Hate Revisited #2, by Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge is on my shortlist of my favorite cartoonists, and Hate is perhaps my favorite comics series of all time. Since ending the series in 1998, he's periodically returned to these characters in roughly real time, as the series leads Buddy and Lisa had a kid. Bagge has said that Buddy Bradley is a version of him, approximately ten years in the past, so it's been interesting to see him move Buddy into a weird kind of adulthood. Hate was the quintessential Gen-X slacker comic in its day, featuring a rotating cast of lunatics in Seattle right around the time that grunge became a dominant aesthetic. After a certain point midway through the series, Bagge moved Buddy and the cast back to his native New Jersey, where he had to try to figure out what to do with his life instead of just drifting. There was always a restlessness to what Bagge was doing in this series; he could have milked the Seattle scene a lot longer than he did, for example. 

Bagge has done a lot of work since Hate ended, including several series with DC, biographies with Drawn & Quarterly, and tons of political commentary and history. (Founding Fathers Funnies is a particular favorite of mine, as Bagge hilariously cuts through a lot of bullshit in a way that matches the irreverence of Hate at its height.) Hate's always been there, however, and the new Hate Revisted! series is a blend of modern-day Buddy & Lisa (and their now-adult weirdo son Harold) and flashbacks to Seattle and even high school Buddy in New Jersey. 

Looking at issue #2, Bagge returns to perhaps his most memorable character, Leonard "Stinky" Brown. Bagge's perspective on Stinky now from Buddy's point of view is interesting. On the one hand, this delusional loser has an undeniable charisma and almost a sweetness to him, but he's also the kind of loose cannon that as Buddy describes "more often than not, they don't grow up...and that 'charm' wears off fast..They become more of a liability." For Buddy, being around Stinky was a fun adventure, because Stinky had no boundaries and no limits. He was totally unpredictable and capricious, and the first story serves as their first meeting. In the course of the story, Stinky calls in a bomb threat to set up a drug deal, steals two different vehicles, shoplifts half of a record store, and gets stabbed trying to rob someone at knifepoint. But he introduces Buddy to St. Mark's Place, they have a crazy adventure, and Stinky represents this tantalizing sense that anything is possible in an otherwise stultifyingly dull suburban environment. Buddy wanted someone to bring him out of his more cautious tendencies, and Bagge shows how easy it was for Buddy to want to fall in with Stinky.

Of course, the next story sees Buddy in the present day, worried about his son falling in with a Stinky-like character nicknamed "Spam." Spam lives in a tent in a homeless camp, jokes about stealing Buddy's propane, and wants to buy land with Buddy's son Harold. Buddy immediately suspects that he's going to get Harold in trouble the way that Stinky ultimately did. Here, Bagge delves back into one of the more jaw-dropping scenes in Hate: Stinky's accidentally (?) killing himself with a handgun in front of Buddy's younger brother Butch. Even after Stinky's death, shenanigans occurred, as Buddy had to help move Stinky's body multiple times. The entire issue revolves around Stinky, as there are flashbacks to Buddy's old housemates Val and George dealing with him.

This wasn't just a memory lane exercise for Bagge; by centering the story around Stinky, he was able to get at the heart of what made him so appealing and repulsive at the same time. Stealing and lying came as easily to him as breathing, and he never once thought about the consequences of any of his actions. Buddy and Lisa have always been a mix of reactive and impulsive in their actions, and Bagge shows how this hasn't changed even as they've grown older. Buddy's plan to rein in Harold is predictably hair-brained, and Lisa's eventual reaction ("grounding" their adult son) points out her own impulsiveness AND reactiveness. 

Bagge did the flashback stories in black & white and the present-day stories in color. The inking in some of these stories was pretty rough, especially the color sections.  The whole issue has several mistakes, like a misnumbered page and a misspelling, which makes it feel that any editing done here was cursory at best. Still, even if this isn't Bagge's crispest work, his use of body language and the way he arranges particular sets of characters is unlike any other artist. There are many artists who have imitated Bagge's rubbery character design and frantic character expressions, and Bagge's comedic dynamism is as sharp as ever.

D&Q: Peter Bagge's Credo

It's been interesting following Peter Bagge's third act as a cartoonist. Originally one of the pioneers of alternative comics in the 80s with Neat Stuff (not to mention editing Weirdo), then one of the stars at the height and eventual fall of alternative comics in the 90s with Hate, he's reinvented himself a few times since then. Or rather, he's reinvented his subject matter, as he hasn't changed his visual style or fundamental essence as a humorist one iota. Bagge tried everything after Hate: animation in the middle of the first dot.com boom and bust, writing and drawing comics for DC, being a reporter and political commentator for Reason and other publications, and writing original graphic novels about various kinds of characters. Throughout it all, he's still retained his trademark rubbery style and frantic expressiveness.

His latest project has been a series of heavily-researched biographies about three different women for Drawn & Quarterly: Margaret Sanger, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rose Wilder Lane. All three of them are libertarian heroes who lived in the early 20th century. Each one was a remarkable individualist who carved their own path and refused to let society's patriarchal tendencies hold them back. Each one was also tempestuous and frequently difficult to get along with. Each one was a controversial figure in their own way. Bagge's admiration for each is obvious and his intensive research is obvious given that the notes section in the most recent book, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, is a third as long as the story itself. Of the three women whose story he's told, Lane is the one most directly connected to what became the libertarian movement, as she was friends with a number of people in that circle, including author Ayn Rand.

Lane was a writer, and well-known during her time for novels, political screeds and extensive articles in all sorts of periodicals. She may be best known for work for which she explicitly denied taking credit: collaborating with her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder on her "Little House" books. This is a matter of extensive controversy, and Bagge doesn't try to settle it one way or another as much as he tries to introduce reasonable doubt. The assertion that Wilder, an untrained (but talented) writer could suddenly produce seamless prose at a late age all on her own seems far-fetched. The most likely scenario, given Lane's record of near-flawless prose, is that Wilder's daughter collaborated with her, taking her mother's ideas and giving them an extensive rewrite. At the barest minimum, she edited them and gave them polish. Lane had a complicated relationship with her mother (to say the least!), so it's possible that she didn't want to complicate it further by claiming credit for her work, as well as knowing that the success of the books hinged in part on the illusion of single-author authenticity.

