Buddy Bradley: Back to the Nineties

Yesterday the Shanafelts and the Hoffmans got together with the Babels to celebrate the very close birthdays of Amy and Morganday in the last week. As a sidenote, John brought with him (as a loan) his Fantagraphic volumes of cartoonist Peter Bagge’s collected stories of Buddy Bradley and his family and ‘friends’, which I had been lately thinking about and which we had then briefly discussed. There were seven volumes in all, starting with a volume of early stories about the entire Bradley Family, then continuing the tale with the eldest son, ‘Buddy’, the breakout character who came to embody the epitome of that Nineties social icon and the era's contribution to the cultural Zeitgeist, the Slacker. After everyone left at 8 PM, I settled down and read the first two volumes, finishing a little after midnight.

The prequel volume, The Bradleys, drawn from volumes of Bagge’s work in Neat Stuff appearing between 1985 and 1989, deals with stories of Buddy’s family during his teen-age years in the Eighties. It includes his dad, mom, younger sister, and kid brother, who (with Buddy) are all leading lives of quiet desperation, as all the social niceties are being stripped away from them and Buddy is only left with a cynical, self-centered point of view. This is all funnier than it sounds, in a cathartic sort of way. Feelings of rage and misery contort their loose, hosepipe construction into writhen monsters of emotion, and one emerges from the fracas that ensues with humor and relief as things are restored, sometimes modified, to the same miserable but calmer status quo.

Surely a homage to Keep on Trucking

Hey, Buddy, the first volume of stories centered on the adventures of Buddy and published in Hate, in a series that eventually spanned 1989 to 1998, begins with him living in a shared apartment in Seattle, Oregon, home of the Bigfoot and Bagwan, having fled his Milwaukee Catholic family after a crescendo of incidents that finished with him wrecking his father’s car. His apartment mates are his high school friend Leonard ‘Stinky’ Brown and the reclusive geek George Hamilton III, whose steady patrimony is sometimes the only thing that keeps the place afloat. Stinky is all over the map, trying to make a living by drug-dealing and independent film producing, but Buddy has a fairly steady job at a used bookstore, from which he has no compunction about stealing. But most of his time is spent trying to decide which girlfriend to hang out with, Lisa or Valerie, both of whom seem to him to be a little crazy. The end of this story arc ends in 1998 with Buddy choosing to marry Lisa, whom he has gotten pregnant, but that’s in future volumes.

Buddy’s adventures have continued into the 2000’s, but that arc has him shedding his slacker’s flannel shirt and blue jeans, shaving his head, affecting an eyepatch and a captain’s hat, and owning a junkyard. Peter Bagge explained this change in appearance as “highlighting his gradual descent into a crazy old coot who works at a dump.” But these seven volumes that John owns are the ones that I read back in the day, and if anyone wants to remember or find out what the Nineties were like, I couldn’t advise a better text than the Buddy series I – VI by Fantagraphics.