The graphic novel speaks volumes

By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES "Hate's" Peter Bagge at home in Ballard. Note the floral wallpaper. He says people are surprised he "looks like a Bible salesman."

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There's a disconnect when you first see Peter Bagge, the creator of "Hate" comics' hilariously disaffected Buddy Bradley. Bagge, who draws Buddy as a rubbery, cynical everyman, has heard it before. "People thought I'd be a biker type, as opposed to looking like a Bible salesman," Bagge, 46, notes dryly in the Ballard home he shares with his wife of 27 years and a teen daughter.

Bagge is part of Seattle publisher Fantagraphics' stellar lineup of comic — ah, graphic novel — talent for this weekend's signings and talks at the Bumbershoot festival. He'll take part in a panel on the medium at 8 tonight at Bagley Wright Theatre with Gilbert Hernandez ("Love & Rockets"), Harvey Pekar ("American Splendor") and Jessica Abel ("Artbabe," "La Perdida"). For a schedule of the company's Bumbershoot events, visit www.fantagraphics.com.

The conversation at hand is about the funny state of the comic industry: Helped by the faux respectability of the term "graphic novel," comics are enjoying more mainstream acceptance and exposure than ever. Highbrow publications such as The New York Times extol their virtues; the current issue of hipster-lit "McSweeney's Quarterly" includes Fantagraphics talent in its excellent sampler of styles and history; and the film industry has finally begun to get things right, from "Ghost World" and "American Splendor" to the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises.

	PETER BAGGE Seattle cartoonist Peter Bagge's anti-hero, Buddy Bradley, agonizes in "The Bradleys" collection.

At the same time, plenty of what's being published these days stinks, and no one's been saying much about that. Precious, narcissistic, esoteric. Many new graphic novels are benefiting from an atmosphere in which comic professionals are so tickled to be climbing out of the funny-book ghetto that they won't say a harsh word about a peer.

Bagge's energetically wacky characters could be distant, methamphetamine-agitated cousins to those of "Mad's" late Don Martin (creator of the not-quite-immortal Fester Bestertester). He says he was never a big comic-book collector. His mom brought him "Archie" and "Casper" when he was sick, but he found superheroes too self-referential to jump right into. (However, his recent "Spider-Man" spoof for Marvel sold an impressive 50,000 copies.) The underground work of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman's "Maus" inspired Bagge later.

"I just wanted to see comics used as a form of self-expression," he says.

But Bagge, taking a break from finishing a satire on Republican U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt for Reason Magazine, wonders if there's gotten to be too much self-expression. "I can't believe it when it's all this pouty relationship stuff. It looks good, but when I start reading it, it's like, where's the beef? But at the same time people are just wetting themselves over these guys.

"It's very autobiographical, very naive and naval-gazing."

The new book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel" (Alpha, $18.85) encapsulates the situation. In short: We don't need more idiots generating material. Yet, the presence of "The Road to Perdition" author Max Allan Collins' forward in the guide shows the dichotomy at work: the relief of acceptance, but at a cost. He shares rueful memories of DreamWorks studio's apparent embarrassment at the comic roots of their big-budget Tom Hanks crime film, and his now-realistic hope that in his lifetime people will no longer look down on the entire diverse medium as kid's stuff.

"There's sort of a flipside to the do-it-yourself ethos which has spread through comics," says Fantagraphics spokesman/editor Eric Reynolds, "which is that anyone, no matter how untalented, can publish his own comics, and usually get praised for it and slapped on the back by peers."

"Comics Journal" editor and Fantagraphics founder Gary Groth moderates today's panel talk and has decried the lack of serious criticism of the form. "It's full of happy talk," he says of the field. "There is a sense of a boom market. You don't want to rock the boat. We've reached a point where anything that even purports to be serious in comics form is praised."

Consequently, Bagge, Reynolds and Groth aren't naming names. But this reader will.

	ART SPIEGELMAN "Maus" creator Art Spiegelman copes with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, "In the Shadow of No Towers."

A pair of the high-profile releases illustrates the problem: Art Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers," and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis 2 — The Story of a Return" (both from Pantheon).