Bagge is less interested in that particular debate and more interested in Lane's interpersonal struggles, especially with her mother. He notes that it's likely that she suffered from bipolar disorder, and she was well aware of and perplexed by her mental illness and the emotional roller-coaster it created. She was simultaneously loving and irascible, constantly smothering talented young people she met as her new "children" or later "grandchildren," in part to replace the baby she lost in childbirth. She was attracted to men but could only stand their company for so long before her wanderlust got the best of her. She was miserable when she was alone and miserable when she was with other people, and her awareness of this fact made her even more miserable. As whip-smart, accomplished, and stubbornly accomplished as she was, Bagge makes the case that she did all this in spite of the weight of her mental illness.

Bagge derives a lot of comedy from Lane's anti-government stance. Initially a socialist because of the influence of her aunt, she saw firsthand the horrors that a totalitarian socialist state can wreak. Bagge also makes the astute point that while her family was gifted land as homesteaders by the government, this was all land pretty much stolen by the natives or bought for a pittance in the Louisiana Purchase. The homesteaders served the purpose many settlers/homesteaders supported by their states do: establish a toehold in lands otherwise occupied by people who have been there for a long time and provoke conflicts. Lane was rightly suspicious of the government regulating industry because of industry's ability to simply buy their way into gaining favorable conditions that would help create monopolistic conditions. Of course, like many libertarians, the idea of a public good and how best to maintain it was something she didn't consider. Nor did she consider the amoral nature of capitalism and the relentless desire of corporations to get ahead not with a better product, but by exploiting workers unable to seek out a better situation or cutting corners on safety or waste disposal. Of course, many of these issues weren't prominent problems in her time, nor did she have training as an economist.

Of course, even though Bagge clearly admired many of her ideas (she wrote for an African-American newspaper and acknowledged the unjust nature of Jim Crow laws and the ways in which black people were persecuted by police, for example), he had no interest in making her out to be a saint or have all of the answers. Indeed, there's a scene where she and Ayn Rand not only have significant disagreements as to atheism, Lane became immediately suspicious of Rand cultivating a cult of personality. In this Bagge got at the heart of what made her an interesting character. She was more interested in ideas than notoriety. She preferred a dry but forceful delineation of ideas (her book Credo) to Rand's dressing it up in fictional form. She embodied the best ideals of the frontier spirit: a powerful and relentless sense of individualism combined with a generosity of spirit and understanding of teamwork as a necessity for survival. In many respects, this is Bagge's own statement about his beliefs in the form of this woman, who was closer to an anarchist than anything else.

Elastic History: Woman Rebel

Tom Spurgeon and others have written extensively about how Peter Bagge was one of the first rank, most influential alt-cartoonists in the world in the 1990s. Bagge was not only a preeminent humorist, he was also a fine editor, first at Weirdo and then again in the latter issues of Hate, when he started printing work by the likes of Rick Altergott and Johnny Ryan. Indeed, Bagge mentioned that he almost thought about keeping Hate going as an anthology periodical, but he saw the handwriting on the wall at the time: the market would no longer support a comics periodical in numbers large enough to sustain a viable professional career. Bagge was also a tastemaker, as a mention from him in Hate was enough to help launch a dozen careers. Even as he was drawing Buddy Bradley's misadventures, I always sensed a restlessness from him and a probing intellect. This played out in ending Hate to pursue any number of other projects and interests, from writing a couple of kids' series for DC (Yeah!, Sweatshop) to writing & drawing a couple of series for Dark Horse (Reset, Apocalypse Nerd) to creating an original graphic novel for DC/Vertigo (Other Lives). Of course, Bagge was also active on any number of websites, with his political strips for Reason winding up in the fine collection Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me.

These projects have had varying degrees of financial and aesthetic success, but the pieces that resonated most for me as a reader were his biographies. The backup strip for Apocalypse Nerd, "Founding Fathers Funnies", were spot-on historically and absolutely hilarious; indeed, I preferred them to the funny main story. In the new edition of Everybody Is Stupid..., the standout piece is "I.M.P", a short biography of literary critic and iconoclastic libertarian Isabel Mary Patterson. Writing about these historical figures, especially women who struggled against sexism and stupidity in general, seemed to really bring out not just Bagge's best satirical bite, it also gave his art far more energy than it did in his recent fictional stories. Bagge seemed genuinely excited to tell Patterson's story, and he did an expert job in picking out just the right anecdotes to keep a reader completely unaware of her achievements interested.

Working with Drawn & Quarterly for the first time, he pitched some ideas about other female historical figures he wanted to write about, and the creator of the birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, was the most favored idea. Bagge was fortunate to have a wealth of biographical information about this crucial, misunderstood and (today) forgotten figure available to him, as well as the good judgment to choose a subject who lived such a crazy life. There's an argument to be made that Sanger bettered the lives of women worldwide like no other figure in the 20th century, and her life is a crazy-quilt of meetings with famous historical, political and cultural figures. Like Patterson, Sanger was an iconoclast who was stubborn to a fault, an intellectual hurricane who did not suffer fools gladly, and a passionate woman with a disdain for antiquated morals. All of that resulted in some great storytelling fodder, as Bagge details her affairs with men like H.G. Wells and sexologist Havelock Ellis. The latter is recounted in a hilarious scene where he reveals his utter disinterest in actual sex, other than in watching women urinate. The eagerness with which she volunteers to do so felt like something Lisa Leavenworth might have done in the pages of Hate.

Indeed, having a protagonist as dynamic and short-tempered as Sanger allowed Bagge to use his trademark rubbery, expressionistic style to its fullest. There are plop takes, eyes bulging out of heads, distorted limbs and other typical Bagge visual cues, but none of them feel forced or extraneous. Indeed, the craziness of Sanger's life makes one feel that Bagge is the only cartoonist able to bend reality to his will in such a way as to depict it properly! Bagge is sympathetic, perhaps to a fault, regarding some of Sanger's more controversial positions, though he points out in the afterword that some of that controversy is misinformation placed on the behalf of her arch-enemies, which included the Catholic church. Sanger didn't actually approve of abortion, but the mere act of supporting birth control and giving equal access to information for women of every socioeconomic stripe was an astoundingly radical idea. That led to her giving a lecture to the Ku Klux Klan's "ladies auxillary" a dubious choice then and now, but one she defended at the time because she thought every group of women deserved to have this information. There's also her murky connection with the eugenics movement, but evidence seems scarce that she favored birth control in order to discourage the poor from breeding. Regardless, Bagge tries to touch on these issues but more-or-less lets Sanger off the hook. It's hard to blame him, because her influence and the organization that she helped create (which later became Planned Parenthood) has been astounding. And like all good heroes, her own hubris, pride and arrogance cost her dearly in her lifetime, even as she lived life to the fullest. Bagge captures all of that, and it's amazing to see him excel in his second and third act as a cartoonist.

