The Details

Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me

Peter Bagge

Fantagraphics Books, $17.

Amazon: Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me

Sometimes the single panel of a political cartoon just isn’t a big enough space for a cartoonist to work with, especially if said cartoonist is interested in providing a detailed, nuanced discussion or honest-to-God reporting on a topic. That’s the sort of political cartooning Peter Bagge has been engaging in for Reason magazine, and a decade’s worth of examples are now available in trade-paperback collection Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me from Fantagraphics, the publishers of Bagge’s comic book Hate. Bagge’s pieces are all multi-page comic strips, often involving Bagge himself attending an event, interviewing participants and then writing about it in first-person narration, his cartoon avatar always at least a peripheral character. The results fall somewhere between an editorial, an essay and a feature article, communicated through Bagge’s familiar big-headed, bendy-armed, super-expressive style. Bagge is libertarian (as is Reason), and it shows, but one need not agree with his politics to enjoy his work here, perhaps because as a political cartoonist, Bagge’s a cartoonist first and political second.