Ah Phooey...but there is Bagge.

Blew my New Year's Resolution; didn't I. Darn it! Anyway, I should be back on track soon as a good few posts are finished and just waiting to be sent up here. This is a little quickie about one of my favourite cartoonists; Peter Bagge.


You'll remember I interviewed Peter for my Cartoon Fiend blog, and you may also remember that reading Peter's tales of Buddy Bradley from Hate Comics pretty much kept me sane while I was ill, so it'll come as no surprise that I'm stoked about Fantagraphics new Hate Annual #8. Which must be available about nowish.



You'll find some preview pages on the excellent Comic Book Resources site, right here.

Great Anthologies Create Not So Strange Bedfellows

I love anthologies. If you look over at the piece I did on the Forbidden Planet UK blog on Danny Hellman's Typhon, you'll discover why I love them - in a nutshell, it's the variety I suppose. But I also love new-takes on existing characters, as evidenced here on an earlier Batman post, and Marvel's Strange Tales has both these things going for it, Strange Tales is an anthology-comic, and it has a variety of new-takes on existing Marvel characters; by Peter Bagge (Neat Stuff and Hate) Nick Bertozzi (Houdini: The Handcuff King), Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt (co-founders of the hugely succesful Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School ), Nicholas Gurewich (The Perry Bible Fellowship), Norwegian cartoonist Jason (Low Moon, profiled here), James Kochalka (Monkey versus Robot), Michael Kupperman (Tales Designed to Thrizzle), Junko Mizuno, (Pure Trance). Paul Pope (Batman year 100), Johnny Ryan (Angry Youth Comix), and Dash Shaw (Bottomless Bellybutton).

It's a stellar line-up, complete with cartoonists who have heightened the profile of the artform beyond the pages of publications and the interweb. Japanese artist Mizuno's Gothic-Kawaii drawing style, a mixture of super-cuteness, and blood and syringes, appears on clothes and in gallery shows, and Paul Pope has designed a Pulphope line of clothes for DKNY and Diesel.

As with any publication of this sort, I have my favourites; Paul Pope and Jose Villarrubia's cover is excellent because it takes itself seriously, alerting the reader that although the Marvel Universe will be treated slightly flippantly, it won't be disrespected. This is a very clever piece of marketing which is especially important to a significant band of readers who are not particularly welcoming of indie cartoonists. For those readers, Paul Pope's cover and introductory story will prove a gateway to this comic's tone and Strange Tales #1 itself will surely prove a gateway comic to a world of indie-illustration for the uninitiated comic book reader. And with any luck, it will also establish a demand for more work in a similar vein beyond Strange Tales #1,2 and 3. I love the sub-text of Leavitt and Crabapple's She-Hulk (coloured and lettered by Star St.Germain), and what could easily be a jarring-juxtaposition of artistic styles, between Molly Crabapple's silky-thin, embroidery-like drawings, and Junko Mizuno's solid-lined Spiderman (translated by Aki Yanagi, and adapted by C.B. Cebulski), becomes a delight in the context of this anthology. I just adore Dash Shaw's Doctor Strange, for reasons to numerous to mention, and Michael Kupperman's Namor is equally brilliant. I think of all the stories in this volume though, my favourite is Jason's Spider Man, I read it about 3 or 4 times and each time I read it it seems funnier and more clever.

My only criticism of the comic, and it is a slight one, more a grumble really, or a gripe, and not even a full gripe, more a gr... or an ...ipe, is that a page or two of the work is 'Not Brand Ech-sy'. I mean, don't take that the wrong way, I loved Don Heck's comic at the time, but that style of parody isn't really what an indie-collection is about. What I mean is I don't like the pages that are more a parody of the character, than an indie-interpretation, as much as I do the rest of the comic. So whilst the majority of the illustrators have combined the more cartoony indie-look with a certain amount of psychological depth, one or two have delivered nothing more than a superficial parody. As I have said though, this is an anthology and whilst I might not love all the pages, there is still more than enough great work here to keep me delighted and eager to read the next comic in the series. All told, it's pretty fab.

All Artwork ™ and © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

Once More into the Breach...as it were.

Or at any rate, "once more (slowly) into the breach", as it were. Please bear with me, I'll get up to speed eventually.

This struck me as a good idea for a blogging because it cemented my relationship with a few texts that some misguided people still frown upon, in toffee-nosed literary circles. Not so very long ago, I was feeling really, really, sorry for myself; around my eighth or ninth day on water (not even the bread and water diet of Edmond Dantes) and I really got a great deal of joy from reading a bunch of stuff that I really had no right to expect more joy from, given that I have read and reread the stuff from cover to cover over and over again.

Perhaps it could be best described as comfort-reading, or maybe more precisely as renewing an old friendship - whatever, around the 30th day of my water-fest I had read my Love and Rockets and my American Splendors and my copy of Ghost World so often that I might be forgiven for throwing them away but honestly, I'm looking forward to reading them all again; although I could do without the being ill part.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I could have spent my time reading Brecht, the Norton Anthologies, Shakespeare, Joyce, or even P.G Wodehouse, all of which is right up my street (I'm a pretty pretentious guy), but I found my comfort in literature that pleased both my eyes (especially while the text was blurry) and my brain, and found, even reading these things for the umpteenth time, just as rewarding as the day they were delivered to me. Here's a complete list of my well-beloved titles:


Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes


20th Century Eightball by Daniel Clowes


American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

Hate by Peter Bagge

Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez

These were the titles that I kept returning to, despite having a wide range of possibilities, so to me they gifts that keep on giving. I just found that when I couldn't even be bothered watching a DVD and the text of any number of novels looked more like marching ants than recognisable words I got a lot of comfort from holding, carrying, looking at and reading these books - even the colourful covers cheered me up. These, mainly Fantagraphics titles, were real Chicken soup for the soul to me.