SOURCE: Witek, Joseph. “‘You Can Do Anything with Words and Pictures’: Harvey Pekar's American Splendor.” In Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, pp. 121-56. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

[In the following essay, Witek traces the history of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor series, asserting that Pekar's work represents a unique contribution to the comic book format—due to its focus on everyday life—and reverses the traditionally escapist tendencies of American graphic narratives.]

American Splendor refuses to fit into any of the main categories of American comic books. This self-published black-and-white magazine-sized comic book is not a superhero or adventure comic, like nearly everything published by the two main comics publishers, Marvel and DC. It doesn't parody or rework traditional comic-book formulas, like most of the black-and-white comics put out by the growing number of “independent” publishers. And despite its roots in the underground comix, American Splendor is neither a holdover from the counterculture nor an avant-garde graphics anthology, like Art Spiegelman's Raw. It is, simply, “The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar.”¹

In each American Splendor, published and distributed annually since 1976 by Pekar himself, Pekar writes stories about his own daily life, depicts anecdotes and conversations he has heard and overheard, dramatizes vignettes from his civil-service job in Cleveland, and presents his often glum ruminations about his career and his life in general. Pekar works full time as a file clerk in Cleveland's Veterans Hospital, and his comic books generally sell about enough copies to break even. Harvey Pekar does not draw his own comics, and in each issue of American Splendor he collaborates with several different artists. Pekar's friend and best-known collaborator, Robert Crumb, explains Pekar's creative procedure:

Usually he writes his story ideas soon after the event, while the nuances of it are still fresh in his mind. He always has a large backlog of these stories, which he can choose from to compose each new issue of American Splendor. He writes the stories in a crudely laid-out comic page format using stick figures, with the dialogue over their heads, and some descriptive directions for the artist to work from. The next phase involves calling up various artists and haranguing [sic] them to take on particular stories.²

The cover blurbs of some individual issues of American Splendor reveal both Pekar's self-mocking irony and the comic book's relentlessly quotidian focus: “More Depressing Stories from Harvey Pekar's Hum-Drum Life”; “Stories about Sickness and Old People”; “Big Divorce Issue”; “Life as a War of Attrition.” Pekar's stories reverse the traditional escapism of American comic-books; American Splendor explores the horrors and adventures of everyday life: facing a dull job on Monday, losing glasses, being called for jury duty, breaking up with a lover.

Pekar's settings are the street corners and workplaces of lower-class Cleveland, his music the cadences of ethnic and working-class speech. Pekar told an interviewer, “I want to write literature that pushes people into their lives rather than helping them escape from them. Most comic books are vehicles for escapism, which I think is unfortunate. I think that the so-called average person often exhibits a great deal of heroism in getting through an ordinary day, and yet the reading public takes this heroism for granted. They'd rather read about Superman than themselves.”³American Splendor, like no other comic book before it, examines and celebrates the agonies and triumphs of individual life. By the standards of mainstream comic books, Harvey Pekar's stories are, as Robert Crumb says, “so staggeringly mundane as to border on the exotic!”⁴ The works of Jack Jackson and Art Spiegelman, though daring and original in execution, are extensions of well-established comic-book genres, but Pekar's American Splendor takes sequential art into realistic and autobiographical places where comics have almost never been before.

Harvey Pekar specializes in comic-book stories which present his own life in all its ordinariness and which examine his often prickly personality with all its annoying, frustrating, and disagreeable traits. Pekar tries to balance each issue of American Splendor, mixing short humorous pieces with long autobiographical stories and philosophical reflections, and his own moods in the stories range from angry paranoia about his personal frustrations to (relatively) cheery optimism about his life as a writer. The stories in American Splendor often attempt to present experience as precisely as possible; Pekar says of his approach to realism in comic books: “I try to be as accurate as I possibly can because I want people to identify with my work. For me, I can't go wrong if I get stuff accurate, even if people stumble, fumble around when they're talking. I'm obsessed with getting details accurate. I might employ a linear narrative style in one story and a non-linear style in another, but I'm always trying to be true to the facts.”⁵

The diversity of Pekar's narrative approaches is a paradoxical outgrowth of his single-minded autobiographical focus. Pekar uses both first- and third-person narration; some stories are told entirely in captions, some are nearly silent pantomimes, with little or no dialogue. A “Harvey Pekar” figure is not present in every piece in American Splendor, yet even in those stories and vignettes that are about other people, the author is present by implication as an observer or listener; when Pekar does not appear, one critic notes, “we understand that we are listening to what Pekar himself overheard.”⁶ Many of the stories do feature a protagonist named “Harvey Pekar,” but Pekar also adopts a number of fictionalized autobiographical personae, including “Herschel,” “Our Man,” and “Jack the Bellboy.” The Pekar character is recognizable by his distinctive characteristics; he is dark-haired with sideburns (and in the later issues a receding hairline), casual if not downright slovenly in dress, usually stoical in expression, and he works at what the persona often calls a “flunky job.” Pekar's stories often end ambiguously, with the only conclusion an offhand moral tacked on by the narrator.

