Gen-X Hate Revisited (Part 2 of 3)

When I was young and living through those times I wanted to be a hipster slacker partying in seattle. I'm 54 so my apathy has completely negated all that and now I'm a true gen x hipster living in the desert making outsider art. Don't be jealous 😎

Kelton Sears basically describing the joke that Bagge was delivering - because he doesn't treat Buddy as a character but as a thin disguise for Peter Bagge - as if he has caught Bagge doing a naughty from almost 40 years in the future then proceeding to make a smug list of how Bagge's work is being problematic - while ignoring that that is the joke and Bagge was taking the piss on this culture in the first place - that is honestly a staggering piece of cosmic comedy. GenZ scolding GenX for online clout because GenX drew a spicy comic book decades ago.

Well, I was there in Seattle for all that, I worked in a comic store during Hate's run, and I even ended up working at Fantagraphics in the 90s. What a great look at it and what it was, you really hit the nail on the head. As for that weenis who wrote the hatchet job about Bagge, especially where "Neat Stuff" is concerned, you're right about him not understanding it being from another time. Neat Stuff being from the 80s, it was just pure observation. That's how people talked. That's what attitudes were like. Bagge was showing it, warts and all, to skewer it. Sanctimonious point-missing for the sake of deliberately contrarian takes is tiresome, it's a shame that's such a popular pastime today.

Peter Bagge conjured up an incredibly relateable series with Hate

Awesome stuff. Hate somehow eluded me for years, then in 2019 (age 25 for me), a friend goes “have you read Hate? The main character reminds me of you!” Kind of an insult, but the comic immediately clicked with me. Bagge is a massive influence on how I write. Like you said, he’s got this way of relaying info in the most natural way possible. He’s a genius.

Hate was first published when I was in college. I continue reading and loving it through my early 20s slacker years. The early 90s were a great time to be a broke hipster. I even got to meet Bagge and Clowes when the HateBall tour came to NYC. Thank you for the info in Hate Revisited; will definitely pick it up. Also consider doing a retrospective on Roberta Gregory’s Naughty Bits. Another favorite of the era

A series called Hate Isn't politically correct who knew?

So ready for this. The first part is great. I've watched it a couple of times already and will again before this segment.

Found your channel the other day. I’m predicting you will have 100k subs within a year if you keep up the quality of your content like this.

Hate was 100% accurate. I lived that shit.

Hey man I'm really digging your videos. I've always been curious about Gen X in general but all of my older Gen X family members had already moved away by the time I had the presence of mind to learn from them. This Hate Revisited series has been very enlightening.

Great work here! What a bummer of a sour note that hit piece was. It feels like a glitch in the matrix that Kelton was faulting Bagge for not ticking the boxes while including a quote from Bagge about not ticking all the boxes. Nuance is lost on people like that in a funny way. I remember seeing homeschoolers as a kid in the 90's. They seemed naive defenseless and unaware of anything not directly in their own orbit. Culture has circled around so hard that people like the one writing this article have adopted the same mantle as those homeschool kids...

Even though I lived through the 90s, as a millennial (and an expat) it really felt like an extension of the 80s to me. Even my tastes in cartoons would be more towards what would have been popular in the 80s (My username still being a reference to X-Men: TAS) . I would occasionally get glimpses of this culture whenever I ran into older kids but I always saw them like how we saw emos and goths later on, a niche subculture rather than the dominant youth culture.

SUBSCRIBED!!!! Living in Brooklyn, NYC around 2010/2011 I remember this huge rapid migration/influx of people from Oregon, Washington, Vancouver, Idaho- you could see the out of state license plates of cars all around predominantly Black neighborhoods (many had For Sale signs on them). Places like Williamsburg, Coney Island and Red Hook had already become "Seattle East" but now Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Brownsville were rapidly getting coffee shopped! Yes, it was fascinating to see the transformation happening in real time. (My favorite alt comic was Joe Matt's Peep Show books- The Poor Bastard, Fair Weather, etc).

I started reading Neat Stuff and Weirdo in the mid 80's. That was some of the funniest comics I read up to that time. Hate is reflective of every psuedo hip early 20's scene around the USA. I'm from the tail end of boomers with our Hardcore scene. Thanks for this great history. I was fortunate enough to meet Maestro Bagge in the 90's. He was laid back but I could sense his sardonic wit

Gotta let me know when the third one is supposed to come out. Good video. Really informative.

People talked and acted that way in Hate because that was how people actually talked and acted in real life. It didn't reveal any kind of underlying bigotry in the people (real or fictional), so much as it reflected an attitude of irreverence; NOTHING was to be taken 100% seriously, or too sacred to fart on and laugh at. That description of the female characters in Hate as 'almost universally insane, sex-crazed, and taken advantage of'? Yeah, one of the reasons I love Hate is because of how absolutely true that rings to my personal, lived experience. All the women in my life are incredibly horny, have difficulty functioning, and get treated poorly by the unfair world we're living in. That is not a flaw in the comic; it's a feature, and a damn important one. It's a flaw in life itself. Despite the title, it was never about actual hate. It was about provoking the gullible into literally judging a book by its cover.

Yeah, a bunch of Gen Xers have gone back on everything they did when they were young, the most obvious case in point being Chuck Klosterman's book The Nineties. If you think the hit piece on Bagge was ridiculous, that's a 300 page retrospective on the entire decade with the same smugly superior point of view. I think there's a need to evaluate what it means to be cynical and sincere. Gen X had a moment where they were both, because they turned so much of their disdain back on themselves and decided they just weren't going to lie about how it was... while at the same time, they still obviously held the same basic anti-establishment values as the boomers did. They just knew they couldn't pull it off. The fault wasn't in the system, it was in the people, who in aggregate ARE the system. It works this way because earnest reform doesn't work. Trust and social duty can't be sold to a consumerist people. They know too much, and can't deal with power well enough to really change the value system. If sincerity means that you have to really go after what you believe is right, but cynicism means knowing that you're going to fail, then you can be both but you can't believe in a happy ending. Gen X was right about this, and at some point you have to accept that it's the beliefs, the hope for the idyllic world, that's flawed. I don't think this is such a bad thing, but I like people more when they're tough and scarred and a little vitriolic, so I'm probably just way out of touch and don't like the species.

Bagge is actually a boomer, but its interesting how in tune with the culture he was

Great channel and series. Looking forward to more