Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge (Peekskill, 1957) studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and combined his artistic education with reading underground comics indiscriminately. His first steps as a professional were taken in the second half of the 70s as a contributor to John Holmstrom’s legendary Punk Magazine, and in the early 80s he went on to publish comics in magazines such as Comical Funnies or Robert Crumb’s renowned Weirdo, of which later he became an editor until he abandoned the task to focus on his own publication, Neat Stuff, known in Spain as Mundo Idiota, in which the protagonists of Hate first saw the light.

Bagge has occasionally worked for Marvel and DC on bespoke projects and has practiced cartoon journalism with notable results, signing reports and chronicles for magazines such as Details or Reason (material collected in the book Everyone Is Stupid Except for Me), but his name remains, above all else, an emblem of the alternative comic books that shook the international scene in the 1990s thanks in large part to the tribulations of Buddy Bradley.

In love with and indebted to Warner cartoons, a shrewd anthropologist and observer of our lowest forms of behaviour, in recent times he’s decided to focus rather on the achievements of human beings, delighting us with the biographical glosses of exemplary women such as the libertarian Rose Wilder Lane in Credo, the proto-feminist activist Margaret Sanger in Woman Rebel and the Afro-American writer Zora Neale Hurston in Fire!!.