Today on the site we have part one of Zak Sally's interview with the great Peter Bagge.
This is something else I wanted to talk about, your whole generation of cartoonists—you know, the brothers Hernandez, Clowes, all those guys— the amazing thing to me is that the climate for comics was so different back then. In the lost interview we talked about what possible models you could have had for thinking I’m going to try my damnedest to make a living off of this, because there were virtually zero models for this outside superhero or genre stuff. And then for you it actually worked. I mean we talked about the fact that you found some old undergrounds, and you found a Crumb comic– and those were…
Well, to back up a bit, I fancied the idea of being a cartoonist since I was a kid. I mainly liked daily newspaper strips, all the funny stuff, and later MAD. But after a while, those two seemed less and less a realistic option for me. I saw the daily strips getting worse all the time. By the time I got out of high school I didn’t see anything in the daily papers that inspired me, or made me think, “This is a good direction for me.” The opposite was happening. And MAD was very much a closed shop, and locked into a tight formula, and I didn’t like MAD‘s competition much. So while I still fancied the idea of being a cartoonist, I didn’t know what to do with it.
Then, while I was in art school, I went into a record store that had a rack full of underground comics, and it was the solo comics by Robert Crumb, in particular, that floored me. What I loved about Robert Crumb’s solo comics was how he treated the traditional comic book format as a blank canvas, and just did whatever he wanted from cover to cover. It was all him: one guy inked it, one guy lettered it, and there were no ads for Twinkles or BB guns. It was just all him. And then there was what he did with it. I loved the way he drew, and I loved his sense of humor just as much as that I loved what he did format-wise. So as soon as I saw that, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do. And while Crumb was my favorite, I liked many of the other underground cartoonists, too: Gilbert Shelton and Bill Griffith, and a lot of others. Kim Deitch, Robert Armstrong, and Aline Crumb. Sadly, I also assumed that since their comics were so fantastic, they must all be millionaires.
Elsewhere:
The writer and SF contributor Iain Banks passed away.
The New York Times profiles Qatar-based cartoonist Khalid Albaih.
Joss Whedon said something about wanting more female superheroes and apparently it caused controversy.
I sometimes forget that Lewis Trondheim has a blog. That's pretty nice.
I could look at this Jack Davis page for a long time.
Chris Mautner, what are you reading over there?
And Tom Spurgeon interviews CF, whose books I publish.