The vast distance between what one Pekar-persona calls his “neo-realistic style”⁷ and the usual concerns and procedures of American comic books appears in stories like “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day.”⁸ The title points to Pekar's perennial theme of the not-so-quiet desperation of everyday life. The story opens with the protagonist, called here “our man,” on the phone with his ex-wife as he complains about his loneliness. He asks if they can see each other again, “sorta on a experimental basis.” She tells him that she is seeing someone new, and his pleading turns to bitterness and anger:

“OUR Man”:
I shoulda known better than to call. You know I still care about you but you don't give a shit for me.
EX-WIFE:
That's not true. I'm concerned about you. I want you to do well. It's just that …
“OUR Man”:
Yeah, sure, I've heard it before. Well, lemme tell you somethin', you lousy bitch, with friends like you, I don't need no enemies. …
“OUR Man”:
… You lousy …
EX-WIFE:
That's why I don't want to see you. You haven't changed at all. Well, I don't have to listen to you anymore (click).

Disappointed at the rebuff and disgusted with himself for both his forlorn hope and what he knows to be his foul temper, “our man” wonders what to do next. He's tired of watching television, and the Cleveland winter makes it too cold for him to hang out on the street corner. With nothing else to do, he lies down for a short nap, only to awaken at six the next morning, having slept all night in his clothes. His drab room is cold and he feels jittery, so he masturbates to calm himself down. He tries to think of a fantasy woman, which reminds him of his troubles with “chicks”: “It ain't right for asshole chicks t'have good bodies. … Hmm, I'll think about Susan. She's good lookin' an' she was real nice t'me, too.” His face relaxes as he reaches orgasm, but he feels “sad an' hollow” when he is finished. He needs to get ready for work at his “shit gig,” so he gets up, sheds his slept-in clothes, and takes a bath. The warm bath is comforting, but he is reluctant to get back out into his cold apartment. As he considers his history of poor jobs, he thinks that a nervous breakdown might be a welcome relief from his routine existence, then realizes that, “If I freaked out I'd have t' start from further back than this.”

He finally steels himself and gets out of the tub, only to find that his socks are full of holes and his clothes are falling apart. He eats a breakfast of sugared children's cereal, puts on his coat, walks out into the wintry wind, and slogs his way through the snow to the subway station. All through his morning routine, “our man” keeps up a running internal monologue as he ponders how to find a new girlfriend and get a better job. (“Awaking to the Terror of the New Day” is set before the Pekar-protagonist starts working at his government job as a hospital file clerk.) The final panel shows “our man” planning his new life strategy: “I'll check out the gover'mint gig scene an' think over where I stand with th' chicks I know. Maybe I'm overlookin' someone. T'day's Thursday, tomorra's Friday. Saturday I c'n sleep late.”

The narrator ends the story with a caption: “Man looks wherever he can for hope.” This weakly optimistic closing moral would be simply trite were it not totally undercut by the following story in American Splendor no. 3, “Awaking to the Terror of the Same Old Day,” where the same protagonist, called “our hero” this time, suffers through a dull and frustrating weekend which reminds him that Saturdays are no panacea for his loneliness and depression.

While American Splendor is too varied for any single story to serve as a paradigm, “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day” does display many of Pekar's typical themes and narrative strategies. Pekar's work first drew attention because of his collaboration with the famous comix artist Robert Crumb, but more often in American Splendor his stories are drawn by the Cleveland team of Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm. A critic has described their work:

When Budgett and Dumm work together, which is most of the time, Budgett does the pencil drawings and Dumm inks them. The result is a good, “solid” and essentially traditional comic book style. Pekar refers to their work as having a “strong, funky feel”. …

Working as a team, Budget and Dumm have appeared in every issue of American Splendor except #4,⁹ but in that issue Dumm, working alone, had a seven pager and the back cover. Clearly these two are Harvey's chief collaborators and they, even more than Crumb, give American Splendor its special character.¹⁰

The relatively crude postures and broad brushstrokes of Budgett and Dumm's artwork are peculiarly appropriate to Pekar's brand of low-brow realism. The drawing style in “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day” defines itself by what is not. It avoids the glamorizing foreshortening and hyperbolic muscularity of the superhero comics; here the figures are accurately proportioned, and the perspectives generally are from eye level. Budgett and Dumm's drawings lack too the comic exaggerations of the conventional “bigfoot” humor style. (Robert Crumb's is a good example of a “cartoony” style, although his recent experiments with a brushstroke technique in American Splendor are more realistic.)

