Peter Bagge is best known as the underground comix whizz who produced Hate, an angry, darkly funny tale that mostly recounted the life of Buddy Bradley, a perennial loser who bounced around from Generation X grunge type to a married man trying to adjust to life in the American suburbs. Bagge has an idiosyncratic art style, somewhere between the weirdness of Robert Crumb and the clean lines of Daniel Clowes, and a sense of humour that's halfway between both of them, albeit infinitely more misanthropic. He's a great cartoonist, basically, but probably not somebody who you'd call up to do a Spider-Man comics. And yet, here we are, talking about the Megalomaniacal Spider-Man. Bagge's take on Peter Parker was totally unlike anything seen in even the wildest What Ifs?, as he goes from being a selfless superhero spurred on by the death of his Uncle Ben to the self-absorbed, greedy, tyrannical CEO of Spider-Man, Inc, as a result of discovering that Ben was a gambling addict and Aunt May had been emotionally manipulating her nephew for his whole life. Yep, instead of saving lives the broken Peter Parker makes money off of the Spider-Man character, employing J Jonah Jameson as his long-suffering lackey and marrying Gwen Stacy. In some ways this is a pretty idealised alternate history for Spidey, until he finds himself too portly to put on the costume and Jonah steps up to the plate, setting in motion a series of events which will prove to be his undoing...with a sad, hilarious predictability. You've never seen a Spider-Man comic like this before or since. And we mean that in the best possible way.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
