Hate

AUTHOR: Bagge, Peter

ARTIST: Peter Bagge (illustrator); Jim Blanchard (inker); Eric Reynolds (inker); Jeff Johnson (colorist); Mary Woodring (colorist)

PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1990-1998

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1993-2001

Publication History

Hate began as a black-and-white comic book written and drawn by Peter Bagge and published by Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books. In his previous series for the same publisher, the magazine-format Neat Stuff (1985-1990), Bagge had chronicled the angst-ridden adventures of the Bradley family, with teenage son Buddy as his semiautobiographical hero. Having concluded Neat Stuff, Bagge wanted to launch a new series with the look and feel of 1960’s underground comics that would focus on a single character in a standard-sized comic book format. Initially considering titles such as Hey, Buddy and The Adventures of Buddy Bradley, Bagge provisionally titled the series Hate, and the name stuck.

Hate picks up Buddy’s story in Seattle as a twentysomething slacker. Bagge also used the series as an opportunity to provide an outlet for up-and-coming alternative comic book creators by including their work as backup features. Beginning with issue 16, Bagge introduced color and employed an inker, Jim Blanchard, to streamline his artistic style, as the story line shifted from Seattle to New Jersey, Buddy’s home state. Hate ran for thirty issues, and the Buddy Bradley material was later reprinted in a series of six trade paperback collections as well as two digest-sized editions, all published by Fantagraphics Books.

Plot

Hate follows the trials and tribulations of hard-drinking, cynical Buddy Bradley as he wanders aimlessly through life from one coast to the other, has a variety of sexual and other misadventures, and occasionally searches for love, or at least some small measure of happiness. In the first half of the series, Buddy is living in Seattle, the epicenter of a growing cultural movement of the early 1990’s in the United States. Readers first meet Buddy as he speaks to them and gives them a tour of his apartment, which he shares with his scheming friend Stinky and their reclusive roommate George.

Buddy begins a relationship with the stuck-up, sex-obsessed Val, a friend of his former girlfriend Lisa. Their attempts at romance are often thwarted by interference from Buddy’s friends, and Buddy refuses to allow Val to move in with him. Buddy’s brother, Butch, a racist Navy washout, visits and causes chaos, while his sister, Babs, suffers as a single mom with two hellish children and a sleazy, deadbeat former husband named Joel.

At the start of the series, Buddy is working at a used bookstore. He later agrees to co-manage a grunge band with Stinky, but he soon gives it up. Buddy reluctantly gets Lisa a job at the bookstore and slowly resumes a relationship with her. George moves in with a wealthy female benefactor and publishes a “zine” that paints an unflattering portrait of Buddy.

Val reenters Buddy’s life, having gathered her own bizarre collection of friends. Stinky returns from the road after the band falls apart. Soon, everyone has converged at Buddy’s place and wants to move in, leaving Buddy on the couch and ultimately prompting him to leave Seattle.

Buddy and Lisa head to his parents’ home in New Jersey for the second half of the series. Adjusting to suburban life is difficult, as is dealing with Buddy’s dotty mother and abrasive, often-ill father. Buddy and his old friend Jay reconnect and open a collectibles store together, B and J’s Collector’s Emporium, while Lisa settles into domestic life with the help of Buddy’s mother. Buddy buys a distinctive monster truck with tiny back wheels and dubs it the “Poliomobile.”

Jay’s heroin addiction and tendency to use the store funds for drugs put him at odds with Buddy, while the family struggles with traditional gender roles as the Bradley men face off against Lisa and the Bradley women. Lisa grows attached to Buddy’s father, and his sudden death in a traffic accident sends her into another period of depression and detachment. She finds solace in Joel’s arms and begins an affair with him. Meanwhile, Buddy finds himself attracted to a colleague’s wife, a wholesome girl named Doris.

Lisa’s depression leads her to therapy and Prozac. When she disappears, Buddy tracks her down in New York, where she has shaved her head and moved in with her Goth punk friend Elizabeth. As Buddy’s mother becomes more involved with a man named George and plans to sell the house, Buddy’s local friends and a newly arrived Stinky, now working a postal route with an Uzi hidden in his truck, contemplate turning the suburban location into a crack house. When Butch joins Stinky on a deserted beach to shoot guns, Stinky blows his own brains out, leaving Butch traumatized and everyone wondering whether Stinky intended to commit suicide or simply made a drunken mistake. They leave Stinky buried in an unmarked grave and agree never to tell anyone.

Butch starts working at Buddy’s store as Buddy begins a relationship with an assertive woman named Sally. He also sees an Asian American woman named Nicole, but he is not happy with either relationship.

