BADGER AND ME
In 1982, Steve Rude and I had just sold Nexus to Capital Comics. Nexus is a reluctant executioner of mass murderers 500 years in the future. Nexus has won numerous Eisners, Kirbys and Ink Pots, and is available on line, and from Dark Horse Comics. There are twelve hardbound issues of the Nexus Archives.
I’d seen Jeff Butler’s work around the University of Wisconsin campus on sports posters and tracked him down.
“What do you want to draw, Jeff?”
“Druids.”
Jeff and I completed a twelve page story about an obnoxious 6th century Druid priest named Ham whose neighbors put him in a coma and hired some Vikings to drop him off the edge of the earth. We took this in and Capital said, “We can’t publish this! Give us a costumed crime fighter.” I asked myself, why would anybody put on a costume and fight crime, pace Phoenix Jones?
They’d have to be crazy!
I’d read The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes and couldn’t get it out of my mind. Especially the part when the mild Billy became a Russian gangster able to throw around guys twice his size. As I walked down State Street in Madison, WI, I passed Badger Liquors, the Badger Tavern, Badger Sporting Goods. Voila! The Badger was born. But Jeffrey was reluctant to abandon his wizard story so we shoehorned that into the first issue and that’s how Badger met Ham!
To those not familiar with The Badger, google Badger comic. The Badger was born of many things, every pop influence I’d absorbed in my thirty years thrown into a blender and whipped to a puree. Zen pop funny animal stories.
But the Badger is also serious. Multiple personality disorder is no laughing matter. It comes from severe, often sexual childhood abuse. The beauty of the Badger was that he could be all things to all people. But initially, he was a sort of street Hannibal Lecter, punishing the rude with beatings instead of eatings.
Badger also sprang into being out of my frustration with Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu. I lapped up those early Doug Moench/Paul Gulacy issues like a famished vole, and I loved the intrigue. But the martial arts—the raison d’etre of this line in the wake of Bruce Lee—were just poses. No real techniques, and often ludicrous sequences such as Shang Chi smashing stainless steel with his fists.
I have tried to understand combat my whole life, probably because I was a fat and cowardly child. No one has less natural athletic ability than me. While living in Boston and writing for The Boston Phoenix, I’d picked up and fallen in love with those initial MOKFs, but I knew the martial arts weren’t right. Why couldn’t a comic show them in a realistic and exciting manner?
I screwed up my courage and visited a dojo a half block from my house in Brighton, the Ja Shin Do Academy. Ja Shin Do was the brainchild of Andy Bauman and Jane West, two outstanding martial artists. Andy got his black belt in the Army in Korea. I started training. Never had they seen a more inept prospect. The first day I was there another newbie went up to a makiwara fixed to the wall and punched it with all his might, smashing three knuckles. He didn’t come back.
When Capital threw in the towel, I pushed for First because I liked what they were doing. We met over the Interstate at the Des Plaines Oasis and hammered out a deal. When First entered the Negative Zone, we found a receptive audience in Mike Richardson at Dark Horse. The Badger didn’t do well at Dark Horse because my stories were not compelling. I blame myself. With First (who still held a proprietary interest in Badger) consent, I took Badger to Image for seven issues. The Lost Issues. Some of them were shit. Some of them were very good. I’d like to repackage the good ones. I went through a rough stretch in the nineties and early 2000s which changed me in many ways. One way, I no longer sign off on a project unless it’s great. Alex Wald, my editor at First, helped me whip this new Badger into shape. Ken had a distribution deal with IDW, for which I wrote Badger Saves the World. I insisted on my friend Kevin Caron as artist, despite some resistance. Kevin is very under-groundy and was not suited to the character. Fans want a slicker, more modern approach. Kevin had just become a father, was working two jobs, and couldn’t keep up, so IDW brought in Alberto Dose, a very fine, Gulacy-like penciler to draw the last two issues. The stories rocked. Riley Thorp, now Qwami X, as well as Johnny Cash, Bruce Lee, and Muslim terrorists. The first issue, “Bull,” is a stand-alone shaggy dog story which Kevin nailed, in an underground sorta way. These are good stories and IDW issued them in a trade paperback. Good luck finding that.
Two years ago First began quietly creeping back into comics publishing, and approached me about a new Badger series. This was an opportunity to introduce Badger to a whole new generation of readers. I’m always happy to rewrite a story I did years ago, so I did a new origin. Actually, the first real origin story for the Badger. Norbert Sykes is an Afghan veteran whose serious mental issues don’t surface until he is captured by the Muhajadeen. It’s a grim story shot through with flashes of insanity. At the end of the first book, Badger, Daisy and Ham are reunited, or rather they meet for the first time.
The story that follows is off-the-walls crazy. I asked Vladimir Putin if it was okay to make him the villain. Vlad said yes. The story brings back Yak, Yeti, Dr. Buick Riviera, Mavis Davis as well as Rasputin and Baba Yaga. It starts when an arctic research team discovers a perfectly preserved mammoth in a Siberian glacier, and Putin, ever desperate for money, chooses to auction off the steaks.
