By: Harvey Pekar Publisher: Ballantine Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Ballantine Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 336 Publication Date: January 25, 2005 Release Date: January 25, 2005
Product Description: Experience the heartwarming all-American story of a crank and his comic book.
What’s a file clerk from Cleveland doing with an Oscar nomination? How did a movie about Harvey Pekar win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival? The story begins in 1976, when Harvey began publishing his autobiographical, slice-of-downtrodden-life comic book series American Splendor, illustrated by a who’s who of underground comic artists, including R. Crumb, Kevin Brown, Greg Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, and Gerry Shamray. After self-publishing American Splendor for nearly two decades under less than splendid conditions (and racking impressive accolades in the process), Harvey finally got a break when Dark Horse Comics took over the publication in the early 1990s. It was an opportunity for Harvey to reach a wider audience–which, as it turned out, included a few Hollywood types, too. (Who knew?) But that’s another story. . . .
Now we are happy to bring you the Best of American Splendor, a collection of some of Harvey’s greatest work. Harvey Pekar has been compared to Theodore Dreiser, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lenny Bruce, but this collection is a true American original. Just like Harvey.
Chronicler of the quotidian There are times when we want to leave the world in which we live and escape for awhile in literature or films that transport us to situations quite different from our own. But there are also times when we long to make contact with literature or film which reassures us that our everyday lives, with all their joys and triumphs, headaches and failures, are the same as everyone else's. We want to revel in our normalcy, or we want to be at least accompanied in our normalcy.
Harvey Pekar is the country's very best chronicler of the quotidian. His American Splendor comix are pulled from the stuff of everyday life: the fact that our work is sometimes dull and a pain-in-the-keester, but can also be a place where we build community; that marriage is joyful and also sheer hard labor; that small things--bender-fenders, late mail, waiting for a bus in the rain--can be occasions for huge anxieties, even as small things--the eccentricities of co-workers, the enthusiasm a bus driver has for botany, the smile of a foster child--can also be occasions for huge joys. Harvey Pekar, for all his own idiosyncracies, lives a life that's very much like our own. His American Splendor not only reassures us that we're not alone; it also serves as a prism for us to put our lives in perspective.
The Best of American Splendor collects Pekar's work from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. The pieces include not only the straightforwardly autobiographical comix for which Pekar is famous--including those that honestly portray his less pleasing qualities, such as his penny-pinching, his self-pity, and his occasional bouts of megalomania--but also a couple of comix essays on Russian modernist literature (pp. 39-40) and Django Reinhardt (pp. 123-124) that underscore just what a natural intellectual Pekar is. His "Hitherto Untold" story (pp. 128-138) is a touching parable of historical memory and heroism. A very nice bonus in this collection is a comix written British author Colin Warneford that details his autism, which Pekar incorporates into his own "Transatlantic Comics" (pp. 96-118). Warneford, by the way, claims that his major influence is R. Crumb (whose only artwork in this collection is the cover), and it would be easy to mistake his darkly hatchworked artwork for Crumb's. Finally, old favorites like Toby and Mr. Boats make appearances, although only brief ones.
A great introduction to those readers who are only now discovering Pekar, and a great collection of his recent work for longtime fans.
A Fine Pekar Snapshot Harvey Pekar is one of the people who helped begin the gradual broadening of acceptable subject matter for comics in the U.S. Starting in the 1960s, a number of comics creators began producing "underground comics" -- comics which had nothing to do with the typical subject matter of comic books. Harvey Pekar entered this arena in 1976 with his autobiographical series American Splendor.
This volume contains stories culled from recent decades of American Splendor. One of the most striking things about the book that's visible right away is the variation in the artwork. Various artists have illustrated his stories over the years, and this book is a showcase of styles, from the rounded, almost kanji-like drawings of Frank Stack to the thin line realism of Joe Zabel.
