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Original Material
AN
INTERVIEW WITH PETER BAGGE
ORIGINALLY FEATURED 1997 -by
Andrew Goletz
Peter
Bagge is the creator, writer and artist of Hate, a comic book that
if we were going to categorize, would best be described as an alternative,
hip, story about the daily life of twenty something Buddy Bradley. If
you’re in your 20’s, you’ll be able to relate to this comic. If
you’ve ever been in your 20’s, you’ll be able to relate to this
comic. And if you’re an old fart who pretends they were never young,
well here’s a chance to understand our generation better.
AG: So how did you get into the comic business?
PB: I lost a
bet (laughing). Just kidding. I’ve been drawing comics ever since I was
a little kid, and it was a goal of mine to get into comics. I couldn’t
think of a better way to make a living.
AG: So you’ve always wanted to do a comic?
PB: Well,
art school is where it really reached its full realization. I met my then
girlfriend (now wife) there and she told me that she liked my drawings and
pushed me on and on.
AG: And the self publishing aspect of the business?
PB: Self
publishing never really interested me. I always considered it too much
like business and not enough time to do what I really liked, which was
drawing. Self publishing
served as a means, at the time, to get my material out there and show
people my stuff.
AG: Was the decision to do the book in black and white due to financial or creative reasons?
PB: I never
really thought about it until recently. I think that the general consensus
is that black and white is for a more mature, adult audience and the color
is more kiddie like. The old Mads were in color, and that didn’t take
anything away from their appeal. I think it even added to it. But to
answer your question, it was an economic decision. Before the days of
computer colorization, it was very hard and time consuming to do a book in
color. Eventually, though, sales reached a point where it could be done in
color and it was more convenient to do so.
AG: Did color make the book more accessible to new readers?
PB: Color
makes a book like this look more appealing. Someone will go into a store
and flip through it maybe thinking ‘this is harmless and appealing’,
and be more willing to try it out.
AG: Is this based on your life at all?
PB: Oh yeah! A lot of
ideas and stories are. But the weird thing is, they seem to happen after
I’ve already written the story. I don’t have these experiences in my
life until the story is completed. When I write, it’s fictional, but by
the time the issue sees print, it’s happened. An eerie example of this
is that my father died while I was working on issue #22. (spoiler- Buddy
Bradley’s father passed away in this issue)
AG: Why did you decide to move Buddy away from Seattle and home to New Jersey?
PB: The
first 15 issues of the book had Buddy moving to downtown Seattle with
people just like him. They were his own age, they too were on their own
for the first time. I enjoyed doing those stories, but I wanted to expand
and show more sides to Buddy. There was no interaction with older people
or kids in the Seattle stories. I suppose that I could have made him
perpetually twenty-something, and just updated the fashions every decade
or so, but it was more challenging and interesting for me to add the
family dynamic.
AG: Why Jersey?
PB: Haha. It
could have been any suburban town. I just picked it at random. The big
crisis was how to get Buddy out of the city. I couldn’t have his whole
family move to Seattle, so instead I had his relationship disintegrate to
the point where he needed to move back home, just to regroup.
AG: And what about the current storyline? From the
events in the book, it looks like another change is in store.
PB: I
don’t like locking myself into something. I think that this is just
another 15 issue long cycle in Buddy’s life, and I can’t really
envision anything past issue #30.
AG: You mean with Buddy at home or the comic in
general?
PB: I don’t know. If I
don’t have any good ideas, I don’t want to do the book just for the
sake of doing it.
AG: Are you prepared to walk away from your best
selling book?
PB: Not at all. I had a
great conversation awhile back with Harvey Kurtzman. We were talking about
other creators and how they walked away from their books at the peak of
popularity because they thought they could do other things. It turned out
that none of these new ideas was accepted by the readers as much as what
they were originally doing. His advice was to never walk away and never to
give up. It was clear to me in our conversation that he was talking about
himself and his own experience with Mad. Everything he did was good, but
it wasn’t the same. I don’t want to be in that position. I can’t
ignore the fact that this is Fantagraphics’ best selling title. I
don’t want to make the same mistakes as people who came before me. I
know that if I decide to do something different, it’ll still be with
Hate.
AG: What do you mean by that?
PB: It may eventually
metamorphosize into an anthology book. We’re trying to put more ads in
the book, which would increase our page count by 16. If we do that,
we’ll be able to include other creator’s work, and maybe that’s the
format that we’ll eventually change into. This way the change wouldn’t
be so abrupt. It would still be called Hate, but other creators and myself
would do stories featuring characters other than Buddy Bradley.
AG: And the future of Buddy?
PB: More
relationship bullshit.
Copyright©2000 Andrew Goletz