The cartoonist's 13-year run at Fantagraphics is gathered chronologically for the first time, with a new introduction from Roberta Gregory and an afterword from critic Helen Chazen.
Fantagraphics has shared with AWN an exclusive cover and 4-page excerpt from "Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken," on sale now - the first chronological collection of Roberta Gregory's "Naughty Bits," with exclusive commentary from Gregory on the pages below.
Animation readers know Midge McCracken by her other name. As Bitchy Bitch she got off the page and onto television twice, both times at Oxygen: first in the Bitchy Bits shorts that ran inside the network's animated anthology X-Chromosome beginning in 2001, then in Life's a Bitch, the animated series that aired on Oxygen in the U.S. and The Comedy Network in Canada across 2003 and 2004. She ran as a syndicated strip as well.
"Naughty Bits" ran 40 issues at Fantagraphics from March 1991 to July 2004, which they note as the longest-running solo comic title by a woman creator. "Bitchy!" puts the Midge stories in chronological order for the first time - they were not written that way - and adds a new introduction by Gregory and an afterword by comics critic Helen Chazen.
Midge is the point, and Midge is a problem. She is bitter, judgmental, the office sourpuss everyone avoids, and her inner monologue is relentlessly negative. Fantagraphics does not soften her: she can be "shockingly nasty, hateful and even racist." The stories run from a traumatic childhood through an awful adolescence into an embittered middle age, and the promise the publisher makes is that the answer to how a person ends up like this is, seriously, funny. Meet the most unlikable character you will ever love.
The excerpt comes from "Bitchy Bitch: True Love's Weight." Gregory shared with AWN, "Midge enjoys an office romance amidst the uncertainty of the Y2K era. Meanwhile, her well-intentioned but equally clueless co-worker, Marcie, is reunited with a nice guy from her past...if she'd only get past her delusions. Born-again Marcie and New Age Sylvia play significant roles in Midge's work life, a microcosm of the world in general complete with titanic spiritual conflicts."
"Bitchy's story unfolds, age by age, era by era, not necessarily in the order in which they were created," Gregory writes in her introduction. "Continuity was not my first thought as I churned out issue after issue [but] these stories do seem to add up to a comprehensive narrative of sorts. And, our deeply flawed Midge does gain insight and achieve some measure of enlightenment in her journey through these pages. Sort of."
Chazen makes a larger claim for what the reordering does. "This collected life story of Bitchy Bitch was never told in the pages of 'Naughty Bits' - we are reading it for the first time now," she writes in the afterword. "Not only through arrangement but the very act of compilation, the story of Midge McCracken is changed forever, simply because it is, in fact, a story."
"Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken" is on sale now from Fantagraphics.
Bitchy!: The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken
Cartoonist: Roberta Gregory
Introduction: Roberta Gregory
Afterword: Helen Chazen
Publisher: Fantagraphics
On-sale: Now
Source: Fantagraphics
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
