Hate Annual 9

This is, as expected, a total delight from start to finish. Nearly all of it, 24 pages, is his first substantial new Buddy Bradley story in years. Buddy is now married to Lisa, with a son and a junkyard business in partnership with Jay, also now married. Buddy also has an eyepatch, which migrates from eye to eye in this, and even vanishes in one panel. The story introduces his new life, then focusses on a visit to Lisa’s completely fucked-up family – religious mother, possibly senile dad, out of control cousin, self-righteous foster brother.

I guess we think of Bagge’s greatness as being a lot to do with his wild cartooning, his Wolvertonesque exaggeration of emotion through crazily distorted bodies and faces, which we see a bit of on the cover, showing Lisa being sucked into hell, but other than this symbolic image, it’s all pretty restrained inside (though there are still some huge toothy mouths and bug eyes here and there), focussing on pretty realistic relationships, characters rapidly sketched in with genuine subtlety and depth, and big emotional charges all over the place. He’s always been excellent at this, but obviously has tended to excess in much of his past work, but nothing in this really stretches ordinary experience – I have met people like these, including in my own family. What it does is create the characters in situations in ways that work and carry a genuine power.

I guess I miss the extreme humour a little, but the more muted visual palette is very expressive anyway, handling a big range of emotions with power and precision and nuance, which is a good match for the writing. This strikes me as an excellent domestic short story, a work with real depth and substance. It’s also funny – obviously his work always looks that way, and the characters are often extreme enough to amuse as well as appal.

There are a few extra pages: some really funny single-panel cartoons about America currently, especially the terrorist paranoia, and, oddly, a back page about Belgium. These are a very welcome bonus, but really it’s the full-length Buddy Bradley story that makes this something I would recommend unreservedly to anyone, though I imagine most people reading this will have made up their minds about Bagge’s work long ago – hopefully that he is great and always worth buying.