Peter Bagge Conversations

For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracingly satirical writing and drawing, this collection offers the ideal means to track his career choices, work habits, preoccupations, and comedic sensibility from the 1980s onwards. Featuring a lengthy new interview and a great deal of previously unavailable material, this book delivers insightful, gossipy, funny, and occasionally tart conversations with a wide range of interlocutors, from personal friends and zine publishers to comics critics and mainstream journalists. Bagge's wide-ranging career has intersected with the modern history of comics, from underground comix and indie comics to comics journalism and graphic nonfiction; this new compendium of interviews will be a must-have for aficionados of his work. 
Bagge's detailed, garrulous, and often grotesquely funny (and discomfiting) work harks back to the underground generation, recalling Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, while also pointing forward to the emergence of alternative comics as a distinct genre. His signature series, the rawly humorous Hate (1990-1998) and his editorship (1983-1986) of the often outrageous Weirdo magazine, founded by Crumb, established Bagge as a leading voice in alternative comics, and his rude, wildly expressive cartooning makes him a counterpoint to the still introspection of recent literary graphic novels.
Over the past few decades Bagge has left his mark on a variety of formats and genres. He is a prolific cartoonist, an accomplished musician, and a sometime essayist, editor, and animator. While his creative output encompasses autobiographical comics, graphic nonfiction, magazine illustrations, gag cartoons, minicomics, political commentary, superhero parodies, comic strips, animated videos, and one-page humor pieces, Bagge is best known for creating continuity-based graphic stories that revolve around sharply defined, over-the-top characters. While some writers on comics have lazily branded Bagge as a grunge-era visual satirist, his creative restlessness and expanding body of work make it difficult to confine him within any single genre, cultural niche, or historical moment.

Kent Worcester most recent books are The Superhero Reader (coedited with Charles Hatfield and Jeet Heer), A Comics Studies Reader (coedited with Jeet Heer), and Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (coedited with Jeet Heer), all published by University Press of Mississippi.