The Happy Hater

Colin Upton’s The Happy Hater is a four-issue, black-and-white comic series from the late 1980s that stands as a raw, personal artifact of the alternative-comics era. Published outside the mainstream, it channels Upton’s distinctive, often caustic voice into a meditation on discontent and the absurdities of everyday life, rendered in his characteristic scratchy linework. Though brief, the series is a key work from a cult Canadian creator whose underground sensibility and unflinching self-examination helped define the punk-inflected, DIY spirit of the time.