Let’s imagine that the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ asks you for an entry on grunge as a sociocultural phenomenon. What would you write?
Which was sheer nonsense. I couldn’t get a better idea. Lazy music, lazy clothes and, above all, lazy attitude.
You are at least from the pre-grunge generation. However ‘Hate’ is a great portrait of the grunge generation. Fluke?
Not at all. On the one hand living in Seattle the grunge scene was something familiar to me, I knew people who were very into it. But at the same time, when grunge emerged in Seattle, it reminded me a lot of what I had already experienced in New York with the rise of punk. It was something that I already knew very well. I didn’t want to make a period comic, based on the past, and so I set my previous experiences in what I saw around me.
How much play would social networks have given in the hands of the characters of ‘Hate’!
Undoubtedly. It’s a shame they didn’t exist. But the fan movies existed and are reflected in ‘I Hate’. Every neighbor’s son got a fanzine with his likes and dislikes and in a way the fanzines worked as social networks work now.
People get tattooed like there is no tomorrow. Have you seen any tattoos of his character Buddy Bradley?
A lots of. too many. Even before tattoos became so popular, a girl who worked at my American publishing company got a huge tattoo of another of my characters, not Buddy. She did not consult me; I would have told him: ‘Don’t do it!’ But the truth is that he is a compliment, although it seems to me a terrible idea. Many fans send me pictures of their Buddy Bradley tattoos.
What do you think of ‘Hate’ 30 years after writing and drawing it?
When I review my first works, not only ‘Hate’, I am surprised by the aggressiveness and the anguish and the anger that I stored inside and that I no longer feel. I don’t even know where those emotions came from anymore. I think he must have been a terrible person and I wonder how he could have had friends then. I do not identify in the least with those emotions.
I suspect he was more of a fan of the Young Fresh Fellows, also from Seattle, than of the grunge groups.
Success. Also, Scott McCaughey and Kurt Bloch are acquaintances of mine. I also really liked The Posies, not from Seattle but up close. Although there were some grunge groups that I liked, like for example… Nirvana, of course. After a tour of Spain with The Fastbacks, his other group, Kurt Bloch told me that he was much better known in Spain than at home and that Spanish fans thought he was harassed by fans from Seattle when he went down to the grocery store for a bric of milk. In order not to break the spell he told them yes. It happened to me and the same thing happens to me
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Which artists do you recognize as influences?
In my youth, no doubt Robert Crumb. But, before that, Schulz, the author of ‘Peanuts’, and many cartoonists from ‘Mad’ magazine. And then, even though he’s a bit younger than me, Daniel Clowes was also a big influence. Our careers progressed in parallel and we were very competitive with each other, and also with the brothers [Gilbert y Jaime] Hernandez. If now, to illustrate the type of relationship I have with Clowes and the Hernández, I were to publish a new issue of ‘Odio’, the first thing I would do would be to ask them what they thought of it. And if they told me ‘fuck you!’ It would mean that they liked it a lot.