but I just still could not get my head around the fact that he wasn't a millionaire then, that he wasn't the richest man in the world then just because to me, he's like the greatest artist to me that ever lived. I just think he is phenomenal and without a doubt, my biggest inspiration. Artistically also big influence or who we consider your well him. Yeah. When I was a kid to be a lot of the mad artists, Paul Coker Jr. visually, you know, and Don Martin, I loved, but I loved everybody that worked for mad. Peanuts Schulz was a huge influence. I pretty much liked every, when I was a kid, I liked every newspaper strip that was funny or was supposed to be funny in quotes. I still thought they were funny just, but you know, if the guy drew kind of funny, I liked it, you know, I was, I would buy paperback collections of Marmaduke. I was like, yeah, this is good stuff. Once upon a time, how can you not? Well, your style is very cartoonish, how did you evolve into that? Well, there's something else that I loved, another thing that I was obsessed with was Warner Brother cartoons. And I liked them ever since I was a little kid, but unlike other cartoons I'd see on TV as I got older, I'd grown to my teens and I would see when I'd watched some old Bugs Bunny cartoon again, I would get jokes that I used to not get, the references, you know, Wendell Wilkie, you know, and you know who Wendell Wilkie is, and you go, that's hilarious. But they'd stick them in a cartoon. When you're an eight-year-old in the 1950s, yeah, that's completely... And so I was, but also visually, you know, particularly the... I loved all the director, Warner Brother directors, I was obsessed with all of them. I never could seriously contemplated becoming an animator just because I was well aware of the tedious labor involved. But there was one director named Bob Clampett and his cartoons were the most exaggerated. They were very explosive. He was the ones... Like, people mentioned tech slavery, but I think Bob Clampett's cartoons were even more exaggerated than tech savories. And I love tech savory, too. So I used to try to get that, that rubbery exaggeration, I tried to get it on the printed page. You know, in a way, it seemed like a little bit, it seemed like a dumb attempt, a foolish thing to do since those things literally are moving, and the cartoons are moving. But I wanted to get that energy and dynamism on, you know, on the printed page and stuck with it, you know, and just became, more or less became a habit. And also the way I draw it, you know, like the business with no elbows and other things that people always point out with my work, it wasn't like a rule of mind. I'm not going to draw elbows and knees. And sometimes I do, depending on what the person is doing, you know, if their elbow is, if they're leaning on it and the elbows on the table, I will make the elbow. Or nudging somebody in the ribs. Exactly. It just, it's at one point, I like, I made a conscious effort to draw elbows and it didn't like the way it looked. I just, it seemed like it was holding things up. And I just look, again, it was that energy that's always automatically there when I don't bother with things like that and keep it rubbery. But you'd settled on a very cartoony style from the outset, you hadn't tried it. Yeah, it just, it's what worked for, it worked for me. And it was some of the people find hard to believe is like when I would, like again, when I was at SVA, my first drawing class, that drawing teacher, he very much wanted us to draw realistically, you know, he'd get a bunch of folded curtains and cylinders. You know, the typical first year of art school, uh, the life studies. Yes. And, uh, and I was his prized pupil, you know, I drew the most realistically of anybody in the color. When I'm, when I'm literally looking at something, I'm not so good at doing that from my head. But I'm, when I'm looking at something, I had no problem recreating it. But I also found it incredibly boring. That was, he was one of many, like I said, I was like his favorite pupil. And even though he was a teaching drawing, he was a fine artist. And I remember one time while I was talking to him, I told him that I, he was talking about, he wanted me to follow in his footsteps, whatever that was. But I told him, uh, at one point that I wanted to be a cartoonist. And he said, seriously? And I said, yes. And he turned on his heels, walked away and never talked to me again, never even looked at me. Has teaching ever been a possibility for you? Yeah. No, I do teach. I do. Yeah. Like a, just one semester at the Seattle University, it's a Jesuit school in, in the middle of the most liberal part of Seattle. The Jesuit sneak in everywhere. Yes. What's the, the nature of the course? It's a, actually I'm part of the English department. It's writing, writing comics. Okay. They call it writing graphic novels, although I'm not asking the students to write a whole novel. The final project would be just to create a comic story that's anywhere from six to ten pages. Before