Presenting The Greatest News In The Long Great History Of Great News

You heard it here third (after Facebook, via Fantagraphics website). FOX network has just made a development deal with Peter Bagge to script a pilot for his famous long-running comic book series The Bradleys to carry as an animated prime time television program.

The Bradleys technically started their long and wacky history in Bagge's collected mishmash of sketches called Neat Stuff, which began in the early 80's, and spun off The Bradley's - the dysfunctional family from suburban New Jersey starring Bagge's teenage alter-ego Buddy Bradley, his younger sister Babs and baby brother Butch, and also featuring his grouchy couch-potato dad Brad and church-going dipsomaniac mom Betty -- all loosely based on Bagge's own family as he was growing up. Although we can all only hope it was never this horrifically trauamtic.

An entire day's worth of squabbling could take up a whole comic book, most of which centers around the volatile family and the formidable tempers rampant in their DNA. Brad might explode at Betty for not having dinner on the table when he wants it, and a fed-up Betty might throw his plate across the kitchen and wind up in the front yard, ensconced on a lawn chair with a bottle of booze "on strike" (which provokes the neighbors to shake their heads and mutter "There go those Bradleys again.") Naive little Butch, war-obsessed and a chip on his scrawny shoulder, might be persuaded to jump off the roof of the house and break his legs because his brother convinced him that he had super powers, while bratty, self-absorbed Babs runs through the house or yard at the slightest provocation screaming to all who will hear her "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF MEEE!", which over the years has practically become her mantra. And star of the show Buddy, surly acne-scarred music geek and all-around asshole of the family (which is saying a lot) often finds himself in the middle of all the drama, even though most of the time he goes out of his way to stay out of everybody's way, preferring the solace of his bedroom, his headphones, and his beloved old 1960's garage rock records, all the better to drown out the constant family caterwauling.

Sounds like every other dysfunctional family sitcom since Married... With Children, doesn't it? Maybe, and yet maybe not. And this is what concerns me about making The Bradleys into a television series. While dysfunctional families are hardly new material, it was Bagge's knack for nuance and character development that really fleshed out the family dynamic. How a typical scene where Babs and Betty have a perfectly civil conversation at the dinner table erupting into a hair-pulling slap-fight of nuclear proportions in the front yard isn't so much the slapschticky acts themselves but how they get there. And Bagge gets there with the kind of snappy dialogue and slow build to madness that he's famous for. And for what I fear may not translate into a half-hour animated series. The humor of having Buddy's face frozen with vibrating "surprise lines" like the one in the last panel above could potentially be lost in animation where you can't linger on a joke or a frame to soak up all its comedy potential.

Either way, I'm extremely excited for Peter Bagge, whose new book Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me I touched on a little while back. I've been following Bagge since Neat Stuff was reprinted in the early 90's, as well as his even more famous series Hate, which chronicles the life of Buddy Bradley in his twenties and living in Seattle (as far away as he could get from New Jersey and the family) during the height of the grunge rock era. Bagge's work can also be seen often monthly in MAD magazine and weekly in the Weekly World News, so the man is really putting his name out there.

I wish you love and luck, "Pee Bagge". I'll be watching.