Peter Bagge: Other Lives

Oh, I see what you’re getting at. (laughs)

I think I first got onto the internet back in 1995 or so. This is back when the internet and AOL were practically synonymous. A friend of mine who isn’t gay at all, is 100% straight, he said that he would go onto these chat rooms and pretend he was a woman and hook up with straight men. I go, are you the only person who does that and he said no I’m sure a lot of guys do that. I said don’t you think they suspect that and he said, well, it’s all fantasy so what difference does it make to them? And I said don’t you ever wonder if they if you go on and hook up with a woman that it might be a guy and he said, I don’t care, I don’t see them.

So from that point on I was always very much aware of how you could change your sex for half an hour on the internet. And I hadn’t been on that virtual community second life yet, but I’d been hearing about it and I had read about it and it seemed to be the epitome of this fantasy life. Hence the name, second life. So when I pitched the idea to DC I was thinking about all these things, not just the way people alter their identities on the internet, although the internet makes that incredibly easy to do so, but that people have always done that and there are reasons why they do that, pretend to be somebody else. Or fantasize about being somebody else. And DC liked the idea, so here I pitched an idea that had a lot to do with Second Life but I’d never been on it. I immediately got an account and went on it just to explore and it was much weirder than I ever imagined. (laughs) Have you ever been on it?

Yes it’s that strange. Without a doubt. I spent six months on it and I was always very much a voyeur. I could barely converse with people and if I did, my avatar would go up to them and ask what they’re doing and why are they dressed that way, what’s this area all about. More often than not, people wouldn’t answer. They would just completely ignore me. (laughs) That’s the other thing, too. Just to see what it was like, I would tweak with my avatar. At one point I made my avatar African-American. That was very interesting because literally no one would talk to me. (laughs) Racism’s alive and well here in Second life. Nobody would say boo to me. It wasn’t even like I was scary looking. I looked like Barack Obama. (laughs)

But the other thing to is, I didn’t even attempt to get as much out of Second Life as you could and I eventually got bored with it. You can go through tutorials and very quickly learn how to build. Using virtual money you can buy a chunk of land and do whatever you want with it. You can make it a sandpit. You can make it Mount Everest. You can make it a shopping mall. But you would build it yourself. You would build the structures yourself and the more you practice that the more you can learn to do. You can eventually learn to make glass walls and learn how to make a car. Needless to say there’s a lot of people who are fascinated with that. Computer programmers would do amazing miraculous things. For example, make a totally workable dragon that you could ride on, which I used in the comic. I had zero interest in building. I think I built a box and got bored. And that was that.

The other thing too is doing business on it. The most obvious thing would be designing clothes that your avatar would buy. There’s places you can go to get free clothing, but it’s pretty goofy junky stuff. But let’s say to give an obvious example you were really into very elaborate Victorian goth look. There are virtual clothing designers and they make money selling this to you. The money is called lindens. Very quickly people started converting lindens into real money. There’s an actual exchange rate. If you do enough business, you can make pretty good money. I read a story about this one woman who bought tons of land. She used real money, because you need real money to get lindens. You convert your actual dollars into linden money. So she bought tons of land then waited. It’s just like in real world. As the place got more and more populated she started selling the land that she bought to other people. For ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred times more than she paid for it. And in real life got rich with real money. (laughs) But that’s the other thing to is that I was not going to bother to start any kind of a business. I didn’t have anything to offer anyway other than.

Pretty much. Before this I did a book called Apocalypse Nerd. The idea was that it would be a graphic novel but that publisher, Dark Horse, allowed me to serialize it so it came out as a six issue miniseries before collecting it as a book. I wanted to do that with this book too I really wanted it to come out as a comicbook and then bunch it all together as a graphic novel but they wouldn’t do that. They just don’t make money from comicbooks is the problem.

Yes. It was very hard. There I was on page ninety-seven and nobody has seen a page of it. Having the public see pieces of it and getting feedback while working on it. It gives you an idea of what’s working and what isn’t. It can be devastating, too, when you’re that invested in something that’s very long and you’re releasing it piecemeal and the public hates it. (laughs) It also gives you a chance to correct things and clarify things as you go along.

With each one of those titles it was always one of the editors from DC called me up and asked me to throw some ideas at them. That’s how Yeah! started with Shelley Bond, back then she was Shelley Roeberg, she just asked me to try to come up with an idea and we did a lot of back and forth before it wound up being “Yeah!” And then with Sweatshop, it was an editor named Joey Cavalieri. Same thing, he just called me up saying I’ve got this small window of opportunity where they’re willing to develop another humor series, so we came up with Sweatshop. With Other Lives, it was an editor who’s no longer with DC named Bob Schreck who he asked me to come up with a graphic novel idea for Vertigo and that evolved into Other Lives.

That’s right. (laughs) Eight years later.

