Dean Haspiel

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

Divorced from the historical question of Cuba, this is a very intense coming-of-age story with stark, memorable art. Of course you can't really divorce a story about a disillusioned Cuban revolutionary who eventually flees to Miami from context, can you? So of course the question is how does one put a story like this in context? A lot of people who fled Cuba were the folks who had done their fellow Cubans wrong, but pretending Castro never did any human rights violations is tankie nonsense, show more much like the health care and literacy gains of the island are real.

But back to Lockpez, it does mean that when you're reading this semi-autobiographical story, you do wonder "is this basically true?" and "is there important context being left out?" and that's kind of where I was left with the book. show less

The danger with autobiographical works like The Alcoholic is that they tend to run the risk of forgetting about the audience. Some author/artists (Milk & Cheese creator Evan Dorkin springs easily to mind) delve into this territory with good intentions, but invariable end up obsessed with nothing more than their own shortcomings and failings. The reader is reduced to nothing more than a reluctant therapist, or even worse, a captive audience to one artists obsession with hating himself.

Not all show more works of this nature fall into this trap, however, and The Alcoholic manages to maintain a level of entertainment and engagement from beginning to end. Author Jonathan Ames exposes his life long struggles with love, friendship, relationships, and drugs, but always with an eye towards examining human nature as well as his own motivations.

Dean Haspiels art, angular and classic without abandoning realism for style, is the perfect compliment to Ames story, and never distracts from the books focus by battling the author for the readers attention.

Much like American Splendor (on which Dean Haspiel also collaborated), The Alcoholics narrative comes across as a self-explorative train of thought as, the author explores the path his life has taken. Ames bares his soul to himself as well as the reader, and examines his past mistakes and blunders without ever sounding preachy or whiny.

Ames also manages to keep a level eye on his life as a whole, and doesnt hang too much significance on any one event. As a resident of New York during 9/11, Ames shares his experiences and emotions about that tragic event in US history. However, he doesnt make it the focal point of the book, nor does he use it to bookend the narrative. He displays it for what it was; a traumatic world event that affected him directly forced him to reevaluate his personal behaviors yet again, but than eventually moves on with his life. An event like 9/11 is an easy device for a writer to manipulate an audiences emotions with, but Ames treats it with the respect and perspective that it deserves.

An autobiographical graphic novel about heartbreak, depression, self-loathing and addiction, The Alcoholic winds up being a tad more uplifting and inspirational than one might expect, and possibly more than the author intended. show less

Pekar has been writing about his life for so long that it's hard to read a new piece of his on its own terms - if there's a gap, you fill it in with what you already know. And he's always used a lot of gaps, writing about little moments here and there; he'd talk at length often enough, but it was like a tour guide who might stop at any moment and let you just watch things go by for a while. His one long book, [book: Our Cancer Year], had more or less the same rhythm, and it held together show more because of the intense experience it described (although Frank Stack's art, scruffy and flowing like one big sketchbook, helped too). The Quitter is a long story that doesn't hold together at all, partly because it tries so hard to be a seamless piece, but you can still pull it apart and enjoy some of the mess.

He rarely wrote about his pre-adult years in American Splendor; here he skips through them and pulls out episodes that fit his theme, with a frame of his present self saying more or less "This is my theme and here are some examples." The theme is his pattern of freaking out and abandoning various challenges, which seems pathological in some cases and pretty normal in others. There are some vivid stories in there, including a brief successful career in beating up other kids and a humiliating panic attack in a Navy laundry room. There are some great depictions of defective internal drama, like not being sure whether someone hit you on purpose but deciding you'd better hit them back just in case. And there's enough undramatic but particular stuff to give a feeling of organic life, all the seemingly random turns and false starts that somehow ended up at where you are now.

But the stories start and stop arbitrarily, dictated by the need to get on to the next example; the pacing within them is spotty too, dwelling for two pages on some trivial scene, then disposing of a major event in one panel or just in a sentence. The frame-narrator intrudes all the time to explain the transitions, so that when the subject occasionally changes without that segue, it seems like an editing error - and in some cases I think it might be, because there are a few captions that seem to assume you know about events he didn't actually mention. This book was published by DC/Vertigo, so you have a writer who's not used to working in a long form and an editor who's not used to working with realistic fiction; this is probably very unfair of me, but I wonder if DC just figured that Pekar's thing was rambling monologues and all they could see was that he was doing his thing.

I like [author: Dean Haspiel]'s art a lot (disclosure: he's a pal) and he's done some good American Splendor stories. His work in The Quitter is slick and he did his homework, but for once I didn't feel the life; the muscular line is too mismatched with the aimless script, except when it's too closely matched and just shows the exact same thing the caption is needlessly saying. (I love the cover unconditionally, though - it's a good joke if you've ever read The Spirit.)

My favorite panel in the book is when, after explaining again how fear and impatience have deflated his efforts, Harvey just looks at you and says, "And there are lots of people like me." At least on that one page, he knows the problem isn't that he's a mutant with magic failure powers in an epic tragedy; it's that we're all playing a game whose rules often result in pointless damage, and this damage makes us into obstacles for each other. show less