New Versions of Old Books: Steinke, Bagge, Lafler

Let's take a look at some new collections and volumes of comics that I reviewed in their previous forms.

Big Plans: The Collected Mini-Comics and More, by Aron Nels Steinke. I reviewed the bulk of the contents of this book here and here. This collection of Steinke's early work looks great in this collection, especially his more recent stories. The earliest work looks a lot more uneven, especially in terms of the character design. The static nature of his storytelling also continues to be a distraction at times. Later in the book, Steinke makes his style work for him, incorporating beautiful and detail-oriented drawings to accentuate elements of the story in an unobtrusive way. Steinke presents himself as a figure in a permanent sense of agitation in this book, even more than he expresses anger. Indeed, he frequently holds in his anger until long after the object of his fury is out of sight and earshot. Steinke's use of interstitial pieces from short stories effectively serves to give some breathing room to the other pieces, especially since they tend to be his funnier works.All told, this book just feels like a dedicated cartoonist's first book: filled with enthusiasm, errors and a clear path of development and evolution made in public. His more recent comics about teaching really seem to be the right path for him, as he's able to merge his childlike exuberance with an adult's sense of responsibility and duty. When he collects those strips, I think we'll begin to see the fully mature phase of Steinke's career.

Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me, by Peter Bagge. In my review of the first edition of Bagge's political strips from Reason magazine, I noted that the longer pieces were more thoughtful and interesting than some of the shorter and punchier single-page strips that lacked the even-handedness of the longer stories. In this revised edition, Bagge dropped a few of those shorter strips in favor of adding longer stories, and the result is an even stronger book. Bagge is a libertarian in terms of philosophy, but is quite willing to take on Libertarian party points of view. While many think of libertarians as being gun nuts or obsessed with legalizing drugs (two points of view that show how libertarians dip into both right and left-wing ideas), Bagge's story "Brown Peril" highlights another important libertarian ideal: free and unimpeded immigration. Bagge actually does the work of a reporter and goes on the scene to political events, in this case a hispanic, pro-immigration march in Seattle. Using his quick, merciless wit, Bagge skewers those who are opposed to free immigration and reveals it as another form of othering. "Shenanigans" sees Bagge talk about the ways in which the oldest trick in politics (intimidating voters at the voting booth) was in display in Seattle when the Republican party had a schism between the old-school Mitt Romney supporters and the younger Ron Paul backers. Bagge was diligent in writing about how the backers of the other GOP candidates were in on the freeze-out at first, until they realized the Romney camp pulled a double-cross on them. Bagge really lifts the lid on the garbage pail of politics here, revealing it to be every bit as petty as one might suspect.

On a different note, I thought "Caged Warmth" was amazing. Bagge assisted a group of women in a minimum-security prison stage a musical performance by helping out with the art. The stories he tells are heart-breaking, especially when he relates his own emotions upon hearing the spoken-word testimony of one woman whose drug addiction drove a wedge between her and her children. Bagge still manages to highlight the humor of the situation while skewering his own sense of guilt in not being able to help these women, who are desperate for a letter of recommendation, a job, anything, once they are released.

The best new story t is "I.M.P.", a short biography of maverick critic and writer Isabel Mary Paterson, whose ferocity and wit made her the terror of the New York literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s. At one point a friend of Ayn Rand and a woman who was constantly amazed by the rise of technology as a way of man establishing its dominance over nature and fate, Paterson was an entirely independent thinker who owed no allegiance to any political party or system. Bagge manages to capture the essence of the historical literary figures mentioned while still maintaining his exaggerated, curvy and rubbery line and smart-ass sense of delivery. Bagge also has a knack for writing with affection about those he admires while presenting them warts 'n all. Wrapping things up with a funny strip about his relationship with Ayn Rand's works, this new edition from Fantagraphics is tremendously satisfying, even if (and perhaps especially) if one is at odds with Bagge's political beliefs.

Menage a Bughouse, by Steve Lafler. Steve Lafler was one of my earliest subjects for High-Low some years back, as I took an extended look at his Bughouse trilogy. Comparing the small print size of those comics with some of the original pages published in his Buzzard anthology, it was obvious that the Top Shelf editions looked cramped and small by comparison. This latest collection of all the Bughouse comics finally restores the series to a size that befits Lafler's character design and trippy detail. This was one of my favorite comics of the last fifteen years and a fine synthesis of Lafler's explorations into psychedelia, pulp storytelling, the world of music and the act of creation itself. It's jammed full of excellent drawing, memorable characters and a lively, joyful storytelling tone.

Sequart Reprints: Periodicals

In this column, I've mostly paid attention to the avalanche of quality graphic novels that have been released of late (I have a huge stack still demanding my attention) as well as the large variety of minicomics that grow ever more intricate. There's a big pile of the latter from SPX that will also get a full hearing soon. But what of that disappearing species, the serial alternative comic? Love and Rockets is still going strong of course, but let's take a look at recent issues of some other series, new and old.

DORK #11 (by Evan Dorkin, Slave Labor Graphics)

Evan Dorkin has always been an interesting touchstone creator of sorts for me. He's one of the rare artists who's liked by fans of even the most abstract alt-comics as well as mainstream fans. In fact, he's one of the most prominent "gateway" creators, someone whose work is accessible to mainstream fans but can lead them in other directions. His old Hectic Planet series may have begun as a sci-fi series, but it evolved into something quite different. It became a book about relationships with a sci-fi setting--both about friends and lovers. Certainly Love and Rockets had to have been a huge influence on him by that point, but it was all filtered through his own point of view. That point of view is one of someone who was raised on pop culture & comics, particularly Marvels. As far away from that sort of thing he is now in certain ways, he can't help but reference them in his humor.

That sense of humor is what makes Dorkin such a popular creator. No matter what he's writing or drawing, there's always a manic feel to every word, every panel. Early in his career, Dorkin compensated for his perceived lack of talent by overstuffing every panel full of Will Elder-esque "chicken fat". Now that he's a much more skilled draftsman, that mania remains, only it's on a well-designed page. Dorkin's relationship with pop culture is one of love-hate: his Eltingville Club stories, depicting the misadventures of four genre-loving nerds, is stinging in its depictions of the pathetic lives of these unpleasant individuals. Yet at the same time, there's an undercurrent of pity present as well--and even a certain degree of empathy. Above all else, Dorkin is concerned about his story, his characters and getting laughs--yet there's always a subtext of anger, frustration, depression and hatred towards the world but especially himself.