that, you know, it just, we're doing, I'd make them draw. Yeah. I'd make demand that they combine words with pictures. So it could even be collages, it could even be photographs, but, but they just have to combine the words with the pictures. But it's so much to all English majors. You know, a few of them can draw, but it draw quite nicely. But the end results are really impressive. They do great. Yeah. How do you develop a curriculum for that? I, I had Ivan Burnettion a few months ago where that was really, you know, a focus of our conversation was, was putting together a curriculum. Right. And I even, you know, I even talked to Ivan about it. He created this little book with some very simple lessons. And I referred to that a couple of times in my class. I think I might have like shared syllabi with some of my cartoonist friends who teach. But it's, it's funny, like the most, one of the most frustrating things being a teacher is how the students do not read the syllabus. How often you have to say, they'll go, well, when is this due? Or what is it? It's like, read the syllabus. How many times do I have to say this? But what's funny is I can't really blame them because like I think Ivan or somebody else, they sent me their syllabus for their class. And I was like, I can't read this. This is so boring. It's so dry. Week seven. Blueberry. No. Cares. Now you evolved from neat stuff, the sort of self anthology you were doing into hate comics. From that process, you took the Bradley family that you were doing stories about in neat stuff and extracted the lead, well, the oldest son, buddy. And as I mentioned in the introduction, created this zeitgeist skewering slacker character just before the wave of Gen X really took off. What was it like for you sort of finding that fictional alter ego, that moment when you had the, oh, this is the character I can-- Yeah, he's my stand-in. Yes. Well, when I first drew the Bradley family, it was just a one-page comic strip, and the idea behind it, and I did it very impulsively. I was sitting around with my wife and our old roommate, and we used to just, we would draw comics or just dumb drawings together just the past the time, and most of it was extremely pornographic, you know, like, hysterically pornographic, not like, turn-on pornographic. Yeah. Everything's a turn-on for someone, that's what the internet teaches us. Oh, my God. Not the stuff that we were drawing. I can't fathom. So I just drew this thing called, "Meet the Bradley's." And I very much was presenting them like a sitcom family, like the Brady Bunch. Like, "Here's Dad." "Oh, he's drunk again." And so I drew everybody doing-- basically I drew my own family, and I myself thought it was hilarious. I don't know if anybody else left particularly hard, but I loved portraying my family accurately, but also pretending they're lovable, you know, and adorable. And I was so amused by it that I started doing more stories with them, and they-- and they know-- like, neat stuff, my first comic book of my own, the first thing I did for fan of graphics was pretty much a one-man anthology. I had all these different characters who pretty much had their own friends, and there was like these separate casts of characters. And the Bradley family was one of them, but they got the best response, so wound up taking-- and I had a lot of ideas for them, especially-- again, since it's based on my-- not just my life and upbringing, but the same with all of my friends. One thing I have to say is, Mob Bradley, that's the one character. She's nothing like my mother. That's like the one big difference. How did your family respond when they started seeing these strips, actually? They didn't-- yeah, you know, it's funny. Probably the best way that you could have hoped for were I'd be like, "Did you read it?" And they go, "Yeah." I go, "Did you recognize the family or yourself?" And they go, "Yeah, of course." "Oh, good." "Yeah." "Oh, that's a very interesting family you invented," or, "We're never speaking to you again." "No, it never had either." You know, they were just like, "No, we get it. Okay." "We don't care." "Awesome." Now, my parents-- I really don't think they read it. I once, when I first started self-publishing, I gave copies to my parents. And again, actually, my father gave the best answer you could possibly hope for. I said, "Did I go, did you read those-- it was comical funnies, the things I was doing with Holmes from him?" I go, "Did you read them?" He goes, "Yeah." He goes, "Oh, look." And I said, "What'd you think?" And he said, "I am not your target audience." I was going to ask, "And your career choice never really went over with your dad?" I said, "Good. Well, that's a nice idea." He was, "Keep doing what you're doing." I could see you're enjoying it, but please don't ever ask me or read it ever again. Did they at least-- well, did they see you get some critical acclaim? Did they ever, you know, get this notion that you were actually-- My father had-- he's passed away enough, but he had a