In “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day,” the awkward posture of “our man” as he gets into bed conveys his emotional unease, just as his corpselike positioning after his masturbation reinforces the hollowness he feels. While a more sophisticated use of shading and cross-hatching might make the textures in the story more conventionally “realistic,” the blunt lines and simple surfaces of Budgett and Dumm's rendering create a drab and dilapidated visual counterpart to “our man's” depression and alienation.

Though the themes and motifs of “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day” are characteristic of American Splendor, Pekar's emphases have shifted somewhat since 1978; rarely in recent years does “our man” find himself in such desperate economic and emotional straits. In addition, the protagonist stops calling women “chicks,” and as Pekar further develops his own approach to comic books as opposed to the underground comix, he tends to avoid writing explicitly sexual incidents like the masturbation scene. But remaining constant in Pekar's work are “our man's” hot temper, his problematic relations with women, his reclusiveness, his transcendental cheapness (he's upset at the poor condition of his clothes, not because he wants to look good or keep warm, but because, “I hate t' spend money on clothes”), and his habit of eating junk food. Pekar is more than willing to make himself look unpleasant in the interest of verisimilitude; as he says, “People are always talking about me being cheap, gloomy, inconsiderate, and having a bad temper. It would be crazy for me to whitewash myself. In that case nobody would want to look at my stuff; they couldn't relate to it.”¹¹

Pekar also continues to use the strategy of presenting a seemingly arbitrary stretch of time in his stories; “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day” ends at the subway station, not because the action has risen to a state of tension which has then been resolved, but because “our man's” immediate train of thought has ended. Like many of Pekar's stories, this one emphasizes the physical details of everyday life; no matter how abstruse the philosophical speculation becomes in American Splendor, the world of decaying plaster and kiddie cereals is not far away. For example, “our man's” bath takes up twelve panels; the scene is stretched out over three pages in which the protagonist sits in his bathtub, gets out, shivers, and looks into his sock drawer. With its subtly shifting panel breakdowns and the precise verbal flow of “our man's” complaints and ruminations, the scene reads smoothly and plausibly.

The artwork makes subtle and effective verbal/visual connections: “our man” thinks about his “crib that's falling apart” as his blank gaze leads to a hole in the plaster wall; the perspective wittily shifts to include the toilet behind his head as he thinks, “… an' no relief in sight.” But to comic-book readers who are accustomed only to brightly colored breakneck fight scenes between cosmos-spanning power figures with the fate of the universe at stake, “our man's” morose toilette in lower-class Cleveland, Ohio, must seem very small beer indeed. Perhaps Harvey Pekar's most startling innovation in the comic-book form is not that he bases his stories on real life but that, in the search for an accurate and believable rendering of experience, he is willing to write stories that can be as drab, depressing, and tedious as life itself. Pekar's aesthetic of aggressively humdrum realism struggles against the tide of decades of comic-book fantasy and escapism.

Still, autobiographical and confessional stories have been written in comic books before American Splendor, almost solely in the underground comix.¹² The stylistic expansion of the underground comix artists, especially of the former Clevelander Robert Crumb, helped to inspire Pekar to work in the comic-book form. Pekar says, “All these guys who were doing this stuff, the underground cartoonists, were involved in the hippie subculture. And I thought, why can't you do stuff about everyday life, the life that I'm leading. And I said, ‘Absolutely nothing.’ Comics should not be considered a limited medium.”¹³ Pekar's emphasis on realistically drawn figures and open-ended slice-of-life vignettes makes American Splendor's tone quite different from the hyperbolic self-dramatization of most personal stories in the undergrounds.

