Bagge This, Mofo

Reason cartoonist Peter Bagge's Buddy Does Seattle, a collection of the first 15 (count 'em) issues of Hate--one of the things that made the '90s so, so, so '90s-rific--gets a nice shout-out from The New York Times. For those new to Hate, the comic chronicled the misadventures of one Buddy Bradley, a "genial, acne-scarred slacker." Sez the Times:

Buddy is more than a cultural artifact. Bagge's art is lovingly cartoony--there's a lot of early Mad magazine and Al Jaffee at work here. No anger is unaccompanied by bold hate lines above Buddy's head, no lust without big googly eyes. Buddy's rubber-band body twists to accommodate his rapid shifts from rage to contempt to contrition to surprising empathy. When he starts managing a band to unexpected success, you sense, as he does, that there's something in him that could lift him up out of this world, above his variously damaged and sometimes terminally lazy friends. But time and again he chooses not to, and he's clearly relieved when the band drunkenly fires him. It's as if Clark Kent realized it's pretty lonely up, up in the sky and decided to just stay on earth.

Whole thing here.

And the new Hate Annual #5 is currently for sale over at Bagge's site.

And for god's sake, check out his Reason archive.

And for Ratzo's sake, buy a copy of Choice: The Best of Reason.