The Complete Hate, Vol. 2 by Peter Bagge

This is more or less the book that was known as Buddy Does Jersey for a decade or so, in case you have a copy of that lurking on your shelves. Otherwise, it's what it says it is: the back half of Peter Bagge's quarterly Hate comics from their run in the 1990s, collecting issues 16-30, originally published from 1994 through 1998.

Or, as the title succinctly puts it, The Complete Hate, Vol. 2. It followed, obviously, a similar Vol. 1. (There's also a third volume, collecting the '00s Hate Annual and other things; I expect to get to that in a few months.)

Hitting these stories again for the first time in a couple of decades, I'm not sure if Bagge was trying to make his main character, Buddy Bradley, somewhat more reasonable and adult - or if I've just read so many stories about him that he's starting to seem reasonable to me. But he does make some mostly smart choices in this book, though not consistently, and that stands in contrast with most of the other characters.

Actually, I might need to back that up a bit. Bagge's men make horrible decisions almost all of the time - Buddy's old Seattle friend Stinky makes the all-time winner in that category right in the middle of this book; you know it if you know the series - but his women are at least slightly better. Compare Buddy's siblings, Babs and Butch - she's a mediocre mother at best, but has built a life, holds down a serious job, and is raising two kids. But he's an anger-driven military washout drifting on the edges of criminal activity. Lisa, Buddy's long-time girlfriend, is probably the "worst" of the female characters, and, reading these stories, she seemed finely calibrated: crazier than Buddy (for all of the story-driving "women be nuts" reasons) but not nearly as crazy as Butch or Stinky or the crowd of losers on the cover. She's also explicitly "crazy" in-story - she goes to see a therapist, takes medication to calm her mood swings, and so forth; she's trying to manage her uncontrolled brain, albeit in the context of a slapstick-comedy comic.

While the first volume had stories of Buddy and his friends in Seattle, this one sees him and Lisa move back to New Jersey - first just for a visit, but they quickly move into Buddy's parents' basement, in the time-honored way of American children boomeranging back over the past few decades.

The cast is somewhat different in this book than in Vol. 1, obviously - Buddy's family (including Babs's two hellion children) is more central, and the Seattle crew (other than Lisa) turn up only at odd intervals. Important in the first half of the book is Jay, yet another old stoner/loser friend of Buddy's, who has something like a career finding collectables and jobbing them out. The two decide to go into business together, with a storefront (I think in Paterson) run mostly by Buddy to sell the records, toys, and other pop ephemera, and Jay on the road gathering more crap most of the time.

I don't think it was clear in the first volume how quickly time was passing, but it mostly follows the calendar in this book: these stories cover roughly four years in the lives of these people. I could throw in some platitude about the slacker/loser lifestyle getting less appealing the older you get, but look at that cover. Look at those guys. Do you think they have that level of self-awareness? No. They do not. Buddy does, intermittently, but none of his "friends" do.

Each issue has one story, of twenty-some pages. Plots tend to be loose and rambling; Buddy is central (and Lisa only slightly less so), but he's not a driven person, to be polite about it. In the standard Hate manner, there's a lot of drinking, a lot of people yelling at each other (and sometimes stomping off afterward, and very occasionally turning to fisticuffs), and a certain amount of often-regrettable sex (almost always involving Buddy, though we assume other characters are getting their own legs over here and there). In between, Buddy runs his business with Jay, has various family conflicts - actually, that sentence roughly describes two-thirds of the plot of this era of Hate. To cover all of it: Jay-Buddy business issues (with some ancillary druggy-buddy problems), Bradley family drama, and Buddy-Lisa relationship problems. The three strands intertwine, of course: Buddy's central to all of them, and, even if he's as stable as a character in Hate gets, that's not particularly stable.

Is it weird to say that Bagge's characterization got deeper in this era? Many of the secondary characters are still one-note weirdoes, but Buddy and Lisa are complicated people who, at least some of the time, are trying to do better - and that's fairly new in this series. They'll never do that consistently, or Bagge would have no story material, but at least they're trying.

The art, by Bagge with usually Jim Blanchard inking (and occasionally a vaguer credit that may mean Blanchard did backgrounds or more than just inks) is in Bagge's mature style, with cartoony energy that looks borderline realistic a lot of the time but descends into rubber-hose lunacy for moment of high emotion. (Anger. I mean anger, almost all of the time. Hate was well-named.)

This era of Hate is an odd soap-opera of anger and family dysfunction, small-business woes and relationship drama, all set in a reasonably well-observed suburban New Jersey of the time. I think it's one of those comics that appeals to men vastly more than women, since the mindset is so purely and unquestioningly boyish, but Bagge is a fun cartoonist who creates interesting situation, does strong dialogue, and knows his strengths.