Spiegelman is revered for busting the medium's doors wide open with his brilliant, Pulitzer-winning Holocaust tale, "Maus," in the late '80s. That makes his prosaic reflections on the 9/11 attacks even more disappointing. To sum up: He was worried about his daughter, and he doesn't like President Bush. Filling nearly half of the brief, oversized book with reproductions of old newspaper comic-strip pages that gave him comfort, Spiegelman's self-indulgent new work leaves the impression that he's spent the intervening years listening to his own praise and may have had just one great story in him.

Satrapi's underwhelming sequel to her acclaimed account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution spans her socially stunted adolescent years in Vienna before returning home. Her experiences include dealing drugs for a boyfriend and briefly winding up homeless.

At DC Comics, home of Batman and Superman, President Paul Levitz sees this awkward stage as a normal one.

"When you talk about the evolution of any medium, part of the process is the evolution of critical voice. We're not of the right generation to have watched this, but I suspect there wasn't a lot of great writing [about] television between 'Playhouse 90' and 'I Love Lucy.' Comics as a medium with the creative ambition they have is relatively new with America."

Levitz says the influence of the '50s — when comics were demonized as the cause of juvenile delinquency, and then infantilized — has finally faded.

Now, he says, "The range coming out is wider than it ever was before. You have a field that will support intensely personal memoirs from a 'Blankets' to a 'Persepolis' and at the same time support the far-ranging fantasies of 'Sandman: Endless Nights' or the intellectual journey of something like 'It's a Bird.' For many years, comics was perceived not just to be a medium of storytelling but a genre with the narrow conventions of a genre. And it's great to see that breaking and to see where 'American Splendor' can find its home in the culture at the same time as 'Road to Perdition' and Superman and Batman."

Most artists and writers still prefer to call comics comics — as Spiegelman points out in his new introduction to the reissue of Paul Auster's wonderfully surreal mystery, "City of Glass" (Picador). Groth calls "graphic novel" "a fairly loathsome term," but one that's gotten traction among book buyers, the public and the media. "So people are starting to become aware that there are these things called graphic novels, and there's a little bit of a cachet attached to them now. It's been building for two or three years.

"On the other side, we've finally been able to amass enough good work that we could finally have a decent amount available to adults. Whereas in 1988, when 'The Dark Knight Returns' and 'Maus' came out, we didn't."

	PAUL AUSTER Artists Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli interpret Paul Auster's surreal mystery, "City of Glass."

Those two perpetual sellers show the main pragmatic reason for the boom: accessibility. Or, as Bagge (whose Buddy Bradley runs a comic shop) puts it: "You don't have to go into one of those smelly, stinky stores with the fat guy. 'Oh pee yew, I wouldn't be caught dead with this thing.' But then they see this book at Barnes & Noble." The drug stores and grocery stores where many adults found their childhood comics don't carry many of them anymore; and casual buyers don't go near comic shops.

In short, "graphic novel" has become a catch-all describing any sequential art between squarebound covers. And there are some surprising numbers behind their rise, according to John Jackson Miller, who runs the "Comic Buyer's Guide" and "The Standard Catalog of Comic Books."

"It's not really [original] graphic novels that have made an impact on sales. It is the repackaged comics in larger form that represent 90 to 95 percent of bound comic sales," Miller says. In other words: six-issue story arcs from monthly titles such as "Hellblazer" or "100 Bullets" put together in a trade paperback. Creators can make a living and stay productive on deadlines for monthly books, an easier feat than spending a year on a single 200-page book. His analogy: "We're not in the feature-film bus, we're in the episodic TV business here." The financial impact of graphic novels on the publishing industry hasn't been quantified, but Miller estimates the entire comic industry will rake in $330 million this year.

Fantagraphics has seen its fortunes rise after reaching its lowest point last spring. A plea to loyal customers to buy books, and the success of its hardcover "Peanuts" comic-strip reprint collections, helped save the company from oblivion. The form's growing cultural currency doesn't hurt.

As for where it's all headed, Groth thinks graphic novels will continue to ascend "for a little while, anyway. One factor is how much mediocrity is spewed out in the marketplace, and how much that'll affect readers. There's a built-in impediment that we've tried to overcome for years, that the public equates comics with crappy, subliterate stuff. There's just something off-putting about the medium to them. The one thing that might sabotage it is if there's too much junk out there."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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