{"id":8135,"date":"2010-04-22T09:03:22","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T14:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=8135"},"modified":"2010-03-23T15:05:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-23T20:05:09","slug":"bagge-peter-everybody-is-stupid-except-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=8135","title":{"rendered":"Bagge, Peter &#8211; Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.peterbagge.com\/\">Website<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/everybody1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"everybody1\" src=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/everybody1.jpg\" alt=\"everybody1\" width=\"462\" height=\"601\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fantagraphics.com\/index.php?page=shop.product_details&amp;flypage=shop.flypage&amp;product_id=1574&amp;category_id=213&amp;manufacturer_id=0&amp;option=com_virtuemart&amp;Itemid=62\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ll allow me to be pointlessly nostalgic for a minute, there  was a large chunk of time throughout the 90&#8217;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.\u00c2\u00a0 Out of  that crew only the Hernandez Brothers are still doing comics on a  consistent basis, with Dan Clowes &#8220;going Hollywood&#8221;, Jim Woodring pretty  much vanishing completely outside of the occasional anthology piece  (according to the Fantagraphics site anyway, I haven&#8217;t seen anything new  from the man in years) and Peter Bagge being content to put out the  occasional annual of Hate.\u00c2\u00a0 Except, it turns out, for these strips.\u00c2\u00a0  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&#8217;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.\u00c2\u00a0 It was,  frankly, a nostalgic blast of fresh air to be able to read a graphic  novel of Peter&#8217;s again, even if this is a series of unconnected pieces  instead of a coherent narrative.\u00c2\u00a0 This covers strips he did from  2001-2009 and doesn&#8217;t really make clear if this is a &#8220;best of&#8221;  collection or a definitive listing of all of his strips from that  period.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Subjects in here include a brief definition of  libertarianism, the meandering anti-war protests (and Peter&#8217;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.\u00c2\u00a0 This doesn&#8217;t include any of the many single  page strips, as you should get some surprises with this book, right?\u00c2\u00a0  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.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, it&#8217;s  hard to criticize somebody for NOT doing a strip about something when he  was usually given topics to cover, and I still don&#8217;t know if they just  left out the Bush strips in the ongoing cultural effort to forget that  the man ever existed.\u00c2\u00a0 Anybody who read Hate back in the day already  knows to pick this up just because it&#8217;s Peter, and for you kids today  who never read Hate, this is a good place to start with the guy.\u00c2\u00a0 $17<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/everything2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"everything2\" src=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/everything2.jpg\" alt=\"everything2\" width=\"570\" height=\"732\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Website Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me If you&#8217;ll allow me to be pointlessly nostalgic for a minute, there was a large chunk of time throughout the 90&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[581,2478],"class_list":["post-8135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-everybody-is-stupid-except-for-me","tag-peter-bagge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8135"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8142,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8135\/revisions\/8142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}