The latest issue of Dork distills all of this down to its purest form: 24 pages of nothing but gags. Some of them are single-panel, others are seven 4-panel strips, and there are a few extended sequences thrown in there. The issue began as something that Dorkin thought would be easy, just a bunch of gags strung together. But putting together joke after joke and making each one funny was a monstrous task. Dorkin really let his id wander in a lot of them, as his jokes became more vicious and nastier than usual, almost at an early Ivan Brunetti-level. Whether or not an individual finds them funny will vary, of course, but I did want to speak to the way that Dorkin works.

Reading this issue makes me appreciate the sheer effort Dorkin put forth to sell each joke. Take a one-panel cartoon. We see a furball with a hat and glasses having doggie-style sex with a naked woman. The caption reads, "My favorite porn star was Vixxen St. Clair, whose specialty was taking itt up the ass". The drawing itself is sort of funny, the work behind the pop-culture pun (Cousin Itt from the Addams Family) was admirable, the little detail of coming up with a dead-on porn star name was nice, but what took the joke over the top was the word balloon from It: "BRRPIDIT-BIPIBITIBIF BDRRHRHR-HBDRGT!" Dorkin's ability to really sell a joke, to go the whatever extreme was necessary to make the initial idea funny, is on display throughout the issue.

There are times when Dorkin doesn't care if you don't get the reference, but takes the joke to its logical extreme anyway. "The Prisoner of Second Avenue", featuring #6 asking where he was, and a St Marks Place punker naturally saying "You're in the village". You have to be familiar with The Prisoner and New York to really get enjoy that joke, but that's a case of Dorkin aiming some of his humor at certain audiences and making other gags more universal. "David Byrne Gets Alzheimer's" has the singer of course waking up in bed, saying "This is not my beautiful house", etc.

The violent gags are among the funniest in the book; Dorkin really cuts to the bone on them when he combines a familiar reference with a violent end. For example, "Tintin In Cambodia" is a one-panel gag that sees Tintin and Snowy bound, with their throats slit. "Bad Dad" is a page about an awful, abusive father making demented wisecracks to his son as he does ever-more repulsive and over-the-top things. The latter strip speaks not only to the antipathy he feels toward his own father, but there's also an extra undercurrent of discomfort now that Dorkin himself is a father.

Finally, I also rather enjoy his cultural and comics commentary, like his strip entitled "If Other Media Were As Sad As Comic Books" featuring characters saying things like "Dude! I saw this movie last night and they showed a character in it reading a book!" "Oh, I am in ecstasy!" Then there's the "Save CBGB's" strip, where the characters "forgot what a complete shithole this shithole was!"

This just scratches the surface--there's page after page of jokes. Some work better than others, but that will certainly depend on the audience. Dorkin has always noted that his work is polarizing even with his own fans, with some preferring Eltingville to Milk and Cheese, Fun Strips to the Murder Family, etc. This labor of love, blood, sweat and clearly many tears may be the greatest value for your entertainment dollar you'll see all year.

American Splendor  #3 (Harvey Pekar & various, DC/Vertigo)

Harvey Pekar is a name familiar to virtually every comics fan these days, thanks to the success of the film adaptation of American Splendor. However, Harv had been chugging along for years, first self-publishing his comics and then having them released by Dark Horse. While we did see an issue a year from Dark Horse, they never really gave his work the promotion and attention it deserved. While other major publishers were busy reissuing collections of Harv's early work (which sold like gangbusters), Dark Horse sat on a decade's worth of his comics--many of which were excellent.

Happily, the success of the film and his reprints opened up all sorts of opportunities: three original graphic novels plus a new series from Vertigo. Vertigo is doing a much better job of not only promoting him but getting an interesting variety of artists to illustrate his stories. It's unfortunate that Pekar didn't get these kinds of resources until very late in his career. It's a bit like Gary Payton signing on with Miami late in his career in order to get that elusive first NBA title--he still had moments of brilliance, but he was no longer a trailblazing force.

That's OK, because even an issue of American Splendor that covers familiar ground is still a unique event in the world of comics. Pekar not only is amazingly skilled in his depiction of quotidian life that is paradoxically poetic in its plainness, his cultural-political tangents & digressions on his career are also fascinating to read. I find his short stories are more effective than most of his graphic novels to date, in part because there's not quite enough narrative in most of his stories to sustain a long-form work. I would guess that's why he chose to write about other people in his latest graphic novels, and took a long look at his childhood in The Quitter.

While all three are quite enjoyable in their own way, there's something about a short Pekar story that is immensely satisfying on its own. The way he changes narrative strategies depending on the kind of story he tells and the type of artist he chooses to illustrate that story have a profound effect on the way the reader experiences them. For example, take "The Battle of the Vacant Lot". It's a story about his childhood and a violent event that took place, so it only made sense for his The Quitter collaborator Dean Haspiel to illustrate it. Haspiel's art is dynamic and stark, with lots of bold blacks, dramatic close-ups and tense compositions. That choice perfectly played up the story of Harvey accidentally hurting a friend of his as a child but feeling a weird sense of power after he did it. As with most of his stories, there's no neat conclusion or wrap-up; Pekar deliberately leaves his anecdotes open-ended for further contemplation by the reader.

"Medicating In the A.M." uses unusually loose art from another frequent contributor, Josh Neufeld. The slightly fuzzy line Neufeld employed nicely reflects the way Pekar felt in the morning as he contemplated what medicines he needed to take to combat his physical and mental problems. After using narrative captions in that first story to gain a little distance, the reader has full access to his thoughts via word balloons.

"Regionalism" employs long-time Pekar workhorses Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm. They're pretty much the working definition of "solid but unspectacular", which is what this story about urban sprawl, increased segregation and ways to combat it via a localized governmental model that encourages cooperation rather than competing for resources. Harv softens the didactic and rhetorical aims of the story by making it a dialogue between himself and a friend, and the art switches between Harvey and the scenarios he describes. One of the most interesting aspects of Pekar (one glossed over in the movie) is his status as a working-class intellectual, a renaissance man with extensive interests in politics, history and literature.

My favorite story was the quintessential quotidian Pekar piece, "Morning Route". Illustrated by Ty Templeton (an inspired choice) and looking like it was shot almost directly from his pencils, he adds a certain warmth to the proceedings. The story simply follows Harv around as he gets medication, goes to the post office, researches a story and buys some cookies for his wife. The undertone, as there almost always is in his stories, is how one man struggles to make sense of his world and feel like he's productive. As one reads his stories over the years, one picks up the thread not of a temporal narrative of his life, but an emotional narrative. Even when there's nothing but despair around him, he still plods through his day. After retiring from his government job and beating cancer a second time, he had to fight to stave off tedium and feelings of uselessness. For Pekar, not having a purpose and an outlet for expression is the same thing as death.


