Comic Artist Peter Bagge Goes from "Hate" to History at Fan Expo

Peter Bagge’s cartooning style on 11

The famed alternative comic artist will visit the land of the Wolverines and Spider-Men when he appears at Fan Expo in New Orleans this weekend.

t’s a long way from Hate to Henry Hazlitt. 

Comic artist Peter Bagge arrived on the scene in the mid-1980s at a moment when the black & white alternative comics boom was ushered in by Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets, Daniel Clowes’ Eightball, and Bagge’s Neat Stuff among others. The comics drew energy from punk and rebellious freedom from the underground comics. They also showed enough craft and consciousness of comics’ history to make sense next to the New York art school crew that dominated Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Raw. 

Hate focused on Neat Stuff character Buddy Bradley and followed his life as a lazy, cynical underachiever in grunge-era Seattle in his early 20s. Bagge’s visual storytelling came in large part from cartoons, particularly his Tex Avery-inspired rubbery, exaggerated figures, whose implied energy makes them look like they could burst off the page if they got a running start. Bagge put Hate to bed in 2011, but he’s stayed busy, even if nothing caught the public imagination quite like Buddy and his friends. 

Bagge will be in New Orleans for Fan Expo this weekend and will speak on a panel Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m.

Which of these things is not like the other?

It’s a safe bet that none of the other artists at Fan Expo have tried to tell the story of economist Henry Hazlitt like Bagge did for the libertarian-leaning Reason.

The Hazlitt story is part of a significant body of work Bagge undertook that’s very different from Hate. Starting in 2005, he did “Founding Fathers Funnies,” and starting in 2013, he wrote and drew three graphic novels based on independent women: Women Rebel, the story of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger; Fire!!, on writer Zora Neale Hurston; and Credo, on libertarian Rose Ingalls Lane.

They all seem unlikely on the surface because the subjects are largely serious people whose lives don’t obviously loan themselves to Bagge’s cartoonish style. 

“You want people who are big personalities who are moving around,” Bagge says, though that doesn’t sound like Hazlitt. “He lived a very long life and 99 percent of it was sitting behind a typewriter,” Bagge says, laughing. 

Still, Bagge found ways to make the story recognizably his. When Hazlitt explains to his mother that he’d been fired from a job after only four days, her silhouetted profile shows a mouth so agape in amazement that it’s the entire bottom half of her head. His figures and page compositions aren’t as manic as those in Neat Stuff and Hate, but the impossibly rounded shoulders and backs of some schlemiels tells us how we should think about them, just as the squared up, proud shoulders of others tells readers who actually has power.

When he contracted with publisher Drawn and Quarterly to do Woman Rebel, he received an advance so that he could do the necessary research on Sanger’s life. 

“I burned through the advance in three months and the book took me three years. That was the closest I ever came to bankruptcy!” he says, laughing. “Then like an idiot I did two more.”

Bagge’s ability to make his characters distinctive and complex is a constant, whether he’s writing about Buddy and his friends or intellectuals who shaped our culture. The historical comics are unified by the subjects’ shared belief in freedom and human autonomy, but Bagge found things in them that added dimensions to their stories. When working on “Founding Fathers Funnies,” he found himself laughing out loud while reading John Adams’ diaries. 

“He would admit it, but John Adams was incredibly vain and incredibly egotistical,” Bagge says. “He would make a fool of himself as a result, and it was very funny to read how vain and egotistical he could be.” 

He found his Zora Neale Hurston book easy to draw because, according to Bagge, she “was a very funny person. It was easy to derive humor from the things she has done or said because she’s very funny.”  

From “Henry Hazlitt in One Lesson” by Peter Bagge

Bagge had no plans to return to Buddy Bradley and Hate, but his Spanish publisher suggested he give it a try. For years Bagge’s fans at signings and conventions asked him for more Hate, but he had seen the declining sales figures for the later Hate annuals and figured that the request was nostalgia for the early years in black & white when Buddy and his friends–and likely the readers–were punks navigating young adulthood.

“Nobody was interested in Buddy the middle-aged dad; they just want to see young punks in love doing crazy crap,” Bagge says. 

In 2024, he returned to Hate for a four-issue mini-series titled Hate Revisited. Bagge had the idea to tell stories of middle-aged Buddy and show how the Bradleys grew up, but he’d also tell new stories about Buddy and the gang in their twenties. 

“That way I’d be able to do Stinky again, a character I’d killed off.”

Once it occurred to Bagge to tell stories from different points in Buddy’s life, the writing came easily. One byproduct of it is an upcoming one-shot on Buddy younger brother Butch, who grew up a product of conservative talk radio. By the end of Hate Revisited, he lived in a camper in the woods with a borrowed AK-47. Fans thought that looked a recipe for disaster and wanted to know what happened next. 

“I didn’t think I was going to do any more after that,” Bagge says, referring to Hate Revisited. “I didn’t think I was going to do that,” but it will be out in February. 

Cover art paying tribute to George Herriman and “Krazy Kat” for the upcoming “Butch”

At this point, Bagge faces the challenge that aging comic artists face. “I’m old now and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be,” he says. Fans have told him that his line isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but “the stories still come to me,” he says. “I still might do more comics in the world of Buddy Bradley. It’s all a matter of coming up with an idea that’s worth drawing.”