For instance, perhaps the best example of autobiography in the comix is Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green's confessional memoir of the neuroses caused by a traumatizing Roman Catholic education.¹⁴ Green opens the book with “A Confession to My Readers,” showing the artist chained naked and upside down, drawing the comic with a pen held in his teeth and an ink bottle labeled “Dad's blood” by his side while a record player plays a warped version of “Ave Maria” in the background. Binky Brown hilariously tells how Green's autobiographical persona, the adolescent Binky Brown, struggles to reconcile his awakening sexuality with the strictures of the Catholic Church.

Unable to repress his taboo “impure thoughts,” Binky falls prey to bizarre obsessions and paranoid hallucinations in which his bodily members give off phallic rays that threaten to defile churches for miles around him. Guilt and sin have rarely been evoked in any medium with such wild self-laceration and absurd humor, and Binky Brown is one of the classics of the comic-book form. But though Green shares with Harvey Pekar an impulse toward psychological self-examination and brutally honest soul baring, Green's comically extravagant surrealism has more in common with the rest of the unfettered undergrounds than with Pekar's sometimes dour, often ironic rendering of immediate experience.

Precisely how Pekar's approach to American Splendor differs from the underground comix can be explained by considering the autobiographical stories of the ubiquitous Robert Crumb. Crumb and Pekar first met in Cleveland in 1962, before Crumb's comic-book work had been published, and Crumb was instrumental in getting Pekar's first comic-book stories published in the undergrounds in 1972.¹⁵ Many of Crumb's stories at least profess to be about his own life, and the bespectacled and mustached artist is a familiar figure to readers of Robert Crumb's own underground comics. Crumb often directly addresses the reader, as in his parodic defense of his controversial depictions of women, “And Now, A Word to You Feminist Women”;¹⁶ the artist-figure is the protagonist of a number of other stories, such as “The Adventures of R. Crumb Himself,”¹⁷ “My Troubles with Women,”¹⁸ “The Confessions of R. Crumb,” and “The R. Crumb ＄uck＄e＄＄ Story.”¹⁹

Pekar too sometimes writes stories in which an autobiographical persona addresses the reader, but when Crumb cannot resist transforming his personal stories into self-parodies and shameless fantasies, Pekar's commitment to straightforward candor and direct rendering of experience keeps his stories serious in tone and realistic in style. An example of what Pekar does not do is his collaborator's ironic “The Confessions of R. Crumb.” The story opens with the artist at his drawing board, cheerily looking out at us as he explains his artistic and commercial success. His wastebasket is stuffed with lucrative offers from publishers and agents; an arrow points to it with the label, “Notice: R. Crumb does not sell out!”

As Crumb praises freedom of expression in America, an American flag appears behind him, and he lapses into jingoistic patriotic slogans as a pair of Mickey Mouse ears sprout from his head and he sings a verse from “This Land is Your Land.” Soon, a vaudeville emcee who looks like Groucho Marx kicks him through a set of doors marked “Hi! Welcome to Crumbland,” and the artist realizes that “the wonderful world of R. Crumb turns out to be nothing but an endless black void!!” The blackness becomes his mother's womb, and he emerges a bloody infant complete with glasses and a mustache. The story ends as a juvenile Crumb, wearing a schoolboy uniform and carrying a Roy Rogers briefcase, vows to get his revenge: “Someday when I'm a big man, they'll be sorry!!”²⁰

In Harvey Pekar's “American Splendor Assaults the Media,” drawn by Robert Crumb, Pekar too addresses the reader to rant about his lack of commercial success and to wallow (like Crumb, always with a sharp sense of self-irony) in self-pity.²¹ But Crumb, naturally enough for such a gifted draftsman, habitually conceives of his life and problems in terms of images (the “Crumbland” theme park; the return to the womb; big-legged, large-buttocked women as sex objects); Pekar explains his difficulties in front of a plain dark background as he is surrounded by masses of words that confine and oppress him. The visual dimension of the story is still crucial; the images and the jagged page layout support and ratify Harvey's poverty and anger, and the panels focus attention on the figure of Harvey himself. A maniacal-looking Harvey is disgusted to find that the Village Voice has hired what he believes to be an inferior cartoonist, even though the editors claimed to be interested in his work; Harvey sits in a warehouse amid boxes of unsold issues of American Splendor, pounding his fist in frustration; Harvey glares out at the reader with beetled brow, wearing a ripped T-shirt.