Copykat #1 (MK Reed & Laura Tallardy, Otazine)

Manga is very much outside of my sphere of interest, but I've always enjoyed MK Reed's portrayals of youth and relationships. Her ear for dialogue makes her stories pleasant page-turners. It was a bit odd to see her write for an artist other than herself, and it was even stranger to see the printing/paper quality looking so amateurish. The whole thing felt more like a minicomic than a more professionally produced magazine, although its very crudeness actually made it more enjoyable to look at. Most standard manga (yes, I know there are all sorts of exceptions) is so slick and stylized (especially American attempts at the style) that my eye slides off the page. Quite frequently, I can't hold on to what's on the page. The cruder art, combined with a naturalistically told tale, reduced this difficulty for me.

The story is amusing and given energy by Reed's vivid characterization. Every character is given some sort of depth and is neither entirely likeable nor despicable. The plot is rather familiar: a young woman with a bubbly personality but not much of a grip on practicalities comes to live with her sister in New York, waiting for that big break in the art world. Reality dictated that she had to go find a job, and so she stumbled onto one at the local copy shop. Kat, the title character, is the sort of naive but pushy young woman who is fun to read about in this sort of setting. The reader is drawn to her but also wants to see her take a few lumps in the process of figuring things out.

The one really jarring thing about the art was Tallardy interjecting photographic backgrounds at random throughout the story. I'm not sure if that was a stylistic choice or simply a way to avoid trying to tackle subjects she can't draw. Her art is actually fairly expressive, but it's obvious that she can't do everything she wants on a page yet and there's not much economy to her art. She would do well to perhaps use slightly thinner lines and clean things up a bit in general. I like the way she composes a page, but using thick blacks doesn't really compensate for crude draftsmanship.

Monster Parade #1 (Ben Catmull, Fantagraphics)

It's odd that perhaps the most "mainstream" of the comics I'm reviewing in this column in terms of its trappings is from Fantagraphics, the vanguard publisher of alternative comics. Monster Parade is the new series by former Xeric-grant winner Ben Catmull. His work features a certain ominousness in its atmosphere and setting, lightened by whimsical story elements and absurd situations.

There's a certain interconnectedness in the short stories here, but it's not explicit. Catmull's world is one where monsters are the norm but still inspire wonder. In "Winter Storm", a young boy watches a storm roll in, stoked by a gigantic 4-armed hillbilly who's throwing lightning bolts and stirring up a wind. A huge bird brings the rain, and then the boy comes face to face with a flying whale. As we cut to a train rolling by, the story switches from black and white to the next story's washed-out reds. In "Monster Express", we get a sharply timed comedy of discomfort combined with an off-panel rampaging monster on a train. The story is completely different from anything else in the issue. However, despite the escalating gags from page to page, it still manages to finish on an extremely creepy note.

From there, we segue into the local wildlife doing all sorts of odd things and come upon an image of a creature in a window in a town. The reader is immediately jolted into the next story, "Civilization Illustrated", a faux-academic study of a town surrounded by rivers. This was my favorite story in the book, as Catmull manages to combine comedy, weirdness, and creepiness in one package. There's almost a Lovecraftian feel to some of the images (like the creature in the "deep haunted cellars where no living person should tread"). Then there was the minimalistically depicted war between Louse Land and Mite Ville, two insect cities living underneath a dock. There's not really a narrative here, just a collection of dizzying images that make the reader want to know more about every tidbit offered.

Catmull has always been effective in creating mood, atmosphere and general discomfort for the reader. In the long period of time it took him to publish again, it's clear that he's added a lushness to his work that serves to soften its hard edges and induce a sort of nostalgia for events that never took place and locales that don't exist. That may be the most unsettling part of his art.

Apocalypse Nerd #4 (Peter Bagge, Dark Horse)

Peter Bagge is one of my all-time favorites, and I've enjoyed every series he's released since he ended regular publishing of his classic Hate a few years ago. There's a sense that while he's dabbled with children's comics for DC (Yeah!), a whacked-out Spider-Man story and a book about a comic strip artist & his staff (Sweatshop, also for DC) along with Hate annuals, he's yet to really get back in the groove that made him one of the most important and successful comics artists of the 90's.

Apocalypse Nerd, along with its backup feature Founding Fathers Funnies, is taking him a long way back to that status in my eyes. First of all, he's doing both writing and drawing again for this feature, which wasn't the case for his mainstream work. Second, this material is a return to the sort of freewheeling nihilism that made Hate such a landmark series. Third, the backup feature highlights what he's done best in the past few years: politically-oriented strips for places like Reason and Salon. Applying the cynical, smart-assed Bagge interpretation to sacred cows like the Founding Fathers of the US is instructive both as history and a lesson on how to think about politics today.

The title feature follows two friends in the Pacific Northwest after North Korea nuked Seattle and their wacky hijinx. This issue gives us a bit more information about what's happening in the world at large after civilization more-or-less ceased to function in the area. The protagonists stumbled upon a "nerd camp", as a bunch of academics set up a subsistence farm. That happened to be close to a compound filled with lesbian separatists. A raiding party of native Americans on horseback takes over the men's camp; and Perry, the less macho of our heroes, winds up begging to be taken in by the lesbian compound. They reluctantly allow it after he convinces one less threatening woman to injure him and play upon their sympathies. This sort of flies, as they turn him into a pet, even making him live in a doghouse! The story is typical Bagge over-the-top humor, beginning with a shocking premise and then taking it to its logical extreme. As always, his exaggerated, eyes-popped-out art perfectly matches the story. While his line is perhaps not as precisely rendered as it used to be in the Hate glory days, his unique stylization more than gets the job done.

The real main event of this issue was "Let's Fuck Shit Up!" starring the Beantown Boys--Sam Adams, John Adams, Paul Revere and James Otis. It's a hilarious look at the propaganda, chicanery and crudity of America's revolutionary forefathers. Flipping from year to year, Bagge comically explores attempts made at distorting the facts of the Boston Massacre, the political maneuvering surrounding the Boston Tea Party, Otis' demented public rants, and moneyman John Hancock & Sam Adams fleeing by gilded carriage when the battle of Lexington broke out. Bagge manages to accurately convey historical detail with modern dialogue, producing a highly insolent look at history. Considering the way that the Founding Fathers are mythologized in American school systems, getting a taste of the wackiness that truly surrounded the times is what makes his stories so effective. I can't get enough of these stories, and I love to see a book full of them.

