Today, we bring you part two of Zak Sally's enormously entertaining interview with Peter Bagge. This time around, they talk Bagge's recent work, politics, piracy, and how selling convention sketches resembles prostitution. Here's Bagge on editing Weirdo:
While I was the managing editor of Weirdo for that brief period, the harshest criticism I got was from the other contributors, who would be offended by the work of other artists I ran. For example, I reprinted a three-page comic strip by S. Clay Wilson that originally ran in Screw magazine. Screw magazine probably told him, "Be your S. Clay Wilson-est, go crazy and break every taboo." So he just went nuts, drawing the most sexist and racist and scatological comic he could possibly think of. He really went overboard, and I loved it. [Laughs] So I reprinted it.
You see, one of the things that was great about early underground comics is the way they gleefully and compulsively broke every societal rule imaginable. It was very cathartic to see that, and it was one of many things that helped loosen up our culture. But by the '80s, those rules started to tighten up again, largely from the left, surprisingly, and under the guise of political correctness. The false notion of direct causation—that, say, a depiction of rape causes someone to commit rape—was gaining a lot of traction again, which made it easy again for people to demonize and ban material that they didn't like.
The S. Clay Wilson strip was obviously meant to fly in the face of this new political correctness, yet artists who were offended by it kept saying, "It's been done before, time to move on." To which I said, "No, it's obviously time to do it again." [Laughs]. I felt that critics of the strip were being disingenuous when they said "Wilson isn't funny anymore," since I don't think they ever thought he was funny. They simply felt that now was the time to say it out loud, and over and over again. A number of artists said they'd no longer contribute if I ran a strip like that again. So I ran another strip by Wilson that was even more offensive. [Laughs] That may sound childish and spiteful on my part, which it was to some degree, but I also thought those strips were very, very funny, so it wasn't solely about making a point.
Elsewhere:
—Missed it: Mark Millar got an MBE.
—Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season was reviewed in The Guardian, and Jaime Hernandez was interviewed at the BD and Comics Passion festival.
—Tom De Haven has reposted a 1986 essay on Dick Tracy he wrote for Nemo.
—Anne Ishii profiles Taiyo Matsumoto for the Japan Times.
—Darryl Ayo starts a rambling but interesting and probably necessary discussion on the state of independent comics and who exactly is reading them, anyway.
