Harvey Pekar (1939–2010)

Joyce Brabner and Harvey Pekar (with artist Tom Stack's surrealistically wonderful art) have made one of the most touching and affecting works I've read in years, maybe ever. And this is something as Pekar's work is naturally that anyway, but here it goes beyond that. Going through this story I felt I was a member of their household and witness to their moment in history. Told in sparse unadorned dialogue the story cuts through all the unnecessaries of alternative comics and creates show more something with the deepest pathos but at once is also a testament to the every day joys of the insanity of day to day life, ups and downs, profound and meaningless. show less

As far as I can tell, this shouldn't have worked. American Splendor isn't ever about anything, or rather it's about everything, with Harvey Pekar just picking moments in his life that he finds vaguely interesting. Or not even that.

Many of Pekar's stories are almost anti-comic in the amount of narration that Pekar provides to go with the art. There's no word/image hybridity here; without the narration, the pictures would just be isolated fragments, and it would be nearly impossible to deduce show more the stories. In the story "American Splendor Assaults the Media," there's so much text that there's barely room for images in the panels-- and the images are just Harvey Pekar as he tells you about the events. With little-to-no-alteration, it could be a straight text piece.

But somehow, American Splendor is utterly comics. I'm not sure why the pictures are there sometimes, but if they weren't, you'd have something very different. The stories might be dominated by Pekar's voice (so much so that sometimes who the artist is seems irrelevant), but the art does a lot to give it that voice. The first story in the book, "The Harvey Pekar Name Story," is the clearest demonstration of that. This story is just four pages of headshots-- the incidents the story describes never appear on-panel-- meaning that the illustrations are used to convey Pekar's body language as he "tells" the story. Though the narrative communicated would be same if Pekar had simply typed up the story as straight prose, the comic form gives it a sense of timing and humor. I actually once did an experiment where I gave the story as prose to my class and then as a comic, and all of them reported enjoying it much more as a comic. I myself liked American Splendor a lot, and I think I would have found it unsatisfying in any medium other than comics, so clearly Pekar is doing something right.

(My favorite story, by the way, was the one about Harvey's relationship with the guy he would bum rides off of, but refused to do any favors for in return.) show less

Our Cancer Year chronicles Harvey's battle with Lymphoma. Not only is it an unflinching look at chemotherapy, illness, radiation and the relationship between he and his wife, but it's an amazing documentation of what happens when life suddenly has to accommodate cancer. Because that's what life does - accommodate. It does not slow down, people do not pause and it most certainly does not come to some slow-mo inspiring stop where the unpleasant parts are mere blips on the way to beating the show more disease in spectacular fashion.

Much of this is just Harvey fitting Cancer into his life while he buys a new house. It's dealing with the everyday problems of life and trying to work while taking chemo. It's seeing cancer up close and far too personally, because it's not just the few nice shots of hair running down the drain - cancer is shingles and drug-induced paranoia. It's seeing a husband and wife pushing themselves too far before deciding to get help and finding out that even help has an unpleasant life outside of cancer.

In this complete and utter depth of detail, there is comfort in seeing that someone's willing to put out their cancer year warts and all. show less

Later, Pekar would write Ego & Hubris, but I think this was his first extended non-autobiographical biographical comic. It covers the Vietnam wartime experiences of Robert McNeill, apparently a coworker of Perkar's judging by the (extremely light) frame sequences. The title seems inappropriate: this is a story about how Vietnam was not a place for heroes or heroism, but just dudes getting by in often terrible ways. The thing McNeill got a medal for turns out to be instigated by his attempt show more to avoid assigned duties. It's in that grittiness of war that this book really shines. McNeill isn't a good person, he's just a person, with all that entails, and Pekar presents his tale in his characteristically non-judgmental style. I found the discussion of race in the United States military during the war the most interesting part of the book, an aspect I knew little-to-nothing about prior to reading the book. show less