The Vagabonds #2 (Josh Neufeld & Various, Alternative Comics)

I reviewed issue #1.5 of the Vagabonds back in 2005 for my MOCCA article, and much of that material is in the new issue. The "real" issue is even more attractive than the mini; Neufeld's design sense and aesthetics are subtle and refined. This comic is devoted entirely to Neufeld's collaborations and the nature of collaboration itself. Neufeld is so successful as an illustrator because he never fails to bring out the most in a script he's given but does it without overwhelming the text. This makes him an ideal choice for Harvey Pekar, for example, who usually favors simplicity and directness for his naturalistic storytelling choices.

Neufeld separated the issue into four categories: Confessions (biography), Health & Welfare (odd medical tales), Echoes (formal experiments) and Loss (literal and figurative). In the first section, Neufeld illustrates two stories about Donald Ross written by his son. The first sees his rise as a big-time CEO in New York; the second sees him in Barbados after having given up that life. Both stories involve him ambitiously trying to master his environment, only to find that he was in over his head. Neufeld uses a pleasantly cartoony technique for these stories, verging on bigfoot-style comics.

A highlight of the Health section was a strip that Neufeld wrote about breaking his finger and how alienated from it he became. In a tongue-in-cheek turn, he blames the finger for ruining his career and marriage and ends the story holding a cleaver vowing that "there isn't room enough on this hand for the both of us". The most interesting example from Echoes was Neufeld completely redrawing a page of dialogue from an issue of Superman. Neufeld rethinks a scene featuring Superman returning to the Fortress of Solitude into a scene where a man comes home to his apartment in the midst of winter.

My favorite bit from Loss was "Father McKenzie's Sermon", inspired by the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby". Of course, in the song, Father McKenzie writes the words of a sermon that no one will hear; Neufeld interprets this as a sermon for Rigby's funeral. Neufeld's design on the page was quite clever. We see a shot of his feet, then his gesticulating hands and a bible, then a cross around his neck, then the cross on the coffin. We pan back to see a church and its cemetery, and finally her grave. This strip, and the comics he drew that adapated poetry, show Neufeld's great facility with adapting nearly anything into the language of comics.

Though the issue is interesting in its multiple approaches, experiments and types of story, the best Neufeld stories are those written by Neufeld. His travel stories are reminiscient of Pekar's work in that they look at small moments but significant in unfamiliar places and situations. In this issue, Neufeld stretches the bounds of the unfamiliar as an artist and collaborator, and the reader is treated to a one-man anthology more diverse than many multi-creator anthologies.

Sequart Reprints: Buddy Loves Jersey and Misery Loves Comedy

Here's another reprint of a column originally written for sequart.com.  This article was written in 2007.
****

It's a bit odd for me to review the new Peter Bagge and Ivan Brunetti collections that Fantagraphics recently released, because I've read the original issues that they collect more times than I can possibly recall. Both artists have been on my top-five list for well over a decade, even with their output being somewhat sporadic during this period. Both have become hugely influential in very different respects, while their new material continues to be as strong as ever. Anyone who loves comics, and humor in particular, owes it to themselves to take a look at this work. Most humorous comics might elicit a smile or a chuckle or two from me, but Brunetti & Bagge are the rare artists whose work kills me, again and again.

Like all great humorists, both artists reveal something of the truth of human existence with their works. Both artists produce work that is sometimes excruciatingly uncomfortable to read because of its brutal honesty. Both create comics that cross the lines of decency and erase taboos, but are never crude for crudity's sake. There are no cheap laughs in these comics. Their artistic styles are quite different: Bagge favors an expressionistic, over-the-top style that reflects the frantic nature of his characters. Brunetti, at this stage of his career, demonstrated his astounding virtuosity in switching from style to style depending on what the story or gag required. Bagge's Buddy Bradley character, as he describes it, is a version of himself about ten years younger. The character is just different enough to put him through some truly absurd paces. Brunetti's comics either feature rants starring himself, or are over-the-top screamingly funny & horrible gags done in the style of newspaper strips. The worldviews and philosophies of the two artists are completely different, but both tell the truth as they see it.

That truth is bleak. Brunetti's Schizo era can best be described as an existential howl, nothing less than an attack on all of humanity's worthlessness. The target he saves most of his vitriol for is himself. Brunetti's recent material has gone away from this sort of relentless assault, and it's quite understandable. As exhausting as it can be to read his extended treatises, it must have been even more draining to write & draw them. Some of the pages have a manic quality to them, as text overwhelms image and dominates the page. In some respects, his nihilistic gag strips are a more succinct way of expressing his rage, hatred and despair. His creating the most awful and despicable scenarios imaginable for gags and punchlines is an expression of his understanding of humanity as almost entirely worthless, debased and banal--and the artist himself is no exception. I often find myself laughing in spite of myself, thinking "This is so awful!" but still being slain by the darkness of Brunetti's humor and his incredible skill both as an artist and humorist.

The bulk of the first three issues of Schizo is taken up by his "Self-Caricature", which details his musings after waking up (late) for work and what happens upon his arrival. The first issue sets the scene with his general disgust towards the world and himself; there's one memorable page where he pictures "The world as it is today", wherein he's surrounded by murderers, pedophiles, rapists, the hopeless and the victims, begging "Please lobotomize me!" He lies in bed musing upon his fantasy where "I'm Jim Jones, and planet Earth is my Jonestown" and then realizes that he's late for work. Brunetti then moves into a more stripped-down, cartoony style for his gag work, with strips like "Drink My Piss, Motherfucker", "Pontiff In My Pants", "Pardon My Sodomy, Son" and the unforgettable "The Nun With Two Dicks". This is Brunetti's deepest exploration of his id, unfiltered, and attached to a gag structure that makes each strip detonate on the page. These strips are Brunetti at his best: brutal and brilliant.

As adept as Brunetti is at lashing out at the world, he's even better at self-immolation. The story "I Like Girls", drawn in the most realistic style I've seen from Brunetti (before or since), details his obsession with various types of women as he's waiting for his wife at an art fair--including his crush on a mutual friend of theirs. That self-flagellation continues in the second issue of Schizo, which focuses on suicide. "Turn Your Eyes Inside and Dig The Vacuum" continues the self "Self-Caricature" serial and veers into an almost manic direction. As he debates suicide as a defensible position with himself, he then has an extended debate with Jesus Christ. One page of the debate is one panel, filled almost entirely with one huge word balloon. By way of contrast, there's also a page where we see dozens of Ivans in hell, killing, torturing and/or sodomizing each other. The French artist Killoffer did an entire graphic novel years later revolving around this sort of image, but it's still a stunner. He gives a page over to his then-wife to describe what it's like living with Ivan, and then does an amazing page of strips mimicking the style of classic strips starring him and his wife. My favorite is one where he's Sluggo and his wife is Nancy, who chides him by asking "Doesn't anything make you happy?" only to recoil when he's cheered by a nearby nuclear explosion.

