Get ready for an older, more gentle Buddy Bradley in HATE Revisited #1

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.

by Matthew Amuso. HATE is back!

After chronicling the perpetually aggravated Buddy Bradley’s life for over three decades, Peter Bagge’s hilarious and uncomfortably relatable alternative comics opus wrapped up its run in 2011. For HATE newcomers, some background: Buddy first hit the scene in the ’80s as a New Jersey teenager in the anthology Neat Stuff, and when Bagge launched HATE in 1990, Buddy was now living the low life as a twentysomething in Seattle. Eventually, Buddy moved back in with his malfunctioning Jersey family, slowly and painfully grew from slacker to business owner, and settled down with his longtime girlfriend, Lisa.

Bagge’s art evolved with Buddy, moving from crosshatched black-and-white to solid lines and bold colors. He possessed an uncanny ability to meld rubbery, Bob Clampett-esque zaniness with grimy naturalism, and as a writer, he provided an acerbic and down-to-earth perspective on the absurdities of everyday life. The cadence was caustic; Buddy and his associates mocked and degraded one another with abandon when they weren’t busy humiliating themselves. However, no matter how lacerating it could be or how wrong-headed its characters were, HATE always felt honest, even empathetic, in its relentless cataloging of ordinary people’s idiosyncratic stupidity.

HATE Revisited #1 consists of several vignettes, bouncing between Buddy’s early days in Seattle and his life outside the city with his family. So what does world-class misanthrope Buddy Bradley make of our ever-more fractious and absurd modern world? Not much: Trump’s a dick, super-woke people are irritating, and working from home is (wait for it…) easy. Buddy, who once skewered bohemia and suburbia with equal fervor, whose annoyance with the world boiled over into maniacal fits of rage, now seems pretty chill. His apathy has almost entirely overtaken his anger.

Little seems to have happened to Buddy and Lisa since we last saw them. Their financial status appears more stable, but that’s it. Anyone hoping to see the Bradleys deal with a twentysomething son as entertainingly irresponsible as they were will be let down. Harold Bradley lives at home, works in construction, and seems just as even-tempered as his parents were self-destructive. Bagge admits that HATE is partly autobiographical, so this may reflect his relationship with his own child, but it doesn’t make for interesting comics.

This isn’t to say that Hate Revisited is entirely uninteresting — there is some neat stuff on these pages. We witness Buddy’s first encounters with Lisa and his old roommate George, drawn in a facsimile of Bagge’s early black-and-white style, while in the present, Buddy and Lisa go to dinner with George and his current wife/Buddy’s ex-girlfriend Valerie. Bagge’s insight into the foibles of human nature is still intact and still funny, especially in the flashbacks. The best bit is when young Buddy and Lisa are immediately aroused by each other’s glaring personality defects rather than despite them. It’s a true-to-life portrait of hormonal folly, and it probably explains how they wound up happily married.

But when the mystery of what happened to Buddy’s former best pal, Stinky, comes up, the beat falls a bit flat. It’s a mystery Buddy knows the answer to — if the truth got out, it could ruin the life he’s built — but the real danger of exposing his secret isn’t apparent, so it doesn’t add much drama or humor. And unfortunately, Bagge’s art on this issue isn’t what it used to be. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t pack the deranged punch of his best work. It’s still bouncy and innately readable, but much of the comic exaggeration is gone. At one point, Buddy reflects on how odd it is that he used to get into fistfights constantly, but none of that violence had any lasting effect on him. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of youthful chaos that Bagge’s new HATE is missing.

HATE Revisited feels like an aging rock band on a reunion tour; it’s a nice time for the die-hards and great for the artist’s bank account, but it won’t set the world on fire. Hopefully, as this mini-series continues (three issues remain) and more skeletons pop out of Buddy’s closet, we’ll see a semblance of that flame rekindled. But sometimes, growing up means losing the passion for hating things that we had when we were young.

6 / 10

HATE Revisited is in stores now. To snag a copy of your own, click this.

Fantagraphics Press / $4.99
Written and drawn by Peter Bagge.

Check out this 5-page preview of HATE Revisited #1, courtesy of Fantagraphics Press: