44 BAKER, KYLE
story revolved around his eff ort to manage a Northwest Pacifi c grunge band whose
members are named Kurt, Kurt, Greg, and Kurt. “Man, what a racket!” Buddy thinks to
himself when he fi rst hears their music. “Now I remember why I never go to live shows
anymore! Th is has got to be the worst music ever invented in the history of the world!”
Peter Bagge has a high-energy, kinetic visual style that owes a greater debt to classic
Warner Brothers cartoons than to the dominant approaches associated with the alterna-
tive comics movement. While his line work became more confi dent and precise during
the 1980s and 1990s, his scathing approach to comics storytelling remains rooted in
the anti-establishment ethos of punk rock. To date, comics scholars have paid relatively
little attention to Bagge’s work and career, and it may be that some scholars feel more
comfortable writing about comics memoir and journalism rather than satire. It is dif-
fi cult to theorize belly laughs. Bagge relocated from the East Coast to Seattle in 1984,
where he still lives with his wife, daughter, and cats.
Kent Worcester
BAKER, KYLE (1965–). Kyle Baker is an award-winning artist, writer, and animator
whose singular style draws on elements of both reality and caricature. Born in Queens,
New York, Baker’s fi rst job after high school, interning with Marvel Comics , was
intended to pay for attendance at the School of Visual Arts. However, he left SVA
when he realized, in his own words, “you’re going to art school to learn a trade, but I was
already working at a trade, so I may as well save myself the money” (Cunard).
Baker’s fi rst professional work was a 1990 adaptation of Alice Th rough Th e Looking
Glass for First Comics’ Classics Illustrated line. Th e same year, his Why I Hate Sat-
urn , from DC Comics’ experimental Piranha Press imprint, won critical acclaim. Baker
worked for Dark Horse on an anthology about the experimental band Th e Residents;
1993 saw the Doubleday release of his highly acclaimed and quite manic graphic novel
Th e Cowboy Wally Show.
Th e 1999 story Letitia Lerner , Superman’s Babysitter , was withdrawn from a DC
Elseworlds Annual , in a fl urry of controversy. Its depiction of a baby (a super baby, but
still a baby) crawling into a microwave, drinking milk directly from a cow, chewing on
electrical cords and jumping atop water towers caused the editor, Paul Levitz , to order
most of the print run pulped. Baker won two Eisner Awards for the story, which was
printed two years later in the DC anthology Bizarro Worlds.
While the majority of his comics work for companies besides his own has been with
DC, Baker teamed with Robert “Rags” Morales for the 2003 Marvel miniseries Captain
America : Truth. Inspired by real-world military medical experiments using black sol-
diers, this series postulated a troop of black soldiers injected with preliminary versions
of a “super-serum.” Th e series cited historically accurate events from black and military
history, and its illustrations were meticulously researched. Despite its commercial and
critical success, Baker declared that he would not work for Marvel again; nevertheless,
as of this writing he is completing a Deadpool and another Morales Captain America
story, both for Marvel.
