Buddy Does Seattle

The Harvey Award-winning cartoonist Peter Bagge remains one of the comics' industry's great crossover successes of the past decade, having sold more comics than any underground cartoonist through the 1990s to the present. After editing R. Crumb's Weirdo magazine in the mid-'80s and then creating the Bradley family within the pages his first comic book series, "Neat Stuff. Bagge decided to take the Bradleys' alienated and pessimistic teenage son, Buddy, and move him to Seattle (where Bagge lived) to star in a new series called "Hate. The rest is comic book history. "Hate became the best-selling "alternative" comic book of the 1990s at the same time that Seattle found itself in the eye of a media hurricane. With its satirical depiction of twentysomething life in Seattle, "Hate became one of the defining voices of not only the Seattle "grunge" scene, but all of Generation X nationwide (and has been spotted in many films through the years, from Larry Clark's "Kids to John Waters' "Pecker), In addition, critics hailed it for its brilliant characterization. "The Seattle Weekly wrote, "20 years from now, when people wonder what it was like to be young in 1990's Seattle, the only record we'll have is Peter Bagge's "Hate." For 15 issues, the rock 'n' roll emanating from the damp garages of the Pacific Northwest came to life in glorious black-and-white in the pages of "Hate. Bagge more or less cemented his association with the subculture in 1992 when he devoted two issues of "Hate to a story where Buddy Bradley manages his best pal Stinky's grunge band, Leonard and the Love Gods, whose original lineup included three guys named Kurt. "Buddy Does Seattle collects the entire Seattle arc from thepages of "Hate; this is the first time the entire saga has appeared under one cover. Bagge's characters are some of the most fully-realized in comics--Buddy, the slacker antihero, Valerie, Buddy's Prozac-normalized ex, Lisa, his masochistic, worm-eating latest flame, Stinky, his selfish, venereal-warted roommate, and George Cecil Hamilton III, the resident "intellectual," who sits in his room scribbling depressive arcana into his notebook--they display their emotions so openly, so helplessly, so graphically, and with such precision as they attempt to negotiate the ragged terrain of early adulthood that it would all be rather horrifying if it weren't such a riot. Bagge's cartooning aids the cause, with one of the most idiosyncratic and inspiredly elastic and cartoony drawing styles in comics history.