As the series ends, Buddy’s mother moves to Florida with her new boyfriend; Babs reunites with Joel; Val and Buddy’s former roommate George have become a couple; and Sally becomes extremely upset when she discovers that Buddy has gotten back together with Lisa, who has left Elizabeth in New York. Sally winds up with Butch as Buddy proposes to Lisa, who is pregnant with his baby. The series closes as the couple plans its future as a new family.

Volumes

•Hey, Buddy (1993). Collects issues 1-5. Buddy Bradley lives in Seattle, surrounded by a grotesque collection of friends, acquaintances, and losers. He begins dating a stuck-up rich girl named Val, but complications ensue.

•Buddy the Dreamer (1994). Collects issues 6-10. Buddy’s friend Stinky becomes a rock-star sensation, while Buddy finds himself drawn into a depressing relationship with his former girlfriend Lisa.

•Fun with Buddy and Lisa (1995). Collects issues 11-15. As tensions mount in Seattle, Buddy and Lisa decide to abandon their friends and start their lives over on the East Coast.

•Buddy Go Home! (1997). Collects issues 16-20. Buddy embarks on a career as a collectibles-store manager, as he and Lisa adjust to life in a New Jersey suburb with Buddy’s bizarre family.

•Buddy’s Got Three Moms! (1999). Collects issues 21-25. After the death of Buddy’s father, Buddy faces suburban life surrounded by three domineering women, until Lisa decides to flee and significantly alters her lifestyle.

•Buddy Bites the Bullet! (2001). Collects issues 26-30. Stinky commits suicide, sending shock waves through Buddy’s circle of friends. Everyone is facing the realities of adulthood, and Buddy and Lisa decide to get married.

Characters

•Harold William Bradley, Jr., a.k.a. Buddy, the protagonist, is a twentysomething cynic with a large nose and shaggy black hair that often obscures his eyes. Paradoxically, he has little self-esteem but thinks he is right about everything. He professes to be a dedicated bachelor but longs for love.

•Lisa Leavenworth is Buddy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend and, by the end of the series, the mother of his child. She is a fiery redhead with a variety of psychological problems, including self-hatred, suicidal tendencies, and a predisposition to bad hygiene.

•Leonard “Stinky” Brown is Buddy’s roommate, modeled on singer Iggy Pop. He is lanky, has a tuft of blond hair, wears round sunglasses, has personal-hygiene issues, and is addicted to drugs and hard living. He is constantly concocting elaborate get-rich schemes that inevitably fail.

•Jay, Buddy’s friend and business partner, is a tall, thin thirty-six-year-old with short hair and a crooked nose. He is a heroin addict and is prone to taking advantage of the business by lifting money for his own use.

•Valerie “Val” Russo is a trendy brunet who is always dressed stylishly and exerts emotional control over her boyfriends and social circle. She enjoys violent sex in odd places, perhaps as a reaction to her strict, wealthy upbringing.

•George Cecil Hamilton III is one of Buddy’s roommates, an African American geek with a penchant for conspiracy theories, social isolation, and self-publishing zines. By the end of the series, he has begun a relationship with Val, despite his apparent lack of interest in or understanding of women.

•Jimmy Foley is Buddy’s New Jersey neighbor, a blond stoner who is on parole and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He sits around all day playing video games and coming up with often-illegal schemes for making money.

•Butch Bradley is Buddy’s younger brother, a hulking young man with a crew cut, a violent streak, and a host of racist and fascist beliefs. He had some Navy experience, but now hangs out with Buddy’s friend Jimmy until finally finding work at Buddy’s collectibles store.

•Babs Bradley is Buddy’s blond sister, a heavy drinker and the long-suffering mother of two undisciplined children, Tyler and Alexis. She turns to religion after the departure of her husband, Joel, with whom she eventually reunites.

•Betty Bradley, Buddy’s mother, has perfectly coiffed dark hair. Although overbearing and opinionated, she is resigned to her domestic role. Like everyone else in the family, she drinks heavily. After the death of Buddy’s father, she begins the next chapter in her life by moving away with her new boyfriend.

•Brad Bradley, Buddy’s father, is a gruff old man with glasses and little hair. Certain that he is dying most of the time, he sleeps often and expects the rest of the family to cater to him. He dies suddenly when hit by a truck while out on a stroll.

•Joel is a sleazy, long-nosed lecher who is Babs’s former husband and the father of her two children. He has a short affair with Lisa but goes back to Babs.

•Tom Kaufman is an old friend of Buddy, a mustached blond who becomes a cop with a pleasant, normal home life.

•Yahtzi Murphy is a violent, stringy-haired bootlegger who sells illegal video tapes and torments Buddy and Stinky.