It all had to do with changing ownership. Back around the year 2000 or so, Marvel was doing terrible and they reached this point of, what do we have to lose, let’s just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. Nobody foresaw how huge a hit that first Spider-man movie would be, but they figured with the Spider-man movie coming out, let’s exploit it as much as possible. I think that month fifteen different Spider-man titles came out, including mine. They gave me almost total creative freedom. That wound up doing pretty well and they made money off it. I mean how could you not? It’s Spider-man. So they decided they would keep doing the same thing. The next one was going to be a Hulk movie and we’ll put out a ton of Hulk merchandise and we’ll do another Pete Bagge humor satire of it. Meanwhile because of the massive success of Spider-man and I can’t remember the names of the owners but whoever owned Marvel prior to the Spider-man movie sold to another company whose name I don’t remember either. These new owners paid a fortune for the rights to the Marvel characters and when they saw me doing this Hulk comic, which largely was making fun of the Hulk, they freaked out. They insisted that we water down the story quite a bit and edit it. For example we couldn’t use the word drugs. I’m not talking about illegal drugs, I’m talking about cold medicine. We couldn’t use legal drugs. As in the drug store. (laughs)

And they wouldn’t let us use the word viagra. We were like, what are we going to do? So instead of using the word drug we used the word “serum” (laughs) which is kind of hilarious. They let us finish the book but then once it was all done and I got paid in full, they said, we’re not going to release it. The whole time the company owned it they refused to released it. So now Marvel got bought out by Disney and whoever the top honchos are they let them release it albeit under this other format.

Yeah that was going to be one of them when it still looked like we were going to keep doing this. I would have liked that too. (laughs) It would have been a masterpiece.

I just turned in my first feature with them in a long time. It’s very different from what I’ve done with them in the past. I’m going to do a series of biography comic strips and it’s mainly based on writers from the past who have a very libertarian bent to their worldview and thinking. I’m pretty much doing a series of bios of creative people who were libertarian before that terms took hold. The first one is about an author not a household name at all but it’s about an author named Isabel Paterson.

One is I got a little bit burnt out on trying to keep up with topical stories. They were asking me to take on topical newsworthy issues in all the other features I’ve been doing for them. Even though I myself have a libertarian bent, which is why I do comics for Reason, I always tried to make it very personal. I tried to make it clear in all these stories for them that I’m not walking this strict ideological tightrope, but still when the work would appear, it was great that they would generate a lot of conversation, but way too much of it was partisan. Whatever was going on, for way too many people their take on it always had to do with whether they were a member of the Republican or Democratic tribe if you know what I mean. They would all spout the party line and I just got sick of it and also I kept noticing how people have very little understanding of libertarianism itself. It’s wherever they’re coming from. If you’re a Republican you think we’re a bunch of potheads and if you’re a Democrat you think we’re rich people who hate paying taxes and want to pollute whatever they want

I was thinking if I went back, rather than always trying to keep up with newsworthy subjects and following politicians around, which I really got sick of, I thought I’d go back to the past. I’m not talking about going back to ancient times. I’m mainly going to be dealing with the first part of the Twentieth century. Everybody has a general grasp of how things played out in the past, so I’m hoping that it would create more perspective and a better understanding. Plus I hope that people will find them entertaining. I also like the idea of memorializing certain authors that have been forgotten or people who people might know their names but they know very little about them. Or their take on them is totally based on partisan news bites. A perfect example is Margaret Sanger. If you type her name into google you’re immediately going to be bombarded with all these sound bytes of people saying things about Margaret Sanger that are consistently one hundred percent false. (laughs)

It’s always been very sporadic and it still is.

They actually went back to six issues a year instead of four, but they’re cutting on pages rates, so I’m not too depressed about not getting much from them. I always worked for them just because it’s Mad. Since I grew up on it, it’s really hard to say no when somebody calls up and says, you want to draw something for Mad. Even though it’s not the same Mad, if you know what I mean.

Well I’m barely halfway done with the first one and it’s twelve pages. That’s a problem, too. Reason traditionally has only given me four pages, so I’m giving it to them in four part installments. Some of them, Margaret Sanger for example, there’s no way I could tell her life story in 12 pages. When you read her life story it doesn’t seem possible that one person could have done all these things.

No I can’t say that I’ve wanted to do it. I fell into it. Originally people asked me. I was asked to attempt things like this. This cartoon journalism, for lack of a better way of describing it, I just I personally feel like I’ve developed something of a knack for it, so I figure I might as well keep it going. It’s led to a lot of other ideas popping into my head like the ones that I’m describing to you.

Yes, hopefully this will lead to one big book project. Another thing, too is I recently volunteered with a group that brings the arts to women’s prisons. Off and on for a month I was going to a minimum security women’s prison out here in Washington state. They were doing writing projects and dance. They wound up putting on a choreographed show. We did cartoons and drawings. I’m going to look into that leading into a book project where I would illustrate these women’s life stories.

Yeah. (laughs) I certainly try to inject humor into all these projects, mainly because I see something funny in all of them, but yeah. As far as the lighter stuff goes, the first Hate Annual in a long time just came out. I still have this story arc going with Buddy Bradley and I’m starting to see it coming to an end, so we’ll see another whole book collection of Buddy Bradley stories picking up where those Hate collections left off. Then I did two years worth of Batboy comic strips for the Weekly World News and IDW wants to collect those into a book.

I can be totally lame and tell everyone to check out my rock band’s myspace page (laughs)

The band’s called Can You Imagine? It’s totally stuck in the sixties sunshine pop. The Mamas and the Papas and the Beatles and the Beach Boys.