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In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn about some Buddy Bradley comic book stories that appeared only in Germany!
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fifteenth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment’s legends. Click here for the second part of this installment’s legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
Peter Bagge’s Buddy Bradley had comic adventures that appeared only in Germany.
STATUS:
True
The history of independent comic books in the United States is not often filled with commercial success, but there were a few notable periods where there were commercial blips. The first occurred in the late 1960s/early 1970s when head shops had become very popular in the United States, only they needed more to sell than just drug paraphernalia, and one of the things that caught on was selling independent comics. Obviously, this was still a hit or miss period, and the bigger titles made a lot while the small ones didn’t do much at all.
Due to a Supreme Court ruling, local communities were allowed to ban head shops and so head shops were almost all gone by the mid-1970s, so the indie comics scene was in a bit downturn until the 1980s, when the rise of the Direct Market made it so that comic book creators could make money by selling directly to comic book shops and since they didn’t have to print extras (as they just printed to order), you could make some money again doing indie comics, especially when one of these comics, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, became a legit hit comic. So people gave other #1s a shot. Around this time, in 1985, Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff launched at Fantagraphics, with one of the stories being about a family called the Bradleys…
The breakout character of the Bradleys was Buddy Bradley, who a good deal of the male teen comic book buyers of the era identified with…
The mid-1980s indie comic book fell by the wayside (the market had been way too saturated) , but in 1990, Bagge launched Hate, which followed the adventures of Buddy Bradley as he moved to Seattle and the book became a surprise hit, as Buddy became sort of a hero of the slacker generation, despite Bagge making it pretty clear that Buddy really isn’t a HERO in the comic, ya know?
In any event, Bagge’s work became popular not just in the United States, but in Europe, as well, and in 1998, there was a German version of Hate called Krass that involved translations of Bagge’s Buddy Bradley stories…
The amazing thing about these comic books was that Bagge allowed them to do original stories featuring Buddy by European comic book creators, with Guido Sieber doing a number of Buddy Bradley stories with Buddy being in Berlin instead of Seattle.
A poster known as “The Comic Kraut” posted a translation of Sieber’s Buddy Bradley comic…
This reminds me of the time that the German comic book market wanted more Superman comics than DC had at the time, so DC started doing extra comics just for the German market (Curt Swan drawing them still, with stories from Bob Rozakis and Paul Kupperberg) that eventually got published in the United States, as well, until the John Byrne reboot, at which point the stories only saw publication in Germany (I covered it in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed many years ago).
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed – Learn why Eriq La Salle asked the ER producers to break up the relationship between Drs. Benton and Corday.
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that’s it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don’t even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it’s fair enough to still thank him, I think.
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that’s fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don’t mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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