•Elizabeth Mizell is a Jewish Goth punk with piercings and purple hair. She has no respect for Buddy and tries to protect Lisa from him. While Lisa is living with her in New York, the two have an occasionally sexual relationship.

Artistic Style

One of the most distinctive elements of Hate is Bagge’s extraordinarily exaggerated drawing style, influenced by 1960’s underground comics creators such as Robert Crumb and by some Japanese manga traditions. Bagge’s spaghetti-limbed funhouse figures capture the chaotic mood of their off-kilter lives and their resilience in the face of daily setbacks and tragedies. When experiencing extreme emotions, especially rage, Bagge’s already-grotesque characters often transform into even more abstract distortions of humanity that only vaguely resemble their usual selves, with enormous faces eclipsing the rest of their bodies and twisting into nightmarish shapes.

The muddy, manic dirtiness of the imagery during the series’ black-and-white period, with its cluttered, heavily shadowed settings and layouts, gives way after issue 16 to a sharper, more streamlined style, thanks to the presence of inker Blanchard and Bagge’s desire to tone down his own artwork and brighten the mood of the series. Although expressive distortion still happens in the title’s latter half, there is a much smoother delineation overall, with more fluid lines and the addition of full color. The series settles into a relatively consistent, cartoonlike approach for the remainder of its run that slightly obscures its grungy, “comix”-inspired origins.

Themes

Throughout the series’ thirty-issue run, Bagge uses Buddy Bradley to embody much of the alienation and disenfranchisement he experienced as a white, suburban young adult. Buddy is confused and consumed by paranoia, racist and misogynistic opinions, and a tendency toward self-destructive behavior in the forms of drug and alcohol abuse and torturous romantic relationships. While not all of the unsavory aspects of Buddy’s character can or should be attributed to the author, clearly Bagge feels that a specific type of young, lower- to middle-class Caucasian American in the early 1990’s faced challenges that too often stemmed from within as much as from the world without.

The rapidly changing world serves as another target for Bagge’s acerbic wit, with the expansion of homogenous franchised consumerism and the advent of the Internet as a retreat for the lonely and obsessed also coming under fire. Buddy’s devotion to right-wing radio and rampant use of empty sex, drinking, and drugs as an escape from the monotony of a meaningless existence and Lisa’s frequent psychotic breaks and periods of depressive self-loathing are all symptoms of what Bagge sees as an utter breakdown of culture at the end of the twentieth century.

Bagge depicts sex itself as comical and ugly and romance as a gender game that masks more basic, primal desires. His choice for Lisa’s last name, Leavenworth, suggests that he might be equating some relationships with a kind of spiritual incarceration. That even death, often shown as sudden and senseless, is shaken off by his characters with so little emotional response is indicative of their detachment from reality and their own feelings.

The series’ sarcastic finale, in which Buddy and Lisa decide to deal with her pregnancy by getting married because it just seems like the thing to do, neatly subverts the Hollywood-style happy ending upon which it plays. Rather than deal with all of their personal and shared issues, Buddy and Lisa are going through the motions, doing what society expects. Despite Bagge’s cynical tone, however, it is possible that Buddy and Lisa will find a kind of happiness with their own crazy adaptation of the American Dream.

Impact

Bagge’s work is often credited as helping to define the “grunge” movement of the early 1990’s, a phenomenon of popular culture that grew out of the alternative rock scene in the Pacific Northwest and included the rise of bands such as Nirvana to the national stage. The two-part story “Follow That Dream” in issues 8 and 9, in which Buddy becomes co-manager of a band that eventually employs his friend Stinky as lead singer, became one of the series’ most popular tales, summing up much of Bagge’s thoughts on the rock-music scene in Seattle and the clash between creative integrity, corrupt business practices, and celebrity idolatry. Issue 12 features a story called “Collector’s Scum!” that allows Bagge to comment on the comic book collecting world and the American obsession with mindless consumption.

The series gained further notoriety with a sudden, shocking plot twist in its final issues, in which Stinky commits suicide in front of Butch. The incident is enveloped in Bagge’s usual dark humor, but Stinky’s motivations are kept intentionally unclear. The death of Stinky not only continues to haunt Buddy and Butch for the rest of the series but also remained a topic of discussion in the comics press for many months.

Further Reading

Bagge, Peter. The Bradleys (2004).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me, and Other Astute Observations (2009).

Clowes, Dan. Eightball (1989-2001).

Bibliography

Moffett, Matthew L. “Buddy Does Seattle.” School Library Journal 51, no. 9 (September, 2005): 242.

Nashawaty, Chris. “Comix Trip.” Entertainment Weekly 239 (September, 1994): 47.

True, Everett. Introduction to Buddy Does Seattle, by Peter Bagge. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2005.