When the same thing gets mentioned twice in your RSS aggregator, it deserves seeking out.
BoingBoing had this:
And local hero Mike Whybark opines:
touche pas le Ballard Bitter:
I moved to Seattle in 1990, the year Pete Bagge and Fanatgraphics started publishing “Hate,” one of the all-time record holders for right-place, right-time synchronicity. I bought nearly every issue at the late, lamented Fallout Records and Comics and read them, snickering, on the way up the hill to my home, wondering where the insane parties, nut-case postadolescents, and drunken debauchery was. Pete inflicted this on his hapless alter ego, Buddy Bradley with such verve and accuracy that I passed the decade of the 1990s convinced that these activities existed no only in my past, Pete’s past, and the comic book, but also in the streets and shared-unit rental homes of Seattle.
A few years older and wise, I know now that actually, everyone who moved here between 1990 and 1998 moved here partailly beacuse they love the reserved social expressions that characterize interactions here, and in fact, although Pete and I lived the experiences so memorably depicted in “Hate,” the more egregious events are more accurately understood as picture of American subculture in the 1980s than as a mirror held up to the time and place of grunge and dotcoms.
That never really stopped me from party hopping back then, rolling from artist’s loft standoff to basement ammonia fiasco searching for the chemical agape I had once known. Meanwhile, Pete was pouring his considerable anomie into these stories with verve and the lack of self-restraint for which is so widely, and deservedly, admired.
Fifteen years later, what do we have to show for it?
Well, most recently, Fanta issued “Buddy Does Seattle,” and I have been chortling my way through every page. If you ever fell in love with the media idea of Seattle as some kind of bohemeian paradise, or found yourself here, observing the hoopla and yet, of course, unable to locate the source of the fuss, you really owe it to yourself to track this weighty, fifteen-dollar snortfest down.
Pete will probably appreciate the money, when Fanta pays him for the material. But all the same, he’s told me that he kinda hates the turn toward graphic novels in alternacomix of late. He thinks it’s a reflection of a kind of snooty image-consciousness that privileges the social construction of reading comics in public. Everybody’s trying to look smart, he’s told me.
Well, I think that’s a debatable thesis. But I do know that Bagge’s plenty smart, and these stories have, if anything, improved with age. If you ever wondered what it would be like when a Jersey boy collided with Seattle, Pete’s got the news for you, still up-to-date after fifteen years.
I like the graphic novel format (Maus I and II, Persepolis I and II, Blankets, Sandman). I think it’s safe to say, no one is trying to look smart by reading graphic novels (doesn’t matter how thick it is, people will sneer at “picture books.”).