very annoying quirk. So did, like, you know, God bless him. They recently deported Kim Thompson, one of the co-owners and publishers of Fantagraphics. He was exactly like my father in this way, where when I'm talking to my dad, whatever it is that I'm doing, he'll criticize it. Like he'll say, after I was already, like, I bought a house and was supporting a family with the comics I was doing, and he would-- and he knew that. He would be sitting in my house, and he'd say, "Peter, I was reading this article about how superhero comics outsell other kind of comics, like 10 to 1," and I go, "Yeah," and he goes in that, like, those-- all the best-selling comic books are superhero comics, and I go, "Yeah, I know. I'm painfully aware of that. That's true." He says, "Why don't you do those?" And then he would go-- my father was like a frustrated academic. He had this fetishistic collaboration for higher education. When we drive by a college, he had to tour the campus in the car. He goes, "He loved campuses," but he himself was a college dropout, you know, which he-- I could tell he regretted. He didn't admit it, but he dropped out of college, and he wound up an officer in the military, but he would-- but my sister, Barbara, has like every degree you can get, you know, PhDs, and she's a-- she's a-- she's a administrator for an English language school in Japan and Tokyo, and she's uber-academic, so he's always-- especially her. He was always throwing her accomplishments in my-- felt like it was in my face, because he wouldn't say one nice thing about me, but he'd be like, "Barber did this, Barbara did that." Barbara heard the exact opposite. My sister said-- my sister's like, "Dad wanted all of us to go to college. I'm the only one that graduated, let alone went to graduate school." He never acknowledges that, and when I talked to him, he says, "Peter did this," and Peter did that, and Kim Thompson was like that, too. Maybe because I was growing up with this, was raised with someone like that that it didn't-- I didn't like it, but it didn't drive me crazy, but I remember particularly Dan Klaus, who used to eight-ball for-- for, uh, phantographics, and Chris Ware, who did Acme Novelty Library, it drove them nuts. Whenever Kim would be talking-- like, Kim worshipped Chris Ware, and whenever I would talk-- I'd be calling Kim up to talk about my book, and 90% of the conversation was about Chris Ware, and-- and just how he is-- how wonderful he is in every way, and actually he just wouldn't shut up about it. Klaus said at one point he started making hash marks on the wall. Every time he said, "Chris Ware," he was like 37 times! Here's the thing, Chris Ware never heard that. All he heard was complaints when he talked to Kim, and-- And you can't print this, it's got to wear the shade. Or have you seen the new book by the other artists, and he would talk about other artists, and he never would once say to Chris Ware, "You're incredible, you're fantastic." So he would draw Chris Ware completely insane for that reason. How driven were you? I mean, you came up at-- it was my sweet spot. I was in college and grad school, and it was you, Klaus, the Hernandez brothers, Woodring, Chris Ware, maybe two or three years after I discovered him. Having that sort of Mount Rushmore level of great cartoonists all publishing around the same time, how much did that drive you, I guess? Do the innovations, some of these guys were doing push you in certain directions? Yeah, absolutely. We were insanely competitive, but it was competitive in the best way. Just raising your game. Exactly. Like, I would finish a comic book, and this is the best thing ever did. But I'd always be thinking, "We do those guys see this." But then, of course, they would put something-- they were always upping their game, too, but the Klaus was ridiculous, every issue of APO was so markedly better than the one previous to-- but the way we'd compliment each other is, you know, I'd say, "Did you see my latest?" And if Klaus in particular would just go, "Yeah, I saw it. Fuck you." That-- [LAUGHTER] I win. Yeah. Yeah. Watching that. Largely became less that way, also, because even just after a while, the way we were being perceived as artists and how we wanted our work presented and perceived, and even formatted, began to diverge. Right. Like, a lot of those artists, a lot of cartoonists under, they fully embraced the switch to the book and the graphic novel. And I foolishly resisted that. I wanted-- of course, I wanted people to get a lot out of my work. I was putting my all into my work. I was-- it was fine art. I was-- is. I'm expressing myself and through the chosen medium of comics. But so in a sense, I was doing the same thing as everybody else, but I didn't-- I didn't want it to be officially that way, you know? It's not like I don't make my-- or I wasn't-- and I don't make my artwork hoping that it's going to be on a gallery wall soon, you know? And-- The Peabag Reader. Yes. Yes. Being perceived as an artist with a capital A, you know, and-- and