A Tour Through the Art Gallery, Part 2: Pete Bagge

Over the years, I've accumulated a few pieces of original comic book-related art. Nothing compared to the collections of some of my friends, admittedly, but there's some interesting stuff in there nonetheless. So, in my constant (and constantly failing) effort to keep this blog updated on a semi-regular basis, I thought I'd share some of them with you. Join me, won't you?

Picked up this swell sketch of Buddy Bradley (a-duh!) at the 1992 Chicago Con, which is the only show I think I've ever seen the esteemed Mr. Bagge at. I still think his HATE is the great unsung comic book of the 1990s and beyond, and one of the purely funniest things I've ever read. Back in college, even before HATE hit the stands in 1990, my college roommates and I loved the Buddy Bradley stories in Bagge's NEAT STUFF (especially "Hippy House," a book-length epic I still think ranks among the best single issues I've ever read.) I'm glad that, between biographies of Margaret Sanger and strips for Reason Magazine, Bagge still finds time to update us every so often on what's going on with Buddy and his brood. In their own way, those stories are just as meaningful and real as the stories of Maggie and Hopey that Bagge's fellow Fantagraphics creator Jaime Hernandez is telling in LOVE AND ROCKETS.

Side note: The most memorable thing about the 1992 convention was that this was the year Image Comics became popular on a terrifying level. I  remember coming back from some Chicago bar with my pals Jay Geldhof and Jill Thompson (both of whom will show up in this blog series before long) at about 2 in the morning and seeing the giant tents set up outside the hotel where Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld and the other artists were signing comics. The lines were still hundreds deep, even at that late (early?) hour.