Go to Sleep!

Go to: Untitled by Harvey Pekar and Rick Parker

Keith on Harvey

Go to: Keith Knight honors Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar (October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010)

What's in a Name? A Robert Crumb-illustrated page from American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

I love Harvey Pekar. Okay, I've never actually met the man. And who knows if I could have actually tolerated him if he were my next door neighbor. But I have nothing but respect for his achievements. Looking past the juvenile wish fulfillment, corporate ownership, and slick genre conventions that dominated (and still do) the industry, he saw in comics the perfect medium for autonomous artistic expression. And in his American Splendor comics he told extraordinarily blunt, unromantic, even banal tales of his own rather ordinary life. For a long time he worked for little to no financial reward, and gained only intermittent, if dubious mainstream recognition. But he kept plugging away with it, and his comics were eventually adapted into a critically lauded movie with the same name. To me, American Splendor was a revelation when I first encountered it because, in contrast to most of the comics I had read (and my own upbringing), it was grounded on an uncompromising, blue-collar, adult perspective. I was immediately hooked. Others have since followed in creating their own autobiographical works. But Harvey's unsentimental voice remains a singular presence that I will miss.

More on Harvey Pekar by David Ulin, Jared Gardner, R. Fiore, Tom Spurgeon, Kevin Church

Curmudgeon

How not to negotiate with movie studios

In the stories published in the period before the production of the American Splendor movie, Harvey Pekar admitted that he was desperate to sell-out to Hollywood. His living expenses had increased now that he had a foster daughter to take care of. And he finally wanted to retire from his file clerk day job. It seems almost bizarre, but at the time he was even considering an option which would star former SNL cast member Rob Schneider. Pekar finds out that selling-out isn't so easy as it looks. He also started to wonder a lot about his creative legacy. He identified himself with overlooked artists and creators, and probably thought he was going to die in obscurity. The film was eventually made, and won a couple of awards. But it's funny how much worrying about it ever getting made took up so much of his time.

American Splendor Volume 2 #1

Harvey Pekar has been producing his American Splendor comic book for thirty-odd years, mainly as a self-publishing effort. He's collaborated with a number of artists, most notably Underground Comix cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Gary Dumm, and Frank Stack. But the voice expressed has been consistently that of a working-class individual finely attuned to everyday reality's potential to be a source of many small pleasures and equally acute frustrations. He was doing autobiography before it became a dirty word associated with alternative comics. None of today's indie creators can quite match his ability to mix personal angst and social/political commentary within the confines anecdotal story-telling. And of course none of them has managed to denounce David Letterman as a corporate shill while appearing as a guest on Late Night.


Despite the Letterman connection, Pekar continued to work in obscurity until the recent American Splendor biopic in which he sometimes plays himself. That project and his retirement from his job as a file clerk at the VA hospital he worked most of his adult life marked as important a milestone as his bout with cancer less than a decade ago. First Dark Horse, and now DC/Vertigo publish his work. Hopefully the exposure to a wider audience has brought new readers. A more immediate effect of his recent fame is that a new crop of artists have been brought in by his publishers to illustrate his work. Vertigo's first American Splendor series included a diverse collection of talent from Eddie Campbell to Richard Corben. The results were predictably mixed.

This second series continues to recruit artists from both mainstream and independent comics. But the sequel does seem to be a bit more consistent. Ed Piskor channels Crumb in making Pekar look like the cantankerous slob of those early stories. Chris Weston's meticulously detailed line-work is well suited to capture the pain experienced from tripping and falling down on the front steps of a house. Zachary Baldus shadings complement the 50s setting of a disreputable movie theater where a younger Pekar used to work.


These post-movie American Splendor books chronicle a Harvey Pekar mellowed by age and fame. In the first story I'm No Help he indulges a young fan who only knows him from watching the film. In Restraint he takes pride in not causing a scene when a pharmacist refuses to refill his prescription. And in The Kirkus Reviewer he notes that he hasn't put down criticism of his work in a long time, but feels compelled to defend the merits of his graphic novel Macedonia. As a reader of his earlier stories, it's a interesting development in his character. Even the story of his youth is filled with a certain longing that could only have come from many years of reflection and the affect of attempting to capture fading memories. Welcome to the late period of Harvey Pekar's career.