Another amazing feature from the second issue was the fantastic letter column. Virtually every important cartoonist of the day wrote in, including R.Crumb ("Lighten up, dude"), Chris Ware ("Maybe I wasn't such a bad guy after all"), Mary Fleener ("I enjoy the fact that there is a decapitation or stab wound on almost every page--now that's Big Entertainment for your Comics Dollar"), and David Mazzucchelli ("I suspect that anyone who lists his favorite toy as 'Hello Kitty' can't be totally bitter"). It goes on from there, but it was obvious that his initial impact was huge within the art-comics world.

The third issue has the last-released part of "Self-Caricature", titled "Work Equals Degradation". Told in a 4 by 4 panel grid on every page, the regimentation and claustrophobia on the page reflects those feelings evinced by arriving at work and having to deal with the rest of the world. This strip represents his late-90's peak in his old, highly-detailed but still cartoony style. While not sacrificing an ounce of the bile and bite of his earlier stories, he's able to structure his rants into a more coherent, and ultimately more effective, storytelling style. As he negotiates his day and talks to his coworkers, his inner voice is still as devastating as ever--even moreso, given his mild-mannered demeanor. He concludes the issue with perhaps the peak of his gag work during this era: 4 strips featuring the characters Diaper Dyke and Captain Boyfuck, with the jokes exactly what you think they might be, only much funnier. Brunetti's knack for subverting traditional gag-strip situations with the darkest premises and characters he can imagine is a key to what makes his jokes work.

Those that already own Schizo 1-3 will still find a wealth of other material, culled from the many other places Brunetti's appeared over the years. I consider myself to be something of a Brunetti completist, but even I found a few strips here and there that I'd never seen before. Most of them are the sort of "horrible, horrible cartoons" that we later saw in his books HEE! and HAW!, but drawn in his older style. A section devoted to his work in color was especially enjoyable, with strips like "Who's Your e-bay Nemesis?", a surprisingly hopeful bit called "The Dancing Queen" and three pages about James Thurber as highlights.

About the only negative thing I can say regarding Brunetti's career is that he spawned a wave of imitators, few of whom understand the intelligence and despair behind the gross-out cartoons. All they saw in Brunetti's work was the over-the-top transgressiveness of its humor, and they seized on this shock value to produce work that ranged from mean-spirited to utterly worthless. This, of course, was not Brunetti's fault, but it's not a surprise to see how different his new material is from his old comics, especially in Schizo1-2. Brunetti has written and spoken about how a lot of work that he did in the past was tied directly into depression, to the point where he became paralyzed and unable to draw for a long time. As a reader, it made me uncomfortable to see others treat the "Ivan" of these comics like any other character, relishing his pain. But the pain expressed in these comics isn't shtick, it's real. The last thing Brunetti the artist wanted from these comics was for the reader to feel sorry for him (since he deflates himself constantly), but it's impossible for me to read these stories and not feel the artist's humanity. While his new material explores a lot of the same territory, it's filtered through a very different kind of artistic lens, one that gives both author and reader a bit of room to breathe. Brunetti himself is understandably ambivalent about his comics from this era, but it's a great day for comics that this material has been collected at last and made available for a wider audience.

Peter Bagge's Hate was one of the most popular and best selling alt-comics series, and I consider it the comic that best defined its decade. The first Hate collection, Buddy Does Seattle, features Buddy Bradley living in Seattle in the early 90's, at precisely the same time it became the cultural capital of the United States and a symbol of the "slacker" generation. Hate was both the embodiment of this era and a critique, but there were many readers who saw themselves in the cynical, loud-mouthed and brutally honest Buddy. When Buddy decides to go back to his parents' place in New Jersey with his crazy girlfriend Lisa, a lot of readers were horrified. Replacing the hipness of Seattle with the mundane quality of suburban New Jersey was not what a lot of people wanted to see in this series. The fact that Hate was now in color and had someone else inking it led to cries of "sell-out", but it's not like Bagge toned down the content in any way. If anything, the series became even crazier and darker, but in a way that was perhaps much more uncomfortable for some of its readership. Instead of keeping Buddy eternally young and squaring off against hipsters (sort of like a Bizarro Archie), Bagge made Buddy deal with the perils of suburbia: babysitting his sister's brats, dealing with his insane alcoholic brother, tolerating sleazy neighbors and trying to find a way to make money without actually working too hard. In other words, dealing with actually becoming a real adult, a topic that's pleasant for no one.

Buddy starts a collectibles business with his old friend Jay, who promptly spends much of their profits on drugs and strippers. "Uncle Buddy" is a grueling story featuring Buddy having to babysit his niece and nephew--monsters both. It concludes with Buddy wondering how much a vasectomy costs. "I've Got Three Moms!" shows Buddy dealing with his girlfriend, his mother and his sister--and that despite his protests, he actually comes around to enjoy domestication. Things start to deteriorate with the ever-unstable Lisa, to the point where Buddy declares his love to a married friend of his in the middle of a toy convention (and is naturally shot down). When he snaps at Jay afterwards and he's asked what his problem is, he replies "Nothin', 'cept for the fact that my life's a total joke, is all..." Jay replies, "That, and the fact that you're a total asshole." Buddy puts his head on the table and mutters, "...yeah ...that too..."

Bagge keeps upping the ante in story after story. Lisa going to see a shrink is perhaps the highlight of the whole collection, culminating in a joint session where Buddy eviscerates the therapist for blatantly manipulating Lisa into buying into her agenda. As dysfunctional as that relationship was, when Lisa walked out on Buddy he started to spiral downward in a truly impressive fashion. He set about alienating all of his friends and family, including his business partner, to retreat into almost total isolation. The return of Leonard "Stinky" Brown was just the harbinger of the insanity that was to follow in the second half of the book. And unlike Seattle, where Stinky's shenanigans were merely ridiculous, New Jersey took him down a much darker path. His exit from the series, depicted in a very straightforward fashion, remains one of the more stunning moments I've seen depicted in a comic. It was so senseless and (seemingly) random, yet fit perfectly into the trajectory of Stinky's life.

