Harvey Pekar

Born 1939 (Cleveland, Ohio)
American author

Harvey Pekar pulls stories from his own seemingly ordinary existence, finding various graphic artists, some of them quite well known, to illustrate them. His works are extremely realistic, and many of them avoid a strong direction or storyline, and instead reproduce episodes from his own life or those of co-workers at the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital where Pekar worked for thirty-five years. Little known for decades except among comics fans who appreciated his unusual work, Pekar found a degree of fame with the 2003 release of American Splendor, a filmed version of Pekar's annual comic book series.

"I always had a plan. The payoff was just learning and having that knowledge."

Pekar's comics seem simple. But journalists and critics have hung various labels on Pekar over the years, and the assortment points to the originality and subtlety of his work. Eric Olsen of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called Pekar "the Curmudgeon of the Cuyahoga" (referring to the river that runs through the city), and "curmudgeonly"—ill-tempered or negative—has been an adverb often applied to both the man and his publications. Heidi MacDonald noted on the Comicon Web site that these attributes offered qualities to his writing that added more than detracted from Pekar's appeal. "Curmudgeonly, gloomy, and sometimes obsessive," MacDonald wrote, "Pekar's objectivity about his own shortcomings makes him a strangely sympathetic character, and his nonjudgmental observation of the ordinary people around him shows that he is, above all, a naturalist." Whereas comic books before Pekar's had been concerned with fantasy, Pekar became one of the first to write graphic novels that dealt with real life. Andrew D. Arnold of Time called Pekar a "working-class intellectual," a term Pekar sometimes used himself. In addition to his graphic novels, Pekar wrote essays on jazz, studied world history, and delivered commentaries on a National Public Radio outlet.

Best-Known Works

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (1986).

More American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (1987).

The New American Splendor Anthology (1991).

(With Joyce Brabner) Our Cancer Year (1994).

Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill (2003).

The Quitter (2005).

Odd man out

Pekar's father was a Polish Jewish immigrant who spoke Yiddish (a Jewish language) and called his son "Herschel" rather than the more American name of Harvey. Pekar was born in Cleveland in 1939, and during the first part of his childhood his family lived in Cleveland's rough Kinsman-Mount Pleasant area. They later moved to the suburb of Shaker Heights. He didn't get along with local kids in either area. He told Carlo Wolff of the Denver Post, "[I was] alienated from my neighborhood. Initially it was because I was a white kid in an all-black neighborhood, and I had trouble in the second one because these guys just wouldn't accept me, wouldn't speak to me all summer long. To this day I don't know why." Pekar's book The Quitter looked back on this period of his life and its effect on his future thinking.

Pekar acted out his frustrations, picking fights with other kids and often winning them. The Quitter did not gloss over his bullying side, and, in fact, all of Pekar's works in which he writes about himself are straightforward treatments revealing a personality that could be disagreeable or worse. Pekar's attitudes have roots in his unhappy childhood. "I wasn't at ease with myself," he recalled to Wolff. "At a pretty early stage in my life, I got to a point where I would wake up and the first thing that would hit me was, 'What headaches will I have to deal with today?' … It was always, what's next? With my mother, I tell her I'm doing OK, she says, 'That's all right, the next Hitler is right around the corner."'

Turns love of jazz into writing gigs

Never enthusiastic about school, Pekar nonetheless realized that he had writing ability and as a teenager began working on some short stories. His gift took many years to mature, however. In 1957, he joined the U.S. Navy but, as he recounted in The Quitter, was discharged after a strange episode in which he could not figure out how, or refused, to do laundry. He returned to Cleveland and worked in a variety of jobs that included janitor, elevator operator, and clerk. In the late 1950s, he attended Case Western Reserve University. Pekar began to immerse himself in modern jazz and hitchhiked to New York to hear more.

