Neat Stuff
Encyclopedia
Neat Stuff is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 alternative
Alternative comics
Alternative comics defines a range of American comics that have appeared since the 1980s, following the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alternative comics present an alternative to "mainstream" superhero comics which in the past have dominated the US comic book industry...

 comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 series created by Peter Bagge
Peter Bagge
Peter Bagge is an American cartoonist. He is the creator of Buddy Bradley, Hate, Neat Stuff, Martini Baton, and Sweatshop, Apocalypse Nerd and Other Lives. His stories often use black humor and exaggerated cartooning to dramatize the reduced expectations of middle-class American youth...

 and published by Fantagraphics. It ran from 1985 to 1989 for sixteen issues. Each takes the form of a series of short stories featuring different sets of characters, although some issues feature full-length stories relating to just one set of characters. The series was Bagge's first one-man comics anthology. Described by Dez Skinn
Dez Skinn
Derek "Dez" Skinn is a British comic and magazine editor, and author of a number of books on comics. As head of Marvel Comics' operations in England in the late 1970s, Skinn reformatted existing titles, launched new ones, and acquired the BBC license for Doctor Who Weekly...

 in Comix: The Underground Revolution as the work which "threw Peter Bagge into the limelight", Bagge soon retired the title in preference of continuing the Bradleys characters's story in Hate.

Characters

  • Girly Girl - a grinning, leering, rambunctious young troublemaker who found humor in dead animals, festering sores and clobbering child psychologists with baseball bats. True to form, her first strip appearance ended with her being squashed underfoot by her unseen "biggest fan".
  • Chuckie-boy - Girly Girl's brother or best friend (their respective roles are never clearly defined) and the target for most of her bizarre, violent slapstick pranks.
  • Studs Kirby - a ranting, reactionary talk radio presenter who lives in the past (his favourite singers are Brenda Lee and Doris Day), gets drunk a lot, bends the ears of his friends with his ill-informed, prejudiced opinions and begins an escalating hate campaign against his former hero, fellow talk show host Mel Pratt, which becomes an all-out ego war.
  • Junior - a hulking, lantern-jawed and wimp social inadequate in a horrible plaid suit who still lives with his doting mother and seems terrified of the outside world.
  • The Goon On The Moon - as his name suggests, a friendless loser who lives on the moon.
  • Chet and Bunny Leeway - a young couple who seem increasingly dissatisfied with their tedious lives and isolated from the world around them.
  • The Bradleys - a spoof soap opera featuring a dysfunctional family
    Dysfunctional family
    A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...

    , apparently based on Bagge's own family. Brad Bradley, the father, is an overweight, perpetually complaining slob and Betty Bradley, the mother, is a God-fearing, occasionally foul-tempered 'woman of the eighties', whilst their children, Butch (a gullible, war-mad pre-teen), Babs (a plain, self-absorbed teenage girl with retainers on her teeth) and Buddy
    Buddy Bradley
    Harold "Buddy" William Bradley Jr. generally referred to as Buddy Bradley is a comic book character created by Peter Bagge and featured in several of his comic books, most notably Hate and Neat Stuff...

     (a retro music-loving slacker) alternate between fighting each other and their own parents. Bagge would continue with these characters and story line in his later title Hate
    Hate (comic)
    Hate is a semi-autobiographical comic book by writer-artist Peter Bagge. First published by Fantagraphics in 1990 it ran for 30 issues, and was one of the best-selling alternative comics of the 1990s, at its height selling 30,000 copies an issue...

    . After the popularity of Hate, the Bradleys stories from Neat Stuff would be collected and reprinted in their own comic mini-series entitled The Bradleys.
  • Zoove Groover a manufactured and over-hyped new pop star
    Pop Star
    "Pop Star" is a 2005 single from Japanese singer Ken Hirai. The single went on to top the 2005 Oricon Charts and is known for its remarkable music video, featuring Ken in seven different personas, including a raccoon and his own manager. The Video also helped Ken break into the US and Canadian...

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