Harvey Pekar: The Epiphany of the Everyday

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The remarkable comic book storyteller Harvey Pekar, who died yesterday at his Cleveland home at the age of 70, was at least twenty years ahead of his time. Harvey's wonderful tales, foregrounding the epiphanic ordinariness of everyday life, in many ways anticipated the democratic art of blogging.

Harvey and I had some sweet exchanges by phone and mail back in the 1980s. I loved his work, and we shared certain interests.

For those who may have missed Harvey's work -- which probably would not have been easy, given that his life was made into a successful indie movie, American Splendor, with Paul Giamatti playing Harvey -- here is my review of the fourteenth volume in his American Splendor series (the "David Letterman Exploitation Issue"), from the San Francisco Chronicle, 10 September, 1989.



Harvey Pekar leads an unlikely double life: As revolutionary neo-realist comic book creator and 1980s underground cult figure, he also holds a daytime file clerk's job in a Cleveland Veterans Administration hospital.

Pekar's American Splendor comic books are an ongoing autobiography in the form of serial tales, employing standard comic-book format -- what the down-to-earth Pekar terms the "balloons and panels and stuff." But his work's similarity to the conventional version of the genre ends there.

Pekar's storytelling burden, as he's stated, is "the accumulation of everyday experience," whose "huge effect on people" he feels is too little taken into account by most literary practitioners. As a comic-book writer he is a formal innovator who insistently subverts and undermines the conventions of his medium, challenging it to turn aside from mindless fantasy superheroics to capture the intimate experiential veracity of American life.

Defying customary rules of the trade, Pekar tells his illustrators (who range from relative unknowns to big-name comic stars such as R. Crumb and Drew Friedman) he doesn't want them drawing generic characters: "Pick out a specific model." In most of his stories, the principal visual model is the author himself, the experiences chronicled his own and those of friends and people with whom he works.

Following the publication of a pair of mass-market compilations of his work by Doubleday, Pekar became a minor culture-hero in a historic series of 1986-1987 appearances on the David Letterman show. On Late Night, he simply played himself as portrayed in his comics, the rough-edged but enlightened underdog in jeans, T-shirt and working-class accent. He managed to upstage Letterman and and sabotage the show. He was not invited back, but his nervy media-deconstruction caper on NBC -- "throwing a monkey wrench in the works" he proudly termed it -- hardly hurt American Splendor: Pekar's struggling 10,000 copies-per-issue self-produced comic was soon slouching its seedy, insidious way into many more American TV living rooms.

His exploits on the Letterman show provide cover material for the eagerly awaited 14th annual edition of American Splendor. It's labeled, with typical Pekarian unashamed directness, the "David Letterman Exploitation Issue," and inside, it contains a close-up visual transcript of the explosive last show, billed "Grand Finale."

But the most ambitious and successful story in the issue is actually a 22-pager titled "Lost and Found," a candid confessional testament of the intense comic artist's true-life torments of absentmindedness. Here, small hang-ups over incidentals are seen blowing Pekar's personal life into the case-study range hinted at in his frank self-description, at the outset, as a "compulsive nut."

"Lost and Found" is a good example of Pekar's faux-naif comic procedures. The story assaults you frontally with slice-of-life detail and a disarmingly confidential first-person narrative, but just back of the humdrum action and realist shtick, you soon get a sense of a conscious artist pulling the strings.

Reverse-illusion, the deflation of stock suspense, is a common Pekar tactic. When the neurotic author misplaces a book and his day collapses around him, we're given an early, suspense-breaking peek at the "missing" book -- sitting innocently on a table just beneath the phone that's used by an unknowing Harvey to frantically phone bookstores in quest of a replacement volume.

Another Pekar trademark is the anticlimactic, nonsequitur-ish flat ending. My favorite Pekar ending is one in which, at the conclusion of an agonizingly bad day, our hero quietly exults over a fresh loaf of bread as he brings it home from the store. "Pre-Dawn Ride," in this issue, ends on a similar moment of unexpected, quiet revelation, with the source of joy a sunrise glimpsed from an airport parking lot.

And "Lost and Found," too, closes on a grace note of reconciliation and acknowledgment -- in the forgiveness of one's own eccentricity without self-consciousness or judgment -- that has the calm equilibrium and unaffected dignity that Harvey Pekar's work projects at its best.

Harvey Pekar with his wife Joyce Brabner at Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York, 4 October 1985: photographer unknown, photo courtesy of Hallwalls archive
American Splendor, Vol. I, No. 1, 1976: art by R. Crumb, written and published by Harvey Pekar