Books: A decisive new collection
from political satirist Peter Bagge

Everybody Is Stupid except for Me, and Other Astute Observations, by Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics Books; $16.99)

Strip down a political cartoonist’s arsenal to the essentials, and the only weapon worth keeping is ridicule. A perceptive social–political cartoonist since ’way back before anybody recognized him as such, Seattle-based Peter Bagge has devoted himself since the 1980s to skewering stupidity where he finds it — even in himself. Combining an acerbic social outlook with a rubbery drawing style reminiscent of MAD magazine’s Don Martin or all-around gagman Virgil Partch, Bagge reached a plateau during the 1990s with a serialized comic book called Hate, chronicling the troubled progress of Generation X in all its aggressive self-destructiveness.

In times more recent, Bagge has combined that distinctive approach to ridicule with a Libertarian political bias, contributing a long-running comics feature to Reason magazine. The Reason features, in turn, add up to a splendidly funny-and-angry new book called Everybody Is Stupid except for Me. Not even Libertarian dogma is safe, and Bagge rejects party-line herd-following in order to raise a uniquely sane voice among political cartoonists. His cartoons must be timely and topical whenever they first appear — war in Iraq in 2002, for example, or bureaucratic complications in the medical-marijuana issue in 2005 — but Bagge also homes in on issues that serve primarily to illustrate the persistence of human frailty and gullibility. Everybody Is Stupid, overt political concerns aside, is pleasingly consistent with Bagge’s earlier work: As mass-population stupidity (tax-dollar boondoggles, sports-arena and shopping-mall mania and so forth) escalates, so do Bagge’s abilities to hold it up to razor-edged ridicule.

Bagge cartoons himself as a confused Everyman, perpetually attempting to make sense of a society-gone-senseless. If Bagge is a curmudgeon, he tempers the attitude with a willingness to laugh at everything — even himself. If a documentarian, he is an interpretive and exaggerative one. If a social critic or polemicist, he brings to the table a rare combination of backhanded affection and rambunctious humor. No “ifs” as to the matter of his being one terrific cartoonist, with a keen constancy of purpose.

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