Roberta Gregory is the creator of one of the best comic book characters ever, Bitchy Bitch. Gregory has been creating the adventures of Bitchy Bitch since 1989 and she has lovingly passed into the pantheon of great Fantagraphics characters such as Peter Bagges Buddy Bradley and Jim Woodrings Frank.
Now you can catch up with Bitchy Bitch in the new book Life's a Bitch: The Bitchy Bitch Chronicles which fans will enjoy by reminiscing and new fans will love it as a primer for the character.
Check out the official site of Roberta Gregory
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Roberta Gregory: Im actually in the process of scanning the roughs of a little cartoon Im doing to promote mammograms for women. Also Ive got an elderly friend whos writing a book of his reminisces and I did these cute little cartoons showing some of his past in a cute, little cartoony style, very un-Bitchy. Im like a chameleon when it comes to my different styles.
DRE: Do you have a publisher for that yet?
RG: Yeah, were going with a publisher here in Seattle and the book is called Memories With a Christmas Attitude. Its coming out this Christmas.
Ive just got so many projects going on and theyre all in so many different stages. Its 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 youve seen Naughty Bits you know I have those little autobio stories. Theyre kind of fun. Im trying to sit down and do a strip, but little projects like the comics are taking a back seat. These other things are projects Ive either promised to people or theyre potential money. Theres 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. Im doing stuff that I love to do and Im hoping to get lavishly rewarded for it, but Im not holding my breath.
DRE: So if Bitchy Bitch is still going, then what ended last year?
RG: 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 didnt actually first appear in Naughty Bits. She actually appeared earlier in some other stories, but thats been her platform, so to speak.
Ive 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.
DRE: Did the trade paperbacks of the Bitchy stuff ever do well enough so you didnt have to have so many things going on?
RG: 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 didnt have for the little Bitchy collections. They just put out a book with Peter Bagges stories thats the same format as Lifes a Bitch. As Kim [Thompson] says, it has a big chunk of the Bitchy epic so people arent going to be completely lost. Its very reasonably priced, so what were hoping is to get Bitchy even more widely read.
So theres a whole lot going on but Ive still got a part-time crappy day job.
DRE: Thats so surprising. It upsets me that someone who has done this for as long as you have still has a day job.
RG: Believe me, it upsets me too. Id rather be working on my projects than cleaning restrooms and picking up chairs at events. Its a union job, so it pays good, but on the other hand its taking time away from doing comics. But hopefully Ill sell plenty of comics and earn more through my creative endeavors. Ive got a couple more things that may turn into cash also. Im 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 dont have to move furniture and clean floors.
DRE: So the Lifes a Bitch book was Fantagraphics idea?
RG: Yeah. Like I said, now theyve got like bookstore distribution, which is good and bad because you also have things like returns, which you dont have in the comics industry.
DRE: Did you decide what order the stories should be in because its not the order they came out?
RG: 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 didnt make it. Such as entire storylines where shes in college.
DRE: The storyline where shes a high school student that gets pregnant and needs an abortion was pretty heavy stuff.
RG: 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 cant get away from that fact.
DRE: How did you decide what order the stories should go in?
RG: Well some of the early stories are so adult oriented and over the top, I dont think Fantagraphics really wants to put them. Lifes 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. Thats probably not going to end up in Barnes & Noble.
DRE: But shes on the toilet enough in Lifes a Bitch though.
RG: Oh,. sure. Why not? Who isnt? Do you know anybody that doesnt sit on a toilet? Thats the thing that really tweaks me about comics. Theres this mentality that comics are for children and if you do something thats adult oriented in comic book form, then youre obviously trying to corrupt children and all that BS. Women dealing with their monthly problems, people having bad sex, people thinking about bad sex, thats life.
DRE: Did you change your mind about doing as serious stuff as you got rolling?
RG: Oh no. There are serious storylines later on as she finally thinks she finds the man of her dreams and finds out hes obsessed with child pornography. is serious. I think it all fits together.
DRE: Was the comic ever autobiographical?
RG: 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 wouldnt 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 Im Bitchy Bitch. You wouldnt believe the wide range of people that have written to me and say they identify so much with Bitchy Bitch and not all women.
