It’s early on a Saturday morning right now and I’m contemplating which books I want to buy. Of course by “Books” I mean collected editions of comics and graphic novels. I do buy (and borrow from the library with Hoopla) regular (prose) books but I went digital with regular books (prose) a long time ago. I have an overabundance of comics around here and I don’t need to add even more books to them.
One of my all time favorite comics is “Hate” by Peter Bagge. Most of its issues were made in the 1990s and I bought them off the rack at the time. Volume one of “Hate” was thirty issues and after that came “Hate Annual” which ran nine issues. I didn’t get the nine issues of the Annual for some reason but bought the collected edition of them “Buddy Buys a Dump” when it came out many years latter (2014).
A few years ago (2016) another comic of Bagge’s “Neat Stuff” was collected into an oversized, slipcased, hardcover edition. That’s the series where Buddy Bradley (the star of “Hate”) first appeared and, though I had many of them, I don’t have all of the issues. It was an expensive book. It was in two volumes and was about $80 (if memory serves). I kept my eye on it and eventually bought it on sale (in December 2019) for $32.50. A nice pickup. The book is now out of print and expensive.
“The Complete Hate” which collects all of “Hate” and “The Hate Annual” came out in December 2020 and is three hardcover volumes in a slipcase. It’s been on my wish list since then but it has a retail price of $120 and is currently available online at about $90. I’ve had my eye on it all these years and it’s never gone down cheaper than $85. It even went out of print and raised in price before going back into print.
In September of 2022 as I was, once again, contemplating buying “The Complete Hate” I decided to check out the softcover versions available for the book. The whole thing was printed in three volumes: “Buddy Does Seattle,” “Buddy Does New Jersey,” and “Buddy Buys a Dump.” I already had “Dump” and the first two I already had in their original issues. But sometimes it’s nice to have them in collected editions too.
The main problem I had with these collected edition was that they were a bit smaller in size than a regular comic. Around 6×9 inches compared to about 7×10 inches. I like the bigger size. But in the end I bought them because they were much cheaper. I bought them used online for about $25 for the pair. Boom. Done. I had the whole series in collected editions. But they still weren’t the big oversized hardcovers.
Over the last two years I’ve still kept my eye on those box sets. What I decided to do was to save up credit card points and make the purchase with them. That way I wouldn’t have to spend actual money. I’ve saved up the points three times in the last two years but have always ended up using them on something else. Last year I used them when I bought a camera. My DJI Pocket 3.
This year as I was contemplating finally getting that box set I decided on getting something else. Some Richard Corben books. Despite having some Richard Corben comics since the 1980s I didn’t really become a big Corben fan until the early 2000s. For some reason that’s when his work really clicked with me and I’ve been buying all of his stuff since then. But, of course, I missed a lot of it from the 1970s-2000s.
Richard Corben died in 2020 and since 2022 Dark Horse comics has been publishing a lot of his work in hardcover editions. I’ve had my eye on them but hadn’t bought any yet. They start out at about $40 but like most books they drop in price after a while. After they go out of print they can sometimes shoot up in price so it’s good to find the sweet spot before that happens.
I saw that the first four volumes of the Corben stuff was available from between $20-$25 a piece. This was fairly cheap and the first volume was the cheapest at $20 and it had been out for a couple of years. I didn’t think it was going to get any cheaper than that and enough time had gone by that it might go out of print.
I had around $100 worth of credit card points saved up and that would be enough to get all four volumes. A fifth volume had just came out but that one was still at full price. So I abandoned my idea of getting the “Complete Hate” and bought the Corben books. Why buy another copy of stuff I already had when I could get stuff I’ve never read before?
Another funny thing happened in these four years that I’ve been thinking about buying “The Complete Hate.” It’s not complete anymore! In 2024 Peter Bagge did four more issues of “Hate”. It was called “Hate: Revisited” and it was terrific. I have no idea if there are any plans to put it in a new volume but it’s sure not in the old one.
I also just saw that this year they are coming out with softcover editions of “The Complete Hate.” No box set and the three volumes are comic out individually over time. Volume One is set for August and the list price is $30. I wonder if the new Volume Three will have “Hate: Revisited” in it?
Meanwhile “Hate: Revisited” will be getting its own collected edition in July. The list price on that one is around $20. Maybe I’ll pick it up or maybe I won’t.
All this contemplating about buying “The Complete Hate” is really a little bit silly in the end. It’s not like I have been so broke over the last four years that I haven’t had a spare $100. I’ve probably spent $100 on dumb stuff that I shouldn’t have in that time but in smaller increments. Somehow spending $20 on something silly and impulsive five times over time is easier than spending $100 on something I already have in another form. I want to go read some comics now.