The Comic Book Club: Dark Horse Presents and Hate Annual

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This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Evan Narcisse and Graeme McMillan talk about the first issue of the relaunched Dark Horse Presents anthology and Peter Bagge’s Hate Annual #9.

DOUGLAS: I’m really glad to see a new anthology comic on the stands; I’m especially glad to see a fat 80-page anthology like Dark Horse Presents that’s mostly creator-driven, with a bunch of big names associated with it. And there were a couple of pieces in the first issue of the newly relaunched version that I enjoyed a lot. But this is still very, very high on the “what?… why?” factor–in part because there’s barely any sign that this isn’t actually an anthology comic from twenty years ago, and some of this material seems like it might have been considered and rejected twenty years ago.

GRAEME: That’s my biggest problem with this issue: It feels like it’d be an all-star line-up… in the mid-80s. But now, Neal Adams and Howard Chaykin and Richard Corben et al. all seem… I don’t know, not past it exactly, but left behind somewhat when it comes to storytelling these days, even when they bring their A game. And most of the work here is not anyone’s best.

DOUGLAS: The good stuff first: the color Finder story by Carla Speed McNeil is neat if too short, and it’s fun to see what her character Jaeger’s been up to, since the plot of McNeil’s recent Finder graphic novel “Voice” revolves around Jaeger being offstage. (It’s also a hoot to see Jaeger wearing a fluorescent green messenger outfit; this is a story that has to read a little bit differently if you know who the character is or if you don’t.) I like the Patrick Alexander one-page gags; I’m always happy to encounter David Chelsea’s stuff, especially in a context like this. I’m weirdly delighted to see that Frank Miller appears to be drawing a lot of his forthcoming project Xerxes with a snapped-off tree branch.

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Way too much of this issue, though, is trying to tap veins that went dry long ago. That Richard Corben piece is the essence of generic Richard Corben. Neal Adams’ stagnant “Blood” has been in the works since at least 2004 (and a bunch of pages from it circulated in 2005, when he declared that “a lot of it is shooting, killing and punching”), and it’s got all the incoherence of Batman: Odyssey with none of the camp craziness. The Mr. Monster story is four times as long as it has to be, and mostly just makes me wish that Michael T. Gilbert weren’t still plowing the same tiny patch as he was a quarter-century ago. The Concrete story is formally appropriate, since Concrete was in the original Dark Horse Presents #1 too, but far from being one of Paul Chadwick’s finer moments. It strikes me as a category error to include a Star Wars story in an otherwise creator-driven anthology. And what exactly was the idea behind reprinting a terrible Harlan Ellison prose story that’s already been printed elsewhere twice? Is this supposed to be a good comic book, or a celebration of the depth of Mike Richardson’s Rolodex?

EVAN: Yeah, Douglas, I sadly have to agree with most of what you’re saying. Adams’ “Blood” stuff is new to me, and I started off pretty excited. The man can still draw, after all. But as good as the art looks, the little sense it made was made incoherent by his overindulgence. Adams has style in spades, but style actually isn’t always the answer to everything. That one-dimensional focus is a flaw that runs through a lot of the stories collected here, especially with the Gilbert and the Miller pages. The same Corben stuff that seemed edgy and transgressive when I was a teenager sneaking Heavy Metal into my bedroom feels exponentially more pervy, embarassing and nonsensical now. Giant-breasted women and grizzled old warriors in post-apocalyptic wastelands need more of a raison d’etre than looking cool or being what Corben does well.

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We’ve grown up as readers, yet the concept of Dark Horse Presents seems to have regressed. The previous incarnation of DHP broke so much new talent back in the day, and when the contributions were by established creators, they used the anthology to take risks. I remember coming across Matt Wagner’s The Aerialist and thinking “this is probably the best place for a story like this to live.” While this issue is a lot of content for eight bucks, most of it feels like underdeveloped inventory material. I adored David Chelsea’s “Snow Angel” story, though. Chaykin’s short was intriguing–if only because I wonder how far he’s going to push the premise–and I always love the thoughtful tone of Concrete, but neither would have me show up for a second issue. And that’s a shame, because every anthology needs an element that brings you back for more.