DRE: I can see why they identify with her. She says everything that some people want to say.
RG: Definitely, a lot of what makes Bitchy Bitch is her internal world, her internal machinery and most of that isnt 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 dont talk about. Way back in the 70s I was doing lesbian comics and comics about the womens movement because nobody else was doing them. Its the idea that if you get an idea, its also an assignment. Bitchy doesnt take assignments. She bitches. She kvetches. She finds things to blame rather than things to get involved in. Shed rather bitch than try to change herself or look at her own issues. Im completely opposite. Im obsessed with the why of things.
DRE: I also didnt know that Bitchy was sexually abused by her uncle. Do you think shed be as bitchy if that didnt happen?
RG: 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 Im going to start writing, its going to be about what really makes people who they are. Its humor and its ugliness. Thats kind of what life is all about.
DRE: Did you ever think that maybe you shouldnt have put in the sexual abuse? That it would make it too easy for her to become a bitch.
RG: Im usually just kind of thinking about how to fill pages. Then I go, Oh, wow. Thats a good story. I dont think I shouldnt have put in the sexual abuse. Ive 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 50s. Theres things I dont 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 Im concerned, theres really not much you cant put into comics.
DRE: Do you ever see ending the character?
RG: Boy, thats 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. Shes 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.
DRE: Has it come to the point where shes dictating to you what she wants to do?
RG: Well, they do that all the time. Characters have a union. My friend, Donna Barr, was the first to point that out. Theyll tell you what theyre going to do. Ive 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.
DRE: Has anyone ever wanted you to do mainstream comics?
RG: I dont think Id be able to do mainstream comics. Im not really happy with a lot of my art. To me, drawing is more work. Thats why I love doing Bitchy because drawing Bitchy Bitch is like a party. Theres 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.
DRE: What happened with the Life's a Bitch cartoon?
RG: 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 thats not really what Im 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 Bitchys body and Bitchys perception of things. Those would always get written out in favor of scenes with people sitting around talking to each other.
Id love to do Flash animation. Not with Bitchy because I think they've still got the rights to do Bitchy for awhile or whatever. Im kind of eager to play with animation on my own but I dont know when thats going to show up in my career.
DRE: Did you take a look at SuicideGirls?
RG: Oh yeah. Its 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, Id 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
Now you can catch up with Bitchy Bitch in the new book Life's a Bitch: The Bitchy Bitch Chronicles which fans will enjoy by reminiscing and new fans will love it as a primer for the character.
Check out the official site of Roberta Gregory
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Roberta Gregory: Im actually in the process of scanning the roughs of a little cartoon Im doing to promote mammograms for women. Also Ive got an elderly friend whos writing a book of his reminisces and I did these cute little cartoons showing some of his past in a cute, little cartoony style, very un-Bitchy. Im like a chameleon when it comes to my different styles.
DRE: Do you have a publisher for that yet?
RG: Yeah, were going with a publisher here in Seattle and the book is called Memories With a Christmas Attitude. Its coming out this Christmas.
Ive just got so many projects going on and theyre all in so many different stages. Its 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 youve seen Naughty Bits you know I have those little autobio stories. Theyre kind of fun. Im trying to sit down and do a strip, but little projects like the comics are taking a back seat. These other things are projects Ive either promised to people or theyre potential money. Theres 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. Im doing stuff that I love to do and Im hoping to get lavishly rewarded for it, but Im not holding my breath.
DRE: So if Bitchy Bitch is still going, then what ended last year?
RG: 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 didnt actually first appear in Naughty Bits. She actually appeared earlier in some other stories, but thats been her platform, so to speak.
Ive 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.
DRE: Did the trade paperbacks of the Bitchy stuff ever do well enough so you didnt have to have so many things going on?
RG: 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 didnt have for the little Bitchy collections. They just put out a book with Peter Bagges stories thats the same format as Lifes a Bitch. As Kim [Thompson] says, it has a big chunk of the Bitchy epic so people arent going to be completely lost. Its very reasonably priced, so what were hoping is to get Bitchy even more widely read.
So theres a whole lot going on but Ive still got a part-time crappy day job.
DRE: Thats so surprising. It upsets me that someone who has done this for as long as you have still has a day job.