The stories themselves vary quite a bit in nature, but all revolve around Pekar's life in Cleveland as a file clerk at a V.A. hospital. They have all the pluses and minuses of stories of anybody's daily life, but in each Pekar finds something meaningful to say that elevates it above the status of mere episode. The author is known for being downbeat and combative, and many of these stories deal with the pains and anxieties of real life, with no positive resolution. If you enjoy the fiction of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, or maybe Charles Bukowski, you'll enjoy these stories of Harvey Pekar's life.
Graphic literature It's not just the fact that Harvey was the first to put the everyday into comic-book format, it's the fact he has a literary knack for observation (and I mean that in a good way!). Plus also, the everyday, for Harvey, is rarely what the rest of us mean by the term -- these vignettes into his life are highly interesting happenings. Also, the fact he also uses illustrators other than Crumb -- some equally good but very different -- allows you to get more of a sense of the man doing the writing, 'cos all these illustrators see him a little bit differently. That said, I would start with the anthologies ('American Splendor (The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar)' and 'The New A. S. Anthology') first -- they're a little bit better (and this collection contains no Crumb at all -- not that it matters all that much).
The Saga Continues Harvey Pekar is one of my heroes! 20 years ago when I was a student at the University of South Carolina, I came across the first American Splendor Anthology in the browsing section of the school's library. This was the book that inspired me to be a writer myself.
With that said, on to this book. If you liked the other American Splendor collections, I don't see why you wouldn't like this. Toby the Geek, Mr. Boats, his archenemy David Letterman (yes, THAT David Letterman) and the usual cast of characters (minus Freddy the Brooklyn Freeloader) are along for the ride. This goes pretty in-depth with Harvey's family life with his wife Joyce and his adopted daughter Danielle, but as with most of his stuff, its easy for the reader to relate. I particularly like where he discusses his inability to hold a decent conversation with Danielle (what adult hasn't been through that)?
Some other stuff really stands out. A Black jogger confronts Harvey about his depiction of Black characters in his works. Personally, as an African-American fan myself I've always respected the fact that Pekar's Black characters range from the ignorant to the intelligent, showing a wide variety of black life and just portraying us as people who he happens to encounter in his daily life without an agenda. Although admittedly I enjoyed his discomfort about the question of Robert Crumb, whose portrayal of blacks I despise.
Perhaps the most moving segment involves a British fan with autism who writes Harvey about his sad life and experiences. One really feels for this fellow, as others mock and misunderstand his illness and loneliness(at one point, he is molested by a crude oaf in a Chinese Restaurant, but no one sees fit to stop this cad or even call the police). Surprisingly, Harvey does not say if he responds to the pathetic fellow.
But overall, once again Pekar gives us through his writings and cartoons a multidimensional look at the human condition, and shows us, perhaps unintentionally, how much we as human beings really have in common. Enjoy.
Hard to say what draws one to a Pekar comic There are certainly moments when I'm astounded by how well I can relate to some of these stories. For instance, Harvey has a pretty keen ability to sense "the beginning of the end" of a relationship. In other instances, he struggles to rationalize the stereotyping that occurs in his stories, sometimes relying on a sort of tacit understanding that, even though the line is clearly visible from where he stands, he hasn't quite crossed it just yet.
On the other hand, you have to be careful not to try and read one of these volumes all the way through in one sitting. Somehow it just doesn't work so well that way. There's a certain flow to his stories that seems to be interrupted at certain points throughout the compilation. At moments like that you need to set the book down and come back to it later.
I preferred the other two trade paperback compilations to this one, but it has its moments too. I got into Pekar via the HBO movie of a few years ago, and one of the amusing aspects of these books is observing the subtle ways in which the comics differ from the film. If I'm not mistaken, the movie makes no mention of the fact that Harvey is in the midst of moving into a new house when he discovers he has cancer.
If you are already familiar with the peculiar charms of an American Splendor comic, then you'll probably find what you're looking for here.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