Jim Fern illustrates the first story in a photo-realistic manner. Tony Akins illustrates the second story in a super-heroic manner. And Val Mayerik illustrates the last three stories in a style that falls between. An accomplished martial artist, Val knows how to render fight scenes in a kinetic and realistic manner.
I’m working on a series of stand-alone stories geared to each artist’s style and tendencies. “Reptile Dysfunction,” about clone dinosaurs, is for that great illustrator of bizarre fauna Mark A. Nelson. “Badger Meets Madman” to be drawn, naturally, by Allred. “Cryptid” by original Badger artist Jeff Butler.
Stealing the Badger (by Darrick Patrick)
Back in elementary school, I was a fairly unhinged kid. A highly energetic child who didn't quite understand the idea of self-constraint. Always pestering the other students, being loud, doing stunts, running around, talking vulgar, bothering my teachers, partaking in occasional destructiveness, and generally making it hard for my classmates to understand what they were being taught. This got me into a lot of trouble at school, and I saw the inside of the principal's office quite a bit.
My mother Rita was living with my great-grandmother Lora Morris back in 1987 and/or 1988. So, I was in either second or third grade at this time. By this point already, my favorite things to collect and read for hours were comic books. Knowing this, Rita had a stack of comics she was going to utilize as an incentive for me to do my best to behave at school. Each day that I came home and didn't get in trouble, I could have one of those books.
Now, it was a fairly small bundle of comic books she had in this batch. Just enough to keep me entertained with the idea of not disturbing other humans for a few weeks. What those books were though was awesome. A great collection of material that I love to this day, and the first time I ever really put genuine effort into acquiring that "next one" in a series.
The first day after she told me about the comics, I came home without any problems at school. That's when she handed me The Badger #5, by Mike Baron and Bill Reinhold. The Badger is Nobert Sykes, a Vietnam war veteran who suffers from a multiple personality disorder. His main identity is "The Badger", a costumed vigilante who is a martial arts expert and can talk to animals. As the Badger, he is often arrested for punching people in the face. His other personalities include a nine-year-old girl, a homicidal maniac, a dog, a gay architect, and a black man who is unaware of the other six personalities.
Maybe not your typical reading for kids my age at that time, but I loved it. I did my best to keep my teachers happy at Grafton Kennedy Elementary School over those next couple weeks. I nailed it okay, only messing up and bringing home discipline slips a few times. The issues she had of The Badger were numbers 5 through 23, and I really wanted to read them as soon as I could. It got all bad for me though when I got halfway there.
Since I wasn't in school on the weekends, Rita didn't count those days in my quest for Badger comics. I hit a snag when I got my issue #15 on a Friday and it ended up being a two-part story that continued in #16. I couldn't believe it. I had to wait three days until I found out what happened? I couldn't wait for three whole days. That's like waiting for three months through the eyes of a person who is seven or eight years old.
That issue #16 was right there. In mom's room. Just sitting on the top of that stack in the closet. She wouldn't notice if it was gone. It's not like she's all into them like I am. Mom has left for the night. She'll be out working and partying all weekend. All I have to do is wait until grandma is in the kitchen.
Needless to say, when the time was right, I pulled up a chair so that I could reach the top shelf of that closet. I hid the book away under my shirt, slipped it into my backpack, and took it home with me that night to my grandmother Nancy's house. When I got to read The Badger #16 for the first time that evening, in my head it was the greatest thing I had ever read. I was so happy to finish the story that I had started.
A couple of days later and it's Monday. I have a good day at school. Stoked as can be to come home and get my copy of issue #17. Rita pulls the first one off the top of the pile and hands it to me. I start to run off to read it in the other room and then she tells me to wait. She grabs the book back and says, "What's this?" Turning around, she snags the whole stack out of the closet and flips through it. She then gives me the ol' Rita eye.
"Where's the other one before this?" she asked. "There was another one here." I played stupid, thumbing through the comics myself, looking at them, trying to think of something to say. "I don't know," I quietly respond. I ask her if she's sure that there is one missing. She starts to see me sweat. I'm not making eye contact. My fidgety behavior is acting up more so than usual.
"You're telling me you don't have it," Rita says, "that you didn't get in here and take it?" I tell her no, and she asks again. I say no again. She questions me again. She's staring at my face, grabbing my chin and making me look her in the eyes. This goes on until I know that she knows. And I start crying like a baby.
She adds to the tears by really grilling into me once she had me admit my guilt. The stealing of the book was one thing, but she really didn't care about that in comparison to me lying about it. As far as she was concerned, the comic book was mine. I just hadn't earned it yet. There would have been a conversation about that and a punishment, but it was nowhere near how mad I made her by telling a lie when she asked me about it.
I got tore down that day by Rita, both verbally and physically. I don't need to get into the details of all that, but she definitely made sure that I felt like a piece of shit for my actions. And of course, I didn't see a new Badger comic book anytime soon afterward. It worked out to be what it was meant to be though. I can't really think of any other time after that when I lied to Rita, for better or worse. We were always fairly straight up with each other from that point on.
This is the end of Darrick’s essay. For those interested in my novels, they’re all on Amazon. For those interested in my graphic novels: baroncomics.com
Thanks, Eric!
If you're referring to the Badger cover, that's Jeff Butler.