Stinky's ultimate fate was fitting for one of the few characters in the book who, in his own way, was a hopeless romantic. The inveterate cynic Buddy was always his opposite, but Bagge depicts Buddy as being just as pathetic when he starts hanging around AOL chat rooms, going on blind dates and hanging around other losers. When Buddy has a chance to get back together with Lisa, he not only jumps at it but decides to marry her on the spot when she reveals that she's pregnant with his child. The way he talked Lisa into keeping the baby and marrying him was classic Buddy. When she said that any kid they'd have would be fucked-up, Buddy simply replied, "So there'll be one more fucked-up person in the world! Who's gonna even notice?" It's a happy ending of sorts for Buddy, as he abandons his cynicism to pursue "the American dream". The truth is that Buddy never quite figures out what he wanted in life; his misanthropy is cancelled out by his fear of loneliness. There was always a part of him that wanted to be able to buy into middle-American culture, but he knew that he could never really stomach it. At the same time, his hatred of pretension in all its forms (and utter lack of creative expression on his own part) meant that he could never really live as a hipster. Either way, Buddy knew he was going to live a lie; he simply chose the lie that disgusted him less, and pursued it wholeheartedly.

Bagge's rubbery, manic art is a perfect match for the outsized personalities of his characters. His slightly expressionistic style allows him to do things like have a page where Buddy's head swells to ten times its normal size with anger. And no one depicts the ridiculousness of sex like Bagge--he combines a graphic depiction with flailing limbs, exaggerated poses and bulging eyeballs. It's a pleasure just looking at a Bagge page, because the often grim events depicted in his story always take an absurd turn with the way he draws them.

Any comics fan who is a fan of humorists needs to snap up both of these volumes, as well as the first volume of Hate and Schizo #4. Anyone interested in cartooning, humor, storytelling and total investment in one's art owes it to themselves to read them. Even if neither artist's work speaks to the reader personally (and there is a huge serving of cynicism & nihilism dished up), their sheer devotion to the craft of making comics is inspiring. It's inspiring to me as a critic, and it's certainly influenced a generation of artists. These are comics that work on so many levels: as craft, as humor, as commentary, and as the most personal of expressions.

Peter Bagge: The Modern-Day Mencken?

Rob reviews the new collection of Peter Bagge's strips from REASON magazine: EVERYBODY IS STUPID EXCEPT FOR ME AND OTHER ASTUTE OBSERVATIONS (Fantagraphics).



Peter Bagge rose to fame in the 80s and 90s by creating HATE, the classic slacker comic that uncannily anticipated trend after trend in music and youth culture. It's still as funny as ever, primarily because the cultural touchstones were always less important than its cast of characters, led by Bagge stand-in Buddy Bradley. Bagge always said that Buddy was him, minus about ten years. So while Bagge was getting married and starting a family, Buddy was still single and dealing with weird roommates, crazy girlfriends and "working" for a living. Nowadays, Buddy is married and has a kid--though his life is far from normal. Bagge has always been a prolific writer apart from HATE, and his more personal strips revealed that he's really a big ol' square. He loves the Beach Boys, hates live rock shows, admires Britney Spears & the Spice Girls and hates hipsters.



Bagge is also a libertarian and has been crafting strips about free speech and limited government issues for a decade. Given that that decade was during the GW Bush administration, one that saw both out-of-control spending and increasing limits on personal liberties, Bagge certainly had a lot of material to work with. Libertarians tend to hammer home the same themes, often in a less-than-practical or humane manner, but Bagge for the most part manages to stay an engaged (if partisan) observer when he goes on his field reports. That's really what separates these pieces from the random ravings of a political blog: Bagge actually goes to political conventions, gun shows, protests, "swingers" conventions and rides on Amtrak. He talks to people, seeks to understand their points of view (even when he finds them horrifying) and isn't a blind devotee (as the strip where he comes to grips with libertarian star Ron Paul's past racist statements).



While Bagge makes no pretense of ever being a neutral observer, his best strips are those that put the people he talks to front and center rather than his own opinions. The weakest long piece in the book is "'Real' 'Art'", which is one long gripefest about modern art and his own experience in art school couched in some rhetoric about funding such programs. On the other hand, his campaign trail pieces, the articles about hypocrisy with regard to the wars on drugs and sex, and funding boondoggles like light rail & sports stadiums are all on point.. Perhaps the most even-handed and thought-provoking piece in the book was "Bums", wherein Bagge not only provides a lot of information about the reasons people become homeless but also interviews a number of the chronically homeless. Throughout the book, Bagge makes even the dryest of subjects palatable with his hyper-exaggerated line, rubbery figures with looping arms & legs and just-plain-funny drawings.



When Bagge does get really personal, as opposed to biased, that produced a number of great strips as well. "Malls" actually persuasively argues in favor of big shopping malls as places for people who aren't hipsters to spend time, like teenaged girls (who won't get hassled as much), the elderly, the infirm, etc. He also notes that pedestrian-oriented downtown shopping often features hassles with parking and the homeless, and is happy that malls threw him out as a teenager, as "keeping out the riff-raff is what makes malls worth going to!" The bluntly-titled "Amtrak Sucks" makes loaded but persuasive arguments about why Amtrak is a waste of time and money. As someone who frequently endured trains that were 12 hours late and for prices that seemed astonishingly high for the level of service performed, I found myself nodding along to Bagge's hyperbole.

Overall, the longer pieces are fairer and funnier than the shorter strips, which use strawman arguments and are generally a bit more unfair. I like that he was quite willing to take shots at the left as well as the right--though honestly, the Bush era gave him many more targets. The title of this book is quite revealing: Bagge savages his targets not out of partisan fervor, but rather because he finds them stupid, hypocritical and small. Like H.L. Mencken, Bagge favors a scorched-earth satirical attack, tearing down arguments by ridicule as much as reason. Unlike Mencken, Bagge's work is more playful and less likely to attempt to install himself as a know-it-all (even if he thinks he does) because of his nebbishy self-portrayal. Bagge is anything but an intrepid reporter, crumbling under the rhetorical styles of politicians or getting freaked out by weirdos. He admits to getting even with mean-spirited cartoons later, with their bite perhaps inversely proportionate to how meek and mild he was with his subjects in person. Admitting this out loud goes a long way to putting the reader squarely in his corner even if one doesn't quite agree with his beliefs.

It's rare to see a cartoonist branch out into this kind of second act of a career with this much flourish and skill. No one would have ever thought of Bagge as a political cartoonist or cartoonist/journalist before he started publishing with REASON, yet his work here demands a reader's attention every bit as much as the more famous editorial cartoonists in America. While Bagge is no Joe Sacco, it's still exciting to see a cartoonist put that much time and effort into crafting a piece around a subject that is meaningful to them. Best of all, Bagge is still funny. One may find some of the laughs unfair or even shooting fish in a barrel, but his total commitment to entertainment supercedes his political agenda, and this is a very good thing for both his hardcore fans and new readers alike.