Peter Bagge is prolific and hilarious, a very good combination in a cartoonist. He's been running short one page historical comic strips in recent issues of Dark Horse Presents and his own series Apocalypse Nerd, and these will be collected in the one shot Founding Fathers Funnies. Bagge is all over the humor of the great people who founded our great nation, and i'm sure it goes beyond cherry trees, kites and wooden false teeth.
In our cartoonists getting plaudits corner this week, Roz Chast has made the five book short list for the National Books Awards for her exemplary Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? which deals with the twilight years of her hilarious, annoying and lovable parents. She is entered in the non-fiction category and it is the first adultcomic, and only the third graphic novel over all to ever make the NBA lists. The entire category:
Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)
Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes (Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt and Company)
John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Company)
Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (Liveright Publishing Corporation/ W.W. Norton & Company)
Sounds hard to beat a book with a title like the last one, but go Roz!
• Peter Bagge (Hate, Woman Rebel) is one of 34 winners of the USA Artists fellows program which includes a $50,000 grant.
The unrestricted awards, announced Monday, are from the United States Artists program, a grant-making organization funded by philanthropic foundations and individuals to support creativity. The 16 women and 18 men were selected by experts in their fields and were among 116 nominated artists living in the United States.
Among the other winners, singer Meshell Ndegeocello, artist Edouard Duval-Carrié and so on. Bagge won the Rockefeller fellow grant, which given that he is a cartoonist is…awesome. According to his bio on the page he’s working on cartoon biographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Rose Wilder Lane, also awesome.
This May Fantagraphics is releasing OTHER STUFF, a compilation of various strips by Peter Bagge and his friends like Dan Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez, and R. Crumb. The stories in the book are mostly outside the famed Buddy Bradley saga, but no less hilarious.
Peter Bagge’s Other Stuff includes a few lesser-known Bagge characters, including the wacky modern party girl “Lovey” and the aging bobo “Shut-Ins” — not to mention the self-explanatory “Rock ‘N’ Roll Dad” starring Murry Wilson and the Beach Boys. But many of the strips are one-off gags or short stories, often with a contemporary satirical slant, including on-site reportage like “So Much Comedy, So Little Time” (from a comedy festival) and more. Also: Dick Cheney, The Matrix, and Alien!
Other Stuff also includes a series of Bagge-written stories drawn by other cartoonists, including “Life in These United States” with Daniel Clowes, “Shamrock Squid” with Adrian Tomine, and the one-two parody punch of “Caffy” (with art by R. Crumb) and “Dildobert” (with art by Prison Pit’s Johnny Ryan)… plus a highlight of the book, the hilarious, literate and intricate exposé of “Kool-Aid Man” written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bagge. (Other collaborators include the Hernandez Brothers and Danny Hellman.)
Here’s a full color 20-page preview:
Peter Bagge’s Other Stuff
by Peter Bagge et al.
144-page color/black & white 7.25″ x 10.25″ softcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-622-5
As triple-alliterative titles go, it’s still not as good as ‘Cancelled Comic Cavalcade’.