Love to "Hate"

Picked up Peter Bagge's "Hate Annual #6" comic at lunch. There's a medium-sized story about his famous slacker character Buddy Bradley (now raising a family on a redeveloped junkyard, while trying to extricate himself from criminal types and cover up a death); a short tale about a trendy chick trying to be accepted into a biker gang; a series of strips where Bat Boy (of "Weekly World News" fame) is president of the US, with various female pop singers as his catfighting cabinet; a filler of a spoof personality test called "Are you a c**t?"; another short, this time about a rookie grid iron quarterback's wife who makes the mistake of sitting among vocal fans; a "Matrix" parody (starring Buddy's old flatmate George?); and a single-pager recounting an Alice Cooper anecdote.

Broken into its constituent parts, it sounds like a meaningless mess. Read as one, it's enough 70s-underground-inspired art, cynical social commentary and sick humour to keep a Bagge fan like myself happy till his next release.