Hate Revisited #2, by Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge is on my shortlist of my favorite cartoonists, and Hate is perhaps my favorite comics series of all time. Since ending the series in 1998, he's periodically returned to these characters in roughly real time, as the series leads Buddy and Lisa had a kid. Bagge has said that Buddy Bradley is a version of him, approximately ten years in the past, so it's been interesting to see him move Buddy into a weird kind of adulthood. Hate was the quintessential Gen-X slacker comic in its day, featuring a rotating cast of lunatics in Seattle right around the time that grunge became a dominant aesthetic. After a certain point midway through the series, Bagge moved Buddy and the cast back to his native New Jersey, where he had to try to figure out what to do with his life instead of just drifting. There was always a restlessness to what Bagge was doing in this series; he could have milked the Seattle scene a lot longer than he did, for example. 

Bagge has done a lot of work since Hate ended, including several series with DC, biographies with Drawn & Quarterly, and tons of political commentary and history. (Founding Fathers Funnies is a particular favorite of mine, as Bagge hilariously cuts through a lot of bullshit in a way that matches the irreverence of Hate at its height.) Hate's always been there, however, and the new Hate Revisted! series is a blend of modern-day Buddy & Lisa (and their now-adult weirdo son Harold) and flashbacks to Seattle and even high school Buddy in New Jersey. 

Looking at issue #2, Bagge returns to perhaps his most memorable character, Leonard "Stinky" Brown. Bagge's perspective on Stinky now from Buddy's point of view is interesting. On the one hand, this delusional loser has an undeniable charisma and almost a sweetness to him, but he's also the kind of loose cannon that as Buddy describes "more often than not, they don't grow up...and that 'charm' wears off fast..They become more of a liability." For Buddy, being around Stinky was a fun adventure, because Stinky had no boundaries and no limits. He was totally unpredictable and capricious, and the first story serves as their first meeting. In the course of the story, Stinky calls in a bomb threat to set up a drug deal, steals two different vehicles, shoplifts half of a record store, and gets stabbed trying to rob someone at knifepoint. But he introduces Buddy to St. Mark's Place, they have a crazy adventure, and Stinky represents this tantalizing sense that anything is possible in an otherwise stultifyingly dull suburban environment. Buddy wanted someone to bring him out of his more cautious tendencies, and Bagge shows how easy it was for Buddy to want to fall in with Stinky.

Of course, the next story sees Buddy in the present day, worried about his son falling in with a Stinky-like character nicknamed "Spam." Spam lives in a tent in a homeless camp, jokes about stealing Buddy's propane, and wants to buy land with Buddy's son Harold. Buddy immediately suspects that he's going to get Harold in trouble the way that Stinky ultimately did. Here, Bagge delves back into one of the more jaw-dropping scenes in Hate: Stinky's accidentally (?) killing himself with a handgun in front of Buddy's younger brother Butch. Even after Stinky's death, shenanigans occurred, as Buddy had to help move Stinky's body multiple times. The entire issue revolves around Stinky, as there are flashbacks to Buddy's old housemates Val and George dealing with him.

This wasn't just a memory lane exercise for Bagge; by centering the story around Stinky, he was able to get at the heart of what made him so appealing and repulsive at the same time. Stealing and lying came as easily to him as breathing, and he never once thought about the consequences of any of his actions. Buddy and Lisa have always been a mix of reactive and impulsive in their actions, and Bagge shows how this hasn't changed even as they've grown older. Buddy's plan to rein in Harold is predictably hair-brained, and Lisa's eventual reaction ("grounding" their adult son) points out her own impulsiveness AND reactiveness. 

Bagge did the flashback stories in black & white and the present-day stories in color. The inking in some of these stories was pretty rough, especially the color sections.  The whole issue has several mistakes, like a misnumbered page and a misspelling, which makes it feel that any editing done here was cursory at best. Still, even if this isn't Bagge's crispest work, his use of body language and the way he arranges particular sets of characters is unlike any other artist. There are many artists who have imitated Bagge's rubbery character design and frantic character expressions, and Bagge's comedic dynamism is as sharp as ever.

Tanya Dorph-Mankey's Count The Lights Preview

Pro wrestling, at its essence, is a kind of carnival theater improv based heavily on audience reactions. Every emotion must be over the top to reach the person sitting in the last row. Every aspect of the story should be told in the ring itself, through the choreographed violence. There's a reason why so many former theater kids become wrestlers these days; the line between burlesque, drag, musical theater, and wrestling is a decidedly thin one. In a musical, a character is moved to break out into song as a reaction a feeling so strong that conventional speech cannot contain; in wrestling, the same is true, except emotion is expressed in violence. 

Cartoonist Tanya Dorph-Mankey understands all of this, and in her preview of her future graphic novel Count The Lights, she immediately introduces us to her principal characters through what else--their first match together. The twist is that this story is also a queer romance, and wrestling has always had a homoerotic subtext (or these days, just plain text) in the most memorable of its feuds. Dorph-Mankey simply takes this out into the open in a classic enemies-to-lovers storyline that has a number of twists and turns. (Full disclosure: I've helped her edit some of this story.)

This preview introduces heel wrestler Alan Jacobs, a member of a faction simply dubbed "Violence." He's an intense prick who's out to prove himself, and he goes up against a funny slacker of a wrestler named Ryan Roberts, who "absolutely hates to put in any effort." His antics are anathema to a sneering heel like Jacobs, as Dorph-Mankey keeps the action of the choreographed matches "kayfabe," meaning that she suspends the disbelief that the wrestlers project toward the audience. Even after Jacobs predictably wins, Roberts notes that it was a good match because it got a big crowd reaction, and then he flirts a little with a fuming Jacobs.

Fans of wrestling will enjoy a number of different easter eggs in here, but what makes the comic compelling is Dorph-Mankey's ability to tell a story through action and impact. She adds an almost expressionist set of backgrounds for hard-hitting sequences, and her understanding of anatomy and the relationship of bodies in space is absolutely crucial in adding stakes for the characters and an emotional connection for the readers. In a story that revolves around a romance, establishing the importance of gesture and body language (albeit in a totally over-the-top manner) early on propels the character narrative without wasting any time.