Roberta Gregory

Yeah, we’re going with a publisher here in Seattle and the book is called Memories With a Christmas Attitude. It’s coming out this Christmas.

I’ve just got so many projects going on and they’re all in so many different stages. It’s like the more people that are involved, the more things they have going on in their lives and the more delays there are. I want to do a web comic too. If you’ve seen Naughty Bits you know I have those little autobio stories. They’re kind of fun. I’m trying to sit down and do a strip, but little projects like the comics are taking a back seat. These other things are projects I’ve either promised to people or they’re potential money. There’s a saying that the creative satisfaction you get from a project can be inversely proportional to what you get paid for it, which I hope is cynical. I’m doing stuff that I love to do and I’m hoping to get lavishly rewarded for it, but I’m not holding my breath.

The series Naughty Bits. That was a series that Fantagraphics started publishing in 1991 and it went for 40 issues. Most of the stories featured Bitchy Bitch. She didn’t actually first appear in Naughty Bits. She actually appeared earlier in some other stories, but that’s been her platform, so to speak.

I’ve got a series of Bitchy comic strips that I want to put on the website and every couple of weeks there will be some new ones and so forth. Plus, I also have an idea for a graphic novel size story with Bitchy Bitch that would just come out as a book, rather than serialized as comic books.

Oh not really. People do not make heaps of money from comics. I think Fantagraphics are kind of putting all their hopes on this new Bitchy collection now that they have bookstore distribution, which they didn’t have for the little Bitchy collections. They just put out a book with Peter Bagge’s stories that’s the same format as Life’s a Bitch. As Kim [Thompson] says, it has a big chunk of the Bitchy epic so people aren’t going to be completely lost. It’s very reasonably priced, so what we’re hoping is to get Bitchy even more widely read.

So there’s a whole lot going on but I’ve still got a part-time crappy day job.

Believe me, it upsets me too. I’d rather be working on my projects than cleaning restrooms and picking up chairs at events. It’s a union job, so it pays good, but on the other hand it’s taking time away from doing comics. But hopefully I’ll sell plenty of comics and earn more through my creative endeavors. I’ve got a couple more things that may turn into cash also. I’m really good with people, which you might not believe from reading Bitchy Bitch. so I might get involved in a project which is helping people with chronic illnesses through humor and meditation. This is just barely getting off the ground and it could go either way. The trick is to have something that brings in enough money so I don’t have to move furniture and clean floors.

Yeah. Like I said, now they’ve got like bookstore distribution, which is good and bad because you also have things like returns, which you don’t have in the comics industry.

It was a joint effort with Kim Thompson. We just kind of went through all the stories and figured what would go best. I think they might be planning another volume with all the stories that didn’t make it. Such as entire storylines where she’s in college.

Oh yeah, that was back when I kind of barely knew what I was doing with the comic. I just suddenly got into a huge issue, but life is huge issues. I kind of get ragged on sometimes for doing adult material, but life is X-rated. You can’t get away from that fact.

Well some of the early stories are so adult oriented and over the top, I don’t think Fantagraphics really wants to put them. Life’s a Bitch is a book for more general audiences. If you want to see the really rude stuff, you have to get the As Naughty as She Wants to Be trade paperback from Fantagraphics. That’s probably not going to end up in Barnes & Noble.

Oh,. sure. Why not? Who isn’t? Do you know anybody that doesn’t sit on a toilet? That’s the thing that really tweaks me about comics. There’s this mentality that comics are for children and if you do something that’s adult oriented in comic book form, then you’re obviously trying to corrupt children and all that BS. Women dealing with their monthly problems, people having bad sex, people thinking about bad sex, that’s life.

Oh no. There are serious storylines later on as she finally thinks she finds the man of her dreams and finds out he’s obsessed with child pornography. is serious. I think it all fits together.

I suppose in a metaphoric way. I never got pregnant and needed an abortion. I spent seven years in art school instead of one semester in college. I spent about as long as I needed to get material, which was maybe about a year in an office setting. Even then I was in the art department. I was just sort of observing the pathetic people whose lives revolved around office politics. I guess what I always kind of say is if I was really Bitchy Bitch, I wouldn’t have spent 15 years cranking out comics for very little compensation. On the other hand, the things that tweak Bitchy off still tweak me off. Maybe in a spiritual sense I’m Bitchy Bitch. You wouldn’t believe the wide range of people that have written to me and say they identify so much with Bitchy Bitch and not all women.

Definitely, a lot of what makes Bitchy Bitch is her internal world, her internal machinery and most of that isn’t pretty in people. When I started doing Bitchy I was like “Okay. This is humor. It deals with all the things that are involved with women that people don’t talk about.” Way back in the ‘70s I was doing lesbian comics and comics about the women’s movement because nobody else was doing them. It’s the idea that if you get an idea, it’s also an assignment. Bitchy doesn’t take assignments. She bitches. She kvetches. She finds things to blame rather than things to get involved in. She’d rather bitch than try to change herself or look at her own issues. I’m completely opposite. I’m obsessed with the why of things.

Who knows? That was in issue number three. I think issue number two has a story about her Catholic upbringing and then I launched into her childhood and some of the ugliness that was there. Before I knew it, I had a full fleshed out character by issue number three or four. If I’m going to start writing, it’s going to be about what really makes people who they are. It’s humor and it’s ugliness. That’s kind of what life is all about.

I’m usually just kind of thinking about how to fill pages. Then I go, “Oh, wow. That’s a good story.” I don’t think I shouldn’t have put in the sexual abuse. I’ve gotten criticized for when she was a kid using the N-word. Somebody wrote in and was really hurt by that. But kids were throwing around all kinds of horrible things back in the 50’s. There’s things I don’t prefer to see in print, but on the other hand, there are plenty of things I do that other people are horrified by, which I think are just part of my storylines. When I was a small child I read Superman and Archie then when I went to college I was reading Crumb and The Freak Brothers and everything like that. So as far as I’m concerned, there’s really not much you can’t put into comics.

Boy, that’s a toughie. There always seems to be something that Bitchy Bitch can get involved in. There was a point where I thought I was going to kill her. Then I thought I should save her for later because I really liked her. Plus she seems to be very slowly evolving. She’s actually learning to be a little less judgmental. Every several issues, she would finally “do the right thing” instead of backing out of selfishness. There are many more roads for Bitchy to go down before I throw her in front of a truck or something.

Well, they do that all the time. Characters have a union. My friend, Donna Barr, was the first to point that out. They’ll tell you what they’re going to do. I’ve been writing a big prose novel over the last few years. One of my favorite characters decided she had to die and I hated it. But on the other hand, it had to be.

I don’t think I’d be able to do mainstream comics. I’m not really happy with a lot of my art. To me, drawing is more work. That’s why I love doing Bitchy because drawing Bitchy Bitch is like a party. There’s no way to do it wrong. It would be great to approach comic publishers to see if we could do a thing where I write and anther person draws.

The problem is it was produced by this Canadian company. Canada has these strict laws about how many Canadians need to be involved in a project. There was a series of three-minute shorts and I pretty much storyboarded the very first one and it was hilarious. Then once they started producing it, they had to have more and more Canadians involved in it and it just kind of became less and less what I would do. I kind of let them run with it. But it turned out that I just think they got it. They were trying to be edgy, but it kind of ended up being like a sitcom where Bitchy had these two friends and they got involved in projects and so forth. The problem with television animation is that they want to do a half hour series so a lot of them are really sitcom oriented and that’s not really what I’m doing. There was a lot of fun visual stuff that I created in the Bitchy strips so I kept trying to write in visual gags with Bitchy’s body and Bitchy’s perception of things. Those would always get written out in favor of scenes with people sitting around talking to each other.

I’d love to do Flash animation. Not with Bitchy because I think they've still got the rights to do Bitchy for awhile or whatever. I’m kind of eager to play with animation on my own but I don’t know when that’s going to show up in my career.

Oh yeah. It’s a hoot. I basically just kind of dipped into the first couple of pages. But tattooed girls is not exactly my personal cup of tea. The problems is if I got a tattoo, I’d immediately change my mind about it. If I got a tattoo, I would spend the rest of my life thinking, “Oh, why the hell did I get a pink unicorn?

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck