Rehabilitating an unusual libertarian heroine: cartoonist Peter Bagge on the life of birth control rights pioneer Margaret Sanger.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Interview

PETER BAGGE, who has drawn comics in reason for over a decade, is best known for his comic books Hate and Neat Stuff. More recently, he has taken a turn toward "graphic biography" with Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story (Drawn and Quarterly). Senior Editor Brian Doherty interviewed Bagge by phone in October.

reason: What possessed you to move into biography?

Peter Bagge: You are indirectly responsible for this path, Brian. With your book Radicals for Capitalism [2007],you talked about the three women who defined the modern libertarian movement, which is a curious irony since it almost seems like libertarianism is a boys club. I already knew too much about Ayn Rand. But the other two, Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane, I became curious and read their biographies and their novels.

Paterson was so fascinating, everything about her so out of step with the dmes. It impressed me she stuck to her ideological guns all through the New Deal era. I did a comic book bio of her for reason, which for reason was incredibly long at 12 pages. But I found it too short!

My next bio should be on Zora Neale Hurston [a black novelist of the Harlem renaissance with libertarian sympathies], and I intend to do Rose Wilder Lane. Hurston has a cult following around her. Lane, whenever I mention her name, it's "Who?" until I say she was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder [author of the Little House series]. Then it's, "Oh, is she the one they say secretly helped write her mom's books?"

I wondered how all these woman were able to live, even before the feminist movement, as freely as men did. I noticed they didn't get weighed down by pregnancy. For biological reasons women were so much more limited in what they could do. Which made me think about birth control, and when you look into that, Margaret Sanger's name kept coming up.

When you read about her, you get bombarded with so many conflicting perspectives. It's like the blind men describing the elephant. So I dug deeper and found she lived this incredibly productive, adventurous, wild life, very much the stuff of comic books! And her name and reputation are now being successfully destroyed by people on the right and left [largely over accusations of promoting birth control out of a desire for wiping out undesirable races].

Some of the accusations against her are outright lies, some distortions and taking things out of context, or just reacting to her use of the word "race." I read her book Woman and the New...