The late, great, Harvey Pekar

As you are aware Harvey Pekar died. I did a blog-post on Harvey and his work with Ed Piskor, (click here to read it) and Ed kept Harvey up-to-date with matters of the interweb, so I like to think he was aware that people like me, over here in boring old mainstream comicsville UK, did appreciate him. I'm sad he has gone. Harvey Pekar was a one-off. Harvey used his own income as a filing clerk to pay artists, including his friend Robert Crumb, to draw his autobiographical stories, which he then had printed, and then distributed himself. He had a unique vision and he kept right on producing work in a medium he felt was far greater than most people could imagine. Harvey believed that every ordinary guy, like him, was a superhero and that comics could be profound. When he was asked why his stories focused on ordinary subjects like driving downtown to buy a bagel he would reply "ordinary life is pretty complicated stuff".

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/07/american-splendor-harvey-pekar-.html

I didn't actually discover Harvey Pekar through his comics. Oh, I was aware of them, and even had one or two in my collection, but I only really learned properly about his work by watching a film called Comic Book Confidential, a fantastic documentary featuring the work of Charles Burns, Harvey and Crumb, and Lynda Barry, and others. The comics featured just blew me away; I had never seen anything like them. The show featured Harvey's story about being addicted to blues and stealing sides (records) from a radio station. The drawings from the comic, by Crumb, were inter-cut with Harvey reading the story in his famous raspy-voice. I'm not exaggerating when I say it changed all my ideas about what comics could be. It's on iTunes, here.

When I did finally get my hands on a bunch of Harvey's work, including American Splendor, the scales fell from my eyes; I knew, absolutely knew, that the impression the Comic Book Confidential documentary had made on me was not fleeting, I wanted to create work like this, and what's more, I knew my attempt to do so would fall short, and I knew that falling short of this measure was okay, because this was something special. There are a lot of salutes to Harvey on the web this month, and they are all heartfelt; he meant a lot to everyone involved in cartooning. The comic book world now has an enormous Harvey Pekar-sized hole in it; that hole will never be filled.

Once More into the Breach...as it were.

Or at any rate, "once more (slowly) into the breach", as it were. Please bear with me, I'll get up to speed eventually.

This struck me as a good idea for a blogging because it cemented my relationship with a few texts that some misguided people still frown upon, in toffee-nosed literary circles. Not so very long ago, I was feeling really, really, sorry for myself; around my eighth or ninth day on water (not even the bread and water diet of Edmond Dantes) and I really got a great deal of joy from reading a bunch of stuff that I really had no right to expect more joy from, given that I have read and reread the stuff from cover to cover over and over again.

Perhaps it could be best described as comfort-reading, or maybe more precisely as renewing an old friendship - whatever, around the 30th day of my water-fest I had read my Love and Rockets and my American Splendors and my copy of Ghost World so often that I might be forgiven for throwing them away but honestly, I'm looking forward to reading them all again; although I could do without the being ill part.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I could have spent my time reading Brecht, the Norton Anthologies, Shakespeare, Joyce, or even P.G Wodehouse, all of which is right up my street (I'm a pretty pretentious guy), but I found my comfort in literature that pleased both my eyes (especially while the text was blurry) and my brain, and found, even reading these things for the umpteenth time, just as rewarding as the day they were delivered to me. Here's a complete list of my well-beloved titles:


Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes


20th Century Eightball by Daniel Clowes


American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

Hate by Peter Bagge

Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez

These were the titles that I kept returning to, despite having a wide range of possibilities, so to me they gifts that keep on giving. I just found that when I couldn't even be bothered watching a DVD and the text of any number of novels looked more like marching ants than recognisable words I got a lot of comfort from holding, carrying, looking at and reading these books - even the colourful covers cheered me up. These, mainly Fantagraphics titles, were real Chicken soup for the soul to me.

Three Big Rousing Cheers for American Splendor

Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, with DC since 2006, has begun a new run of 4 comics with the Vertigo (go get the nifty poster) imprint. It's 30 years and a few publishers since Harvey began creating his masterpiece, and I can't tell you how much joy reading this one brought me, especially since I read it after I suffered looking over some of the most depressing mainstream comics I have ever seen. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you I just couldn't read the things; they were bewilderingly bad - but that's for another post; today we are celebrating the one shining clear beacon amid a veritable sea of wasted paper.

Two things struck me about the American Splendor comic, that it appears to be better value than any other comic simply because so much good observation is crammed into it, and the stories are simply so darned good, grown-up, reading, and I really, really, prefer to see a mixture of artistic styles of the one subject, rather than one 'approved' version.

The story I particularly enjoyed though was the one were Harvey teamed with the illustrator Ed Piskor, with whom he worked on the graphic novel Macedonia, (along with Heather Robertson) again, to have a go at the critic who made some ill-informed critiques of that publication. It's a good old Harvey Pekar rant and the man is totally right; graphic novels and for that matter comics too, can be polemics, they can be 'lectures' and didactic and why shouldn't a writer take a position when they feel moved to do so? As Harvey says, 'You can do anything with words and pictures'.