OK, maybe I rushed to judgment when I shouldn’t have. This still isn’t the best of these books (I remember liking the last three quite a bit), but it is a lot better than I remember it. I don’t know what my problem with it was back in the day. I guess I had to believe that every comic out there was breaking some boundary, otherwise it wasn’t worthwhile. I’ve known for years now though that it can be enough for a comic to just have a great story.
And this book has no trouble pulling that off. This is mostly all about Stinky’s band and Buddy trying to manage them, with the constant Buddy/Valerie/Lisa drama playing out in the background. Solid stuff all the way around and I can’t wait to move onto the next book. This does bring up a pretty important question though. When reading all the volumes of a series in a row, is it always best to start with #1 and move on from there, even if the series improves significantly from one book to the next? The volume I have also has The Bradleys in it after these first two books. Sure, I should have read it before I started all these, but I seldom plan that far ahead. Now what though? Would the last couple of books in this series have been as good if I didn’t have the previous material to refer to? Would reading The Bradleys right now make everything else that much better, no matter what the quality of that book was (and I seem to remember it liking the most of the three in this volume when I read it for the first time)? Or should I wait until I read the whole series and then go back to this story? I’ve already decided on what I’m going to do, but I wonder what the popular opinion is out there. Do you recommend to friends that they read the first volumes of a series first if some of the later ones are significantly better? I know I always tell people to buy Love and Rockets #2 before #1.
Oh yeah, the actual book. Sorry about that tangent there, but I am curious to see what most people do in that situation. The strongest stuff in this book was the relationship stuff, messed up as it is. Seeing George on a date was classic, and having Lisa be the date was just a fantastic story decision. I never liked Stinky much for some reason, and that continues with this book. He’s fairly one-dimensional in Hate, and it seems like there was more to him in Bagge’s earlier work (which I’ll figure out soon enough, I guess). Valerie gets fleshed out quite a bit with the visit to her parents, then is left out of most of the rest of the book. That was one of my original problems with this series: not as much character development as I would have liked. I can see how ridiculous that is now that the whole series is complete, but I always felt like I was having to assume too much when I was reading the early stuff. This is the book that I’d probably pick to start with if you haven’t read any Hate at all. There are bits and pieces in the first book that you’ll miss, sure, but it’s nothing that you can’t figure out with this book. And it’s stuff that you’ll probably be a lot happier to see once you see how good it gets later on…