Upon returning to Cleveland, Pekar began to make extra money by writing about jazz. His first paycheck as a writer came around 1959 for a jazz review, and he published many more over the next few decades. His music writing appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and in the Cleveland magazine Urban Dialect, but also in national publications such as Down Beat, Jazz Times, and the prestigious Evergreen Review. An essay he wrote for a journal called Coda on renowned trumpeter Miles Davis's music of the 1960s was reprinted in 1997 in the book A Miles Davis Reader. Jazz enthusiasts know Pekar primarily as a music critic rather than as a writer of graphic novels.

Mundane job helps bring fame

Pekar's success as a jazz critic did not bring in a living wage, and for most of his life he would struggle financially. He married and divorced twice before meeting his third wife, activist and graphic journalist Joyce Brabant, and adopting a daughter, Danielle. Around 1965, Pekar found stability if not prosperity when he landed a job as a file clerk at a Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland. The work might seem monotonous for a creatively oriented person, but it fit Pekar well. "It was a simple job, and I was good at it," he told Michael Sangiacomo of the Plain Dealer. "I didn't dislike the job. I became the guy doctors relied on when they wanted to find something. It felt good." He felt little job stress and had plenty of energy left over for reading, writing, and continuing a lifelong process of self-education. "I would read about Western Europe. I would read about Britain in the eighteenth century, then I'd read about France in the eighteenth century," he told Comicon. "I always had a plan. The payoff was just learning and having that knowledge."

But the VA job was more than a paycheck that allowed Pekar to pursue creative activities. MacDonald wrote that "in looking over Pekar's life it becomes apparent that part of the reason for his fame and success is because of his having a mundane job, not in spite of it." Indeed, the small struggles of his co-workers such as Mr. Boats, an older African American man whose speech was laced with poetry, often furnished material for his writing. The ordinary texture of working life showed up in Pekar's tales. Underground artist R. Crumb (1943–) wrote, according to Los Angeles Times writer Robin V. Russin, that "Pekar has proven once and for all that even the most seemingly dreary and monotonous of lives is filled with poignancy and heroic struggle."

Illustrations enliven Pekar's writing

It was Crumb who led Pekar into the world of comics. The two met in the 1960s, at about the time that hippies and other dropouts from conventional society began to discover Crumb, and Pekar penned some essays about Crumb's work. Crumb in turn did drawings for a Pekar short story in 1972, and the two discussed a comic book based on Pekar's own life. The first American Splendor comics appeared soon after that, some of them with drawings by Crumb, and was published annually beginning in 1976. Pekar issued American Splendor himself for many years; finally, in the early 1990s, Dark Horse Comics picked it up.

Other artists also worked on American Splendor in its early years, and one of the most distinctive features of the comic over time has been the variety of artists Pekar has chosen to illustrate his words. The effect was to put different lenses to the ordinary events on which Pekar focused. Nearly two dozen artists in addition to Crumb have worked with Pekar; the list includes Chester Brown, Greg Budgett, Sue Cavey, Gary Dumm (an especially frequent contributor), William Fogg, Drew Friedman, Dean Haspiel (who drew The Quitter), Rebecca Huntington, Paul Mavrides, Val Mayerik, Alan Moore (1953–; see entry), Spain Rodriguez, Gerry Shamray, Carole Sobocinski, Frank Stack, J. R. Stats, Colin Upton, Ed Wesolowski, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, and Mark Zingarelli.

American Splendor got off to a slow start. "The early and middle seventies—what a lonely, awful time for me!" Pekar wrote in the 2001 issue of the comic, looking back at the early years. "It seems like it was always snowing and I was always looking out the window by myself." But word spread, first among comics fans and then among observers of new trends in popular culture. From time to time, Pekar managed to attract national notice, even though the idea of graphic art as a vehicle for anything other than superhero or fantasy concepts was still a novelty for all but devoted readers. In 1987, American Splendor won an American Book Award. One of Pekar's admirers was television host David Letterman, who had Pekar as a guest six times on his Late Night program in the 1980s. True to form, Pekar managed to aggravate Letterman by arguing with him vigorously on the air. He was eventually banned from the show after emphasizing the links between Letterman's NBC network and its corporate parent General Electric; he even wore an "On Strike Against NBC" T-shirt to one appearance. All these incidents showed up in American Splendor.

