Harvey Pekar (1939–2010)

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

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

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

The Quitter covers Harvey Pekar's childhood growing up in Cleveland. Some of this material was previously covered in American Splendor, but not much of it; that tended to focus on Harvey's later life, which only comes in at the very end here.  What can I say about it beyond that it might be my favorite Pekar comic yet?  He fills in his life in broad sketches, focusing into specific moments only a couple times, but this story really resonated with me-- as indeed, I suspect it would with show more anyone who's ever tried to do something and ended up giving up because it was hard. Or maybe just because of stupid reasons. The Quitter details Pekar's attempts to find something he won't give up at.

Pekar's short works resist "messages," but The Quitter has one, sort of, even if it's just that someday you might find something where you don't quit. Barely a message, but it's somehow uplifting, and I found myself feeling better about myself after finishing The Quitter, and I don't often like books that overtly try to do that to me.

Dean Haspiel might just be my favorite artistic collaborator for Pekar so far; his work is cartoony, but gritty, which suits Pekar's "neo-realist" style more so than some of the more realistic art I've seen in American Splendor, which tends to be too stiff to work as good comics.  Lee Loughridge-- who I know as Gotham Central's fabulous colorist-- accentuates the whole thing with good use of "gray tones."

Surely one of the better graphic memoirs I've ever read (and at this point, I've read too many!). show less