it's not like that alone. I don't mean to make these other artists sound pretentious, but there, you know, it-- people were perceiving them that way. So it made sense, and their work was more easily accepted on those terms. They would draw more realistically, their art and their layouts were way more tended to be much more complex than mine. Sure. You were largely in a three by three grid. Yes. Yes. I've done my fair share of experimenting, especially like when I was-- like neat stuff is where it was me trying to learn how to be a cartoonist, and it's full of trial and error when I look at those old comics. And some of it were more-- had a lot of details, there was lots of cross hatching, then I'd step away from that. So-- but then I settled on just what worked, you know? I realized I just want to tell a story and doing it this way, drawing it this way, laying it out this way, this is what works. So after a while, I stopped-- this competition stopped just because, for one thing, we didn't have our own little comic books coming out, you know? Everybody's moving to these annual-- Three or four times. Yeah. And it just-- and again, the formats began to diverge wildly. And also, we just got so settled into what we wanted to do, you know, to really-- I really wasn't comparing myself. To other artists, I would see something I really liked, I'd go, "Oh, wow, this is great." But I reached a point where it didn't make me rethink how I was going to do it, you know? I wouldn't say, "Look, that format is amazing that I worked in, but not for a single second that I think I'm going to try that." Of ten or years earlier, I would have, so-- Was that around an age 40 thing, do you think you've ever done that? Yeah, yeah. I just wonder if we all said what it is we are around that time. There's something that was-- actually, it was like a little bit painful for these-- for these same reasons. I also felt a little bit on the outs, you know? Like it was my fault, I was asking not to be taken seriously, but I also was getting annoyed that I wasn't being taken seriously. I would hope that my friends and peers would at least see through that. That's okay. I was hoping my friends and peers would at least see through that, concede on my part. It's like, "I know I pretend that I'm not an artist with a capital A, but can you at least treat me like that anyway?" But also, as you get older, too, you're not hanging out anymore. You know? That's amazing. I've never been to SPX, but last night, I was sitting out at the patio with Adrian Tumini and Seth and some of these younger cartoonists who I just met. But especially those guys, you know, I've known them-- it's actually-- I've known them for decades even. And it's like no time had passed. I hadn't seen them in ages. I hadn't seen them in like ten years. Some of them. With Seth. I remember the last time I saw them, but it was like no time went by at all. You know? He just would just fall right into whatever it was you were talking about the last time. And it was very, very comfortable, but it also made me very-- it made us all very aware of the fact that we don't do this anymore. You know, we're not part of a gang anymore. Part of just being older or also having families now? Oh, yeah, all of that. Yeah. You just-- like in Seattle, I'm always being invited to-- there's a group of young cartoonists and they put out their own little periodical. They'll do a page in it. And every time an issue comes out, they all have a party somewhere and get shit faced. And they always invite me to it, but it's just-- it's so just not-- for me, I feel stupid being there. Of course, they're-- you know, when you're in your early 30s, late 20s, what else could you possibly want to do? A bunch of cartoonists having a party? Yeah. And the SPX experience, you've been signing at the table. What's your honest signing-- book signing line story? Do you have any weird people showing up with either weird stuff for you to sign, weird stuff to give you? Well, these-- I used to avoid comic conventions for the most part. I just felt like I had no use for them. But these days, thanks to the digital age, my royalty checks keep getting smaller. Whereas the one growth industry is comic conventions. And I think it's got to be because it's an experience. People don't want stuff anymore, but they want experiences. They still need to get out of the house. And so across the country, both mainstream superhero comic conventions and these alternative ones like SPX are exploding. And so when I come to this, I asked for a table. They gave me a table. And I just-- I'm trying to clean out my basement at the same time. For years, for decades, I've been hoarding all this stuff, thinking it's only going to increase in value. And now I realize the best money I'm going to get for this stuff is right now. So I just cram a suitcase full of stuff that's just taken up space in my basement. And I usually sell most of it. But people will pay me good money for sketches, but they also-- it seems like they're deliberately