Comics Book of the Week

Hate Annual #9 (Fantagraphics)

It is my considered opinion that, with his overstuffed anthologies Buddy Does Seattle and Buddy Does Jersey—Peter Bagge wrote the great American novel. Those books compile eight years of adventures of slacker-era everyman Buddy Bradley, as issued bi-monthly or so in Bagge’s own comic book Hate. The Buddy Bradley stories hang together so well in long form, forming such an indelible and rich portrait of life in the 1990s, that Bagge’s pulling back his output to a single Hate Annual per year since 2001 seems sad.

If it weren’t so dead-on and funny. And, much as I hate to say it, appropriate to the storyline. Buddy Bradley’s settled down. He’s married with a kid. He’s found an identity that suits him—and that involves wearing a captain’s hat and an eye patch, a far cry from his youth when he was indistinguishable from millions of other plaid-shirted long-haired 20somethings. In the earlier Buddy Bradley escapades, whole issues could be taken up with the aftermath of a bad date. Middle-age isn’t as spontaneous or combustible. Bagge perceives this and doles out the action at the proper pace, however annoying that might be to readers who crave more frequent episodes.

Hate Annual #9 involves that old novelistic trope of watching one’s parents grow old and having to consider putting them in a nursing home. Bagge expands the premise considerably. For starters, the parents are Buddy’s wife Lisa’s parents, and Buddy’s never even met them. The story involves a family trip and lots of unsavory supporting characters. In presenting Buddy Bradley as a relatively responsible (or at the very least, self-aware) adult, the 24-page multi-chapter adventure becomes as much about juvenility as senility, with Buddy in the deep center.

So colorful it adds to the creepiness of some of the characters, this is yet another burst of brilliance from a writer/artist who uses grotesque cartoons as ways to paint empathetic portraits of modern life. We may continue to, as the comics’ old promo stickers used to say, “Love Hate”—while hating to wait a whole year between installments.