Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me
If you’ll allow me to be pointlessly nostalgic for a minute, there was a large chunk of time throughout the 90’s where, in any given year, you were pretty much guaranteed to be able to see a few new books from Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, the Hernandez Brothers and Jim Wooding. Out of that crew only the Hernandez Brothers are still doing comics on a consistent basis, with Dan Clowes “going Hollywood”, Jim Woodring pretty much vanishing completely outside of the occasional anthology piece (according to the Fantagraphics site anyway, I haven’t seen anything new from the man in years) and Peter Bagge being content to put out the occasional annual of Hate. Except, it turns out, for these strips. These were done for Reason, a libertarian magazine that has gone a bit nuts over the past year with the Obama birtherism and some other odds and ends, but (full disclosure), they’re still closer to my political persuasion than any of the major parties, or at least they are after working closely with electoral politics for the last 5 years. It was, frankly, a nostalgic blast of fresh air to be able to read a graphic novel of Peter’s again, even if this is a series of unconnected pieces instead of a coherent narrative. This covers strips he did from 2001-2009 and doesn’t really make clear if this is a “best of” collection or a definitive listing of all of his strips from that period. There are also all mostly autobiographical from Peter talking to the people involved in his theme of the strip, which is a marked change from Hate. Subjects in here include a brief definition of libertarianism, the meandering anti-war protests (and Peter’s later guilt at making fun of them), the right to own a bazooka, swingers, the war on fornication, the nonsense that makes up modern art, Christian rock, malls, legalized gambling, monorails, taxpayer funded sports arenas, the general suckiness of Amtrak, the ridiculous war on pot (and the war on drugs in general), bums, his search for an honest Republican, his report from a libertarian presidential debate, and the general nonsense that we believe. This doesn’t include any of the many single page strips, as you should get some surprises with this book, right? The one minor complaint is that a book of strips from 2001-2009 should be legally obligated to have at least a half dozen strips breaking down why W. Bush was such an unbelievable fuck-up, but Peter only goes so far as to call the man stupid a few times in other strips. Still, it’s hard to criticize somebody for NOT doing a strip about something when he was usually given topics to cover, and I still don’t know if they just left out the Bush strips in the ongoing cultural effort to forget that the man ever existed. Anybody who read Hate back in the day already knows to pick this up just because it’s Peter, and for you kids today who never read Hate, this is a good place to start with the guy. $17