coming up with wacky ideas. And I realize now it's like that's them being part of the creative process. And lots of times they'll have a theme. A lot of-- Some people have the sketchbook. The sketchbook. Like Uncle Scrooge or something. Right. Yeah, so the story that people always find amusing that I tell is one follows sketchbook. The theme was weird monsters and aliens from the Star Wars movies, but not anyone that had lines. It had-- the criteria was it had to be a monster-- some monster alien that had at the most ten seconds of screen time. And of course, I'm not even a Star Wars guy as I don't-- I'm supposed to remember this, but he had all-- he had binders full of reference material. So I'm flicking through it. I'm like, I go, wait a minute. This is one-- it looked like a hill. And he goes-- it looks like a mountain. He goes-- it's like this big boulder. And it was-- it was like a monster disguised as a boulder, but then it stood up on these stubby legs and walked around. So it's like, it's a big rock. I said-- and I said-- I didn't want to do it. So I said, I'll do it for 50 bucks. And he went, OK. So I didn't quibble. So I was like, great. I'm going to get 50 bucks to draw a rock with stubby little theme. So I drew it, you know, in a minute. I drew this thing. But then things-- he walked away. He says, I'll come back later. And he walked away. And then meanwhile, things slowed down for me. They didn't have much to do. And I'm looking at this rock. And I said, oh, this is ridiculous. This guy gave me 50 bucks. So out of guilt and also nothing else to do, I just kept adding shading and crosshatching to this rock until it was incredibly detailed. And it was almost like a photo re-creation of the photo I was referring to. So when he came back and he saw all this detail that I gave it, he was so moved that I saw like a tear running. It's the most beautiful rock. But then like-- and other people too, they just come up with like they'll name a character of mine maybe, you know. I used to when I was younger, you know, out of pride or whatever, you know, not wanting to think of myself as a prostitute. If somebody asked me to draw Batman, I'd be like, what are you crazy? I'm like going to draw Batman. I draw my own characters. Now it's like, yeah, of course I'll draw Batman. You know, depending on how much money you'll give me, you know, I'll draw characters never heard of if they have the reference material. I've abraced-- very much embraced the prostitute nature of being a comic convention artist. It's capitalism. So what I was going to say was, though even if they asked me to draw, like they'll ask me to draw Buddy Bradley, but they say, can you give him green here? And I'm like, I don't have a green marker. Here's a green marker. And you know, have him writing a snake and he's wearing a dress. And then the person will be like, oh my God, my boyfriend's going to load this drawing. I was like, but they're collaborating with me. You know, it's part of the experience is also, it's like, hey, you know, I came with this idea and I hired Pete Begg to draw it. And yesterday, this guy, this really Aspergery guy came up to me and he just, he went, I want you to draw. He didn't even hesitate. He said it so fast that it was like, wasn't sure I heard what I'd heard. He says, I want you to draw a monkey writing a werewolf. And I said, a monkey writing a werewolf and he went, yes. And I said, is this a theme? Are you asking everybody to do that? And he went, no. I said, so I go, you knew exactly what you want me to draw and you only want me to, because I said, I don't draw monkeys or werewolves, but do you want just me and me alone to draw a monkey right now? I said, yes. And to him, it was like, why are we having this conversation? I've given you your marching orders to work. So I drew it. It actually came out really good. And he never came back to pick it up. He paid me for it, but it's like, did this guy forget that it wasn't even a full moon last night? He said it's possible he's off running around through silver spring and tattered clothing or something. How'd you feel the first time someone showed up with a tattoo of one of your illustrations? Well, I mean, people could, you know, of course, since I'm very much in favor of human autonomy. People could do whatever they want, but I really don't like tattoos. I think every tattoo is a regretful. You know, I've just insulted 90% of your listening audience. I just don't, every time I see any tattoo, I'm projecting, of course, but I'm always like, there's going to be a part sometime in your life, even if it's like minutes before you die, that you're going to regret that tattoo. So yeah, so I always felt bad about it because I think I'll be excited. But, you know, it goes in this, yeah, you know, but I was like, well, if you asked me, I'd be, I would tell, you know, but you know, sometimes people will pay me money just to design something that tattoo for them. Yeah. Well, that's kind of a, well, again, I love cartoonists, but I've never