RG: Believe me, it upsets me too. Id rather be working on my projects than cleaning restrooms and picking up chairs at events. Its a union job, so it pays good, but on the other hand its taking time away from doing comics. But hopefully Ill sell plenty of comics and earn more through my creative endeavors. Ive got a couple more things that may turn into cash also. Im 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 dont have to move furniture and clean floors.
DRE: So the Lifes a Bitch book was Fantagraphics idea?
RG: Yeah. Like I said, now theyve got like bookstore distribution, which is good and bad because you also have things like returns, which you dont have in the comics industry.
DRE: Did you decide what order the stories should be in because its not the order they came out?
RG: 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 didnt make it. Such as entire storylines where shes in college.
DRE: The storyline where shes a high school student that gets pregnant and needs an abortion was pretty heavy stuff.
RG: 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 cant get away from that fact.
DRE: How did you decide what order the stories should go in?
RG: Well some of the early stories are so adult oriented and over the top, I dont think Fantagraphics really wants to put them. Lifes 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. Thats probably not going to end up in Barnes & Noble.
DRE: But shes on the toilet enough in Lifes a Bitch though.
RG: Oh,. sure. Why not? Who isnt? Do you know anybody that doesnt sit on a toilet? Thats the thing that really tweaks me about comics. Theres this mentality that comics are for children and if you do something thats adult oriented in comic book form, then youre obviously trying to corrupt children and all that BS. Women dealing with their monthly problems, people having bad sex, people thinking about bad sex, thats life.
DRE: Did you change your mind about doing as serious stuff as you got rolling?
RG: Oh no. There are serious storylines later on as she finally thinks she finds the man of her dreams and finds out hes obsessed with child pornography. is serious. I think it all fits together.
DRE: Was the comic ever autobiographical?
RG: 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 wouldnt 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 Im Bitchy Bitch. You wouldnt believe the wide range of people that have written to me and say they identify so much with Bitchy Bitch and not all women.
DRE: I can see why they identify with her. She says everything that some people want to say.
RG: Definitely, a lot of what makes Bitchy Bitch is her internal world, her internal machinery and most of that isnt 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 dont talk about. Way back in the 70s I was doing lesbian comics and comics about the womens movement because nobody else was doing them. Its the idea that if you get an idea, its also an assignment. Bitchy doesnt take assignments. She bitches. She kvetches. She finds things to blame rather than things to get involved in. Shed rather bitch than try to change herself or look at her own issues. Im completely opposite. Im obsessed with the why of things.
DRE: I also didnt know that Bitchy was sexually abused by her uncle. Do you think shed be as bitchy if that didnt happen?
RG: 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 Im going to start writing, its going to be about what really makes people who they are. Its humor and its ugliness. Thats kind of what life is all about.
DRE: Did you ever think that maybe you shouldnt have put in the sexual abuse? That it would make it too easy for her to become a bitch.
RG: Im usually just kind of thinking about how to fill pages. Then I go, Oh, wow. Thats a good story. I dont think I shouldnt have put in the sexual abuse. Ive 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 50s. Theres things I dont 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 Im concerned, theres really not much you cant put into comics.
DRE: Do you ever see ending the character?
RG: Boy, thats 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. Shes 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.
DRE: Has it come to the point where shes dictating to you what she wants to do?
RG: Well, they do that all the time. Characters have a union. My friend, Donna Barr, was the first to point that out. Theyll tell you what theyre going to do. Ive 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.
DRE: Has anyone ever wanted you to do mainstream comics?
RG: I dont think Id be able to do mainstream comics. Im not really happy with a lot of my art. To me, drawing is more work. Thats why I love doing Bitchy because drawing Bitchy Bitch is like a party. Theres 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.
DRE: What happened with the Life's a Bitch cartoon?
RG: 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 thats not really what Im 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 Bitchys body and Bitchys perception of things. Those would always get written out in favor of scenes with people sitting around talking to each other.
Id love to do Flash animation. Not with Bitchy because I think they've still got the rights to do Bitchy for awhile or whatever. Im kind of eager to play with animation on my own but I dont know when thats going to show up in my career.
DRE: Did you take a look at SuicideGirls?
RG: Oh yeah. Its 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, Id 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
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Awesome.
great stuff!