Writer: Harvey Pekar
Artists: Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik and Gerry Shamray
Price: $15.95
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0-345-46830-9

"The guys who do that animal comic stuff an' super-hero stuff for straight comics are really limited because they gotta try t'appeal to kids. Th' guys who do underground comics have really opened things up, but there are still plenty more things that can be done with 'em. They got great potential. You c'n do as much with comics as the novel or movies or plays or anything; you c'n do anything with words an' pictures!"
- Harvey Pekar, "The Young Crumb Story"

The most important thing to learn from reading Harvey Pekar's AMERICAN SPLENDOR is that you should always write stuff down. Pekar's fashioned an entire career out of it. Granted it was a career that he carried out on the side, such is the place of comic books in the modern economic world. For the past thirty-odd years, Pekar has worked a day job at a Veteran Affairs hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. And the hospital has provided an enormous wealth of vignettes.

Everyone knows a Harvey Pekar. He's a guy far too creative and intelligent for the kind of job he's working in. Like a lot of working-class artists, he's never had the financial freedom to drop everything in the pursuit of creating art. Perhaps it's the fear of being poor (or being poor again or becoming even more poor) that kept Pekar as a file clerk, but the fact remains; the file clerk job probably didn't occupy a whole lot of his brain anyway. Creative people can go stir crazy when they don't have an outlet. Perhaps that's what R Crumb saw in Pekar.

In addition to being a jazz critic and magazine writer, Pekar was fortunate enough to have met R Crumb back when Crumb was working for American Greeting Cards in Cleveland, Ohio. When given the first script for what would become AMERICAN SPLENDOR, Crumb uncharacteristically offered to illustrate it. Using Crumb's popularity as ballast, Pekar enlisted the work of a number of other cartoonists such as Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, Gerry Shamray, Chester Brown, Spain and Drew Friedman.

Pekar has been publishing AMERICAN SPLENDOR since 1976, which was a good time for someone to decide to turn comics into something more literary. Around this time, Jim Steranko published RED TIDE and Will Eisner published A CONTRACT WITH GOD. There's a spot of contention about which comic is technically the first graphic novel, but it's more important to note that both comics had a heavy influence on the medium and on fandom.

In the 1970s, Comics fandom had entered a much more mature stage in its existence. Readers were looking for something that appealed to their lives or lifestyle. They wanted to read comics that would affect them emotionally in an art style they're familiar with. Since Harvey Pekar went and turned himself into a comic book character, millions of other artists have done the same. Most notably today with the Journal Comic movement, where artists keep a daily comic diary of their "life and times".

And these comics have spread the medium's appeal to readers who don't generally read comics.

Recently, a movie has been made of AMERICAN SPLENDOR, and it's a further validation of comic books. So in conjunction with the movie, Ballantine has repackaged the first two AMERICAN SPLENDOR anthologies into one book - complete with a picture of Paul Giamatti on the front - and this collection is a real peach.

For those familiar with the movie, this collection of AMERICAN SPLENDOR features many strips that were adapted to the screen. There's "The Harvey Pekar Name Story" and "Jack the Bellboy and Mr Boats," and "A Marriage Album", which tells the story of Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's romance.

The artwork in this anthology ranges from the familiar work of R Crumb to the pointillism of Sue Cavey, which is at times so light that the image nearly fades away. This is a stark contrast to the style of Drew Friedman, a later contributor to AMERICAN SPLENDOR, who used pointillism to render every blemish on a human being's face, which oftentimes creates a rather grotesque interpretation of Pekar.

It's Crumb who has the most intense rendition of Pekar, in that he draws him with torn shirts and looking generally scrubby. Crumb's interpretation of Pekar is reminiscent of Crumb's rendition of himself. It's rather harsh and oppressive, focusing on the negative aspects of his character; however in the introduction to this collection, Crumb makes this observation about Harvey Pekar that works slightly out-of-synch with the hard luck, average Joe persona Pekar has adopted:

"Harvey was the first person I ever met who I thot (sic) was a genuine 'hipster.' I was very impressed. He was heavily into modern jazz, had big crazy abstract paintings on the walls of his pad, talked bop lingo, had shelves and shelves of books and records, and never cleaned his apartment ... and he was seething intense, burning up, always moving, pacing, jumping around ... just like a character out of Kerouac."

Gerry Shamray's interpretation of Pekar is much softer than Crumb's interpretation, but not as soft as Sue Cavey's. Shamray does seem to touch on this "always moving, pacing, jumping around" character.

None of the artists are given much to work with as far as backgrounds go. Oftentimes, an entire story consists entirely of Pekar addressing the reader. At times the background is simply a blank panel, as in the Crumb illustrated "The Harvey Pekar Name Story". With most of Gerry Shamray's work, Pekar is positioned in a park or near a lake, where he fidgets and shuffles about while contemplating his place as an aging hipster in this world.

The early strips are focused on introducing Pekar as a character. Rather than start at the beginning, as the movie does, Pekar started in some indeterminate place and then moved around from there creating a concentric autobiography. The film is much more linear and works to fit each story together in one narrative.

Pekar isn't afraid to show himself at his most mundane or compromising moments. He's not afraid to be a jerk. He's precisely how filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini interpreted Pekar for the screen; however, taking a look at the body of his AMERICAN SPLENDOR work, Pekar rarely shows his other characters in such diminishing light as he does himself.

He does, in fact, show great compassion towards Toby Radloff, a friend at the VA hospital with a compulsive love of REVENGE OF THE NERDS and jellybeans. Where Radloff could easily be exploited for comic fodder, Pekar instead chooses to be objective and allow the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions. The strip about Radloff and REVENGE OF THE NERDS appears in a different anthology, THE NEW AMERICAN SPLENDOR ANTHOLOGY.

The collection, released in conjunction with the film, serves as an introduction to Pekar's comic world rather than as a strict companion piece to the film. As such, Pekar's struggle with lymphoma is documented in the book OUR CANCER YEAR, by Pekar and Brabner. It's worth noting that the two are at work on a new AMERICAN SPLENDOR book, titled OUR MOVIE YEAR.

Inspiration is a tricky thing. It tends to show up when you're not expecting it. Whether you're stuck behind old Jewish ladies at the supermarket, on jury duty, or when you've been rejected from THE VILLAGE VOICE. What Harvey Pekar constantly proves with AMERICAN SPLENDOR is that these things are important. If they're not written down, they're lost.

Frank Smith is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.