thought in terms of, yeah, I've got to get X, you know, on my arm. Yeah. Who do you read? Pros or comics? Who do you, who you're reading nowadays? I just read the Internet all day long, and I read books, I read nonfiction, I can't remember the last time I got through a novel. For some reason, I have a hard time with novels, they always, by nature, they now strike me as incredibly self-indulgence and I'd so prefer nonfiction, you know, it's like, yeah, just tell the truth or your perception of the truth and stop changing everybody's names and pretending that this isn't nonfiction. Do you think you're going to go back to any sort of long-form fiction? I know you've done a couple of comics into collections for DC, for Dark Horse. Yeah, with Dark Horse, DC went through some big shake-up. It's funny that I had a couple of comic book series, more like all ages type things that I did for DC, and the former president, long-time president, I guess that was his title of DC was some named Paul Levitts, and he was always the one, I mean, that was his job, he was always the one that canceled my series. So of course, I'd pull Levitts her, shake my fist at you, but then also he got fired, he was replaced by guys who don't seem to hire anybody over the age of 30, you know. So all of a sudden, I am completely off the radar, so the last time I saw Paul Levitts, I was like, really nice of you were there? I know he was like, I hear that all the time from you geysers. Two other questions. You've been continuing Buddy Bradley's stories, after you've finished 30 Issues of Hate, you've done seven or eight of them, basically a year apart for the hate annual with Buddy getting older, basically about ten years younger than you all along. Do you ever look at doing continuing Buddy Bradley's story? Yes, that's what I'm doing right now. Hate annual was, you know, it was me trying desperately to keep doing comic books, but I know that, again, they're just so not economically feasible. And I just couldn't afford the time to do these Buddy Bradley stories, and again, just for the benefit of your listeners, Hate annual was a way to keep the Buddy Bradley character of hate alive, which I very much wanted to do, it's just that I had all these other opportunities that I wanted to take advantage of. Probably about a 24 page story every year or so, it would range from ten, you know, even as small as ten pages, and then I'd fill it up with other stuff, I'd reprint material that I did for other people to pad out each issue. Don't you mean to create a more fulfilling experience for the reader? You can not pad out. Both. Yes, yes. I was padding it out, and also it was all brilliant. But that's exactly what I'm doing now, is I'm doing, it's basically Hate annual number ten, I'm doing a 20 page Buddy Bradley story, but it kind of wraps up this story arc that I've had slowly building with all the stories I've been doing for Hate annual so far. But it's not going to come out as Hate annual ten, we're just going to take all of the existing Hate annual Buddy Bradley stories and make a book out of it. And this will be the extra, this will be an extra 20 pages to wrap it up. Do you plan on continuing beyond that? I'll have to wait and see, you know, it always comes down to, can I afford the time invested in it, you know, but, you know, and sometimes I wonder, am I doing this out of habit? I have tons of ideas for him because, again, he's based on me. And our lives aren't identical, you know, Buddy Bradley isn't a cartoonist, and I'm not in this scrap metal business in any way, but I probably would still do fictional stuff. I've done too many series that were collected into graphic novels for Dark Horse, but Dark Horse is just like every other publishing company, you know, their economic situation ebbs and flows. And when things are going great, that's when the fellow who owns Dark Horse, Mike Richardson, when things are going great, that's when his young editor just feel like it's safe to say, why don't we do another mini series with the likes of Peter bag? And he'll be like, yeah, sure, great. But it always seems like by the time the book comes out, times are tough again, and Richardson's like, What the hell are we pulling this? So we did talk about doing a sequel to it. Reset is about a comedian slash character actor who's down on his luck. And so he takes part in these weird bizarre experiments, just a way to make money. He also keeps in the book, he keeps resisting, he wants to revive his career, but he keeps resisting going on any kind of reality show. He doesn't want to be a part of that and doesn't want to be, you know, subject to ridicule. He's not that desperate for attention. But by the end, it's kind of like the way I embrace being a comic's prostitute at the very end of that reset. He just calls up his agents, says, yeah, sure, he goes, there's still any offers. And his agents says, yes, this show, it's called Washed Up Island, and it's on the Fishing Channel. So of course, I didn't even think of it, but when it came out