Turns horror of cancer into poignant story

Many American Splendor segments focus on mundane events such as Pekar family outings, but his 1994 book Our Cancer Year deals with a more serious episode: Pekar's 1990 cancer (lymphoma) diagnosis and subsequent chemotherapy treatment. Co-written with Joyce Brabner and illustrated by Frank Stack, Our Cancer Year presents an unflinching look at the chemotherapy process and the resulting strains in Pekar's family life. Part of the book leading up to Pekar's diagnosis dealt with the tortured process by which Pekar and Brabner acquired their first house. "The book (and their marriage) is distinguished by Brabner's great tenderness and determination in the middle of Pekar's medical nightmare," wrote Publishers Weekly, and Our Cancer Year was showered with rave reviews in leading publications. Pekar occasionally took a break from his own existence and wrote several biographical comics, such as Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill. McNeill was a Vietnam veteran, one of Pekar's VA hospital co-workers.

Pekar inspired younger artists to create comics based on their own lives, and he helped shape the everyday subject matter of alternative comics. In 2005, African American comics author Keith Knight, author of the syndicated K Chronicles, visited Pekar in Cleveland. Afterward Knight paid him homage in a comic that showed Pekar saying, "Yeah, the movie helped me sell some comics … so it worked out." The movie to which Pekar referred was American Splendor (2003), which finally propelled Pekar to a rank among the most famous writers of graphic novels.

American Splendor made an impact even on viewers who had never heard of Harvey Pekar. Actor Paul Giamatti (1967–) played Pekar. Pekar himself also appeared in the film, as an alter ego who converses with the Giamatti/Pekar character. Directed by Bob Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, the film had an experimental style that perhaps owed something to the innovations of Pekar's successors in the world of graphic literature: documentary-style fact, fiction, interviews, and other media were all mixed together. Pekar liked the film, which was both a rendering of the American Splendor books and an introduction of sorts to Pekar himself. "WOW!" he told Eric Olsen of the Plain Dealer, "That was really innovative the way they mixed acted portions and documentary footage and animation and cartoons, and double casting some roles. Great." He recounted his experiences with the film in a new book, Our Movie Year, and American Splendor earned awards at the prestigious Sundance and Cannes film festivals.

Living with his family in the hip suburb of Cleveland Heights, Harvey Pekar was finally on a roll. He made frequent appearances on college campuses, and he began his work with public radio station WKSU. The Quitter gained wide attention, and major publishers contracted for new Pekar books. Typically pessimistic, however, Pekar looked toward new problems in the future. "Yeah, yeah," he answered when asked by Don Kaplan of the New York Post whether the American Splendor film had made his books more popular. "But I'm wondering how long it's going to last. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop."

For More Information

Periodicals

Arnold, Andrew D. "Draw Your Life as a Comic." Time (April 27, 2001).

Olsen, Eric, "Film's Success Hasn't Spoiled This Everyman." The Plain Dealer (December 15, 2004): p. E1.

Russin, Robin V. Los Angeles Times Book Review (July 12, 1987): pp. 1, 11.

Sangiacomo, Michael. "Curmudgeon's Life a Blessing and a 'Curse' Everything Bothers Pekar Except Fame." The Plain Dealer (October 5, 2005): p. E1.

Wolff, Carlo. "A Life in Comic-Book Form: Quirky Harvey Pekar Suffered Early, Hard Twists." Denver Post (October 9, 2005): p. F11.

Web Sites

"About Harvey Pekar." Harvey Pekar. http://www.harveypekar.com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Kaplan, Don. "Harvey Pekar." New York Post Online. http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/53571.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006).

MacDonald, Heidi. "The Splendor of Harvey Pekar." Comicon. http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=next_topic&f=36&t=003134&go=newer (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Wolk, Douglas. "Notes from a Famous Nobody." Salon. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/10/06/pekar (accessed on May 3, 2006).