GRAEME: Chalk me up as another one disappointed by this. It’s especially disappointing, I think, because the last incarnation of DHP, back when it was an online thing at MySpace, was actually pretty good, especially when it came to offering up surprising creators and/or new work. (It launched with Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugarshock, which is still my favorite of Whedon’s comic work.) This, though, just feels old and tired. I’ll agree that Snow Angel was the highlight for me, probably closely followed by Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder short, but almost everything else just felt either too slight or far too long (Mr. Monster especially, but I think the Chaykin story was also over-familiar and just plain dull – that it’s part one of many just makes my heart sink). I can’t quite work out who the audience is for this. At $8, it’s not cheap, and it’s also just not worth that kind of money on a regular basis. New fans won’t find anything here to convince them to come back, and old fans have seen it all before. It’s a shame, because DHP as a title and Dark Horse as a company are capable of so, so much more than this, but having this as a flagship book does no one involved with the publisher any favors whatsoever.

DOUGLAS: I admire the fact that Peter Bagge has never quite given up on doing Hate. His series about the vaguely miserable domestic life of Buddy Bradley, as he’s grown from a youthful slacker to a fortyish junkyard owner and dad, used to be quarterly back in the ’90s (well, it was more like thrice-annual, but still). For roughly the past decade, he’s been checking in with the cast about once a year, and having them age in something like real time. Up until now, though, the Hate Annuals have just had short stories about Buddy and Lisa and their family, and been filled out with whatever else Bagge’s been working on: reporting, satire, spot illustrations, whatever. The new Hate Annual #9–which apparently made it to some American comics stores this week, but not others–is almost entirely taken up by a single (two-part) story, and it’s my favorite thing Bagge’s done in a long time. That’s partly because Hate is the one major Bagge project where he’s clearly got some affection for his characters: he’s a smart, angry misanthrope, but having a sort-of-sympathetic handful of characters at the center of the series keeps his harsh satire grounded.

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I liked his graphic novel Other Lives last year, too–a satire about online identity–but a year later I can’t remember much about any of its characters. Buddy and Lisa and Jay, on the other hand, are all characters I’m happy to see again, although I always forget a few details about them since the last time I saw them. As usual, I found myself wondering when exactly Buddy lost an eye, and looked it up again; the answer is that he didn’t–he’s just been wearing an eyepatch and sailor hat as an affectation for a few years, because he’s kind of nuts and tends to cling to ideas long after they’ve stopped being useful to him.

This issue is a particular kind of story Bagge’s returned to repeatedly over the years, ever since his Neat Stuff era: the “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” scenario, played for laughs. It’s a very funny story about a really unhappy, screwed-up family–without giving anything away, Lisa’s climactic interaction with her mother is both something that would sound shockingly depressing if it were described on its own and the comedic peak of this issue. Also, Bagge’s been working the same look for this series for a couple of decades now–three tiers on almost every page, panels crammed full of dialogue, that crazy super-distorted cartooning style where everybody’s limbs are just skinny curves–but it’s prima facie funny, and he’s fantastically adept at keeping things visually interesting, which is a good trick for stories that basically consist of people sitting around and chatting.

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EVAN: I haven’t checked in with Hate in ages, having last read one of the big collections that came out a few years ago. So the big surprise for me was how much change Bagge has put Buddy through. I remember hearing he got married, but seeing the shaggy-haired slacker icon as a balding dad and small businessman was shocking but really poignant. Buddy’s calmed down, even if the world is still crazy around him. What I’ve always liked about Bagge’s art is how much genuine emotion he can get out of that super-distorted style. The angst being portrayed through wrinkly lips and bugged-out eyes may be played for laughs, but you still feel for the characters. I actually found parts of Lisa’s family’s dysfunction to be really sad, and loved the random things Harold blurted out, too. Touches like those make it so that reading Hate Annual #9 isn’t just working through a sequence of comedic bits. You feel like you’re walking through parts of a character’s life, even if it’s filled with absurdly dark humor.

GRAEME: I’ll be the cynic for whom this didn’t really work, then. It’s not that the main story in this is bad, it’s just that it felt oddly false and insincere for me. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, or an age thing? It felt dated and weirdly conservative in a “Yeah, we were slackers but look at these freaky swingers doing drugs oh my God” way, which… may be appropriate for Buddy and Lisa as characters, but felt awkward and uncomfortable to me, for some reason. Putting that alongside the selection of painfully unfunny cartoons at the back–those are Bagge’s cartoons from Reason magazine, right?–and the whole thing felt like a comic personification of the old joke about rebels becoming more buttoned up than their parents when they get old. It really just didn’t work for me, sadly.

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