that my editor on the title said, we have to do, we have to do a mini series about his experience on Washed Up Island for the Fishing Channel. So I wrote an outline for it, but now things must be tight at Dark Horse again, because Mike Richardson said, can you tell Pete Baghdad to sit on that for a while? That's the way the career goes. One question from a fan of yours, Palamein, when I mentioned on Facebook that I'll be interviewing you. He just asked, how were Bunny and Chet getting along these days? God, I'm probably too depressed. For the benefit of your listeners, Chet and Bunny, they're like a very specifically a stand-in for me and my wife, and it's just the thoughts and conversations of a domestic couple. Unlike me and my wife, though, they didn't have children, and I did recently, now it's 10 years ago, amazingly I did it for Adobe's website. They paid me, this is back there in the .com boom, they paid me a fortune to do a regular ongoing one page, yeah, comics for the web, and I did Chet and Bunny, just billy aching about their life and what does it all mean, and our neighborhood's getting gentrified, do we like it or do we hate it? Stuff like that. So I don't know, boy, I haven't thought about doing something with them. I don't know why I think it would be depressing if they're reflecting the post-recession era. I could see where you kind of drive them down even further. My last question is one that might be a little touchy. My brother-in-law saw an ESPN former football player and coach Mike Tice recently won $100,000 in some horse betting move. You get any tips from him at all? Is there anything, you know, any good horses? I know, I couldn't believe how that quickly made the Twitter verse. It's like everybody I know knows about it. Yeah, I saw it on ESPN and just had this vision of you in a slow burn. No, no, it's, well, you know, it's kind of the guy's always, you know, he makes really good money. I just had an incredibly successful career as a coach. So he had a three, his last job was, he had a three-year contract with the Chicago Bears. He was an offensive line coach and I think the last year he was with them, kind of, was he either, was it a four-year deal? I don't know. All I know is that the head coach, Levy Smith got fired and so they got rid of the whole staff. So, this past year, this is the first year that my brother-in-law Mike Tyson isn't working. It's the first time he's taken a break from the NFL that I can recall and he seems to be doing fine. I was worried about it because he's a workahaulic. He's incredibly hyper, he has so much energy, but yeah, he's getting paid like, I don't know, two million bucks to do absolutely nothing, you know, because it was in his contract. So that's to me, you think, you think I'm like, huh, because he won a hundred thousand bucks at the races, he's getting paid two million bucks to do nothing, you know. Clearly, we went into the wrong line of work. Yeah. But also, you know, him and his wife, actually his wife is my sister-in-law, his wife is my wife's sister. They love the horses and he's always, they used to invest in horses. So like, with a hundred thousand, it's like, yeah, that was great. He picked like the longest of long shots, just for something to do and it panned out. But then I shouldered to think how much money he's lost on the horses. Yeah. He did tend not to come out ahead of it. So that's how I make myself feel better. Peter bag, thanks so much for your time. Sure, thank you. And that was Pete Bag. I strongly recommend Woman Rebel. It's a really wonderful piece of work and it's published as I mentioned by Drawn and Quarterly. You should find it bookstores, Amazon, probably comic stores, depending on how progressive and interested they are in this sort of stuff. You should also check out Pete's other comics, including the collected editions of Hate. Everybody is stupid except for me. Pete Bag's other stuff, Apocalypse Nerd, and more. And most of those are published by Fantagraphics Books, although he's also had work published by Dark Horse Comics and DC Vertigo. And Reason Magazine carries his comics reportage and you can find that work at reason.com. You can find Pete's site at peterbag.com and that's P-E-T-E-R-B-A-G-G-E. And that's it for this week's virtual memories show. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Charles Blackstone, the managing editor of book slot and the author of the brand new novel, Vintage Attraction. Until then, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. And I can't help but wonder what chapter I've been under, yeah! I'm a slave male and that's a fact. There's so much more to me than that. Such a heckful little girl. Well, then a rookie's her owner. She's riding in a little boat, she don't like me, but she's got me hooked. And I can't help but wonder what she's like between the cover. I can't help but wonder what she's like between the cover. I can't help but wonder what she's like between the cover, yeah! [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]