Harvey's diatribe against the calumny of editors and the cheapness of promises ends, not with a sex fantasy, as does Crumb's story, but with an explanation of why he writes American Splendor:

I was gonna write this jive woman a nasty letter, but a guy at work talked me out of it …

Friend: Wadda you wanna do that for? They'll just laugh at you. … They'll think you're a crank. … They don't care about you. …

So I sublimated by writing this. … That's about what I can do when things bother me—write stories about them. …

Where comix artists such as Justin Green and Robert Crumb turn their personal difficulties and psychological struggles into surrealistic high farce, Harvey Pekar at first considers venting his rage. Then he turns his anger into language.

Like his friend Crumb, Harvey Pekar is bothered by many things, and he is something of a crank. His stories show him to be frugal to the point of miserliness (and in the past, to the point of petty larceny), easily irritated at everything from old Jewish ladies in supermarkets to the American legal system, sloppily dressed, manic, inconsiderate, and crabby. He is also an extraordinarily keen observer with an eye for the everyday surrealism of human behavior. Pekar collects jazz records and writes articles and reviews for some of the leading American jazz magazines, and he brings a musician's ear to the rhythms of daily speech and the nuances of ethnic dialects; many of the short pieces in American Splendor are simply celebrations of the way people talk.

Where Jack Jackson inserts contemporary diction into historical stories to counteract their distancing “pastness,” Pekar uses the precision of his ear to convince us that his stories happened exactly as he tells them. Pekar is also a voracious reader. Though his formal schooling lasted only a year beyond high school, Pekar has educated himself about literature, history, and economics by an intensive regime of self-imposed study. He has written for various publications on popular culture, African history, and socialism, and has published discussions of writers such as George Ade, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.

Pekar's critical concentration on the masters of American realism indicates the wellsprings of his home-grown aesthetic. Though Pekar is familiar with the history and traditions of comics, his approach in American Splendor is closer to the realists of prose literature than to anything that has appeared in comic books before. Pekar sometimes pays direct homage to his literary influences. In “Grubstreet, U.S.A.,” Pekar draws a parallel between his own efforts to find an audience for American Splendor and the struggles of the novelist George Gissing in Victorian England: “God, these guys can't make any money unless they write commercial crap. They live hand-to-mouth, they're looked down on by middle class an' upper class people. …”²² Pekar realizes he could be describing himself but then undercuts his own self-dramatization when he thinks of the security he has from his civil-service day job: “I don't wanna exaggerate, though. I had the advantage over those funky Victorian writers in one big way, so y'don't have to feel as sorry for me as I do for myself. (However, I'd appreciate as much pity as you can give me.)”²³ The one-page story “Katherine Mansfield” is Pekar's internal monologue about Mansfield, mortality, and his own place in literature. The story, drawn by Gary Dumm, shows Harvey sitting in a chair reading Mansfield's Bliss. He thinks:

Some of her stories are almost flawless. She had so much going for her—sensitivity, a fine appreciation of irony, excellent technique, a strong intellect, broad vein of lyricism. … dead at thirty-four.

What kinda woman was she? Would it've been a letdown t'meet her? She'd have t'be something else in person to measure up to her writing.

All these writers that say so much to me: her, George Eliot, Balzac, all dead. I got an advantage—I'm alive. It's my time now; I'm the one doing the living. … But not forever. I got about thirty years if I get my quota. Everything over that is gravy. I know it; I'm not cocky just because I'm still breathing.

Here were these people, thinking so profoundly, feeling passionately, seeing so much. Their books are my great companions, but reading them is like looking through a one way window.

The story ends with Harvey looking through a doorway, his back to the reader, thinking, “Will anyone at all read my stuff after I'm dead? Will they wonder what kind of guy I was?”²⁴ The strip has almost no action; Harvey sits and reads, gets up, and thinks. The structure of Harvey's thoughts indicates Pekar's typical concerns. He moves from a literary analysis of Mansfield's writing to the facts of her life, and thence to his own life and work.

His self-absorption might seem at first to be simply banal or narcissistic, and some of his stories do flirt with sentimental self-indulgence. But Pekar's commitment to the standards of realism finally justify, to him and to most of his readers, his self-centered focus. When asked why he writes autobiographically, Pekar says, “Well, I may have a bigger ego than most people—that's for others to decide—but the main reason I write autobiographically is because I find it hard to understand why I myself do things, let alone why others do them. I want my writing to be as accurate and plausible as possible.”²⁵

For Pekar, accuracy and plausibility in his comic books is entirely consistent with the tenets of literary realism. He deals with immediate experience, physical details, specific actions, and the ethical consequences of everyday life. In his stories he emphasizes character, both his own and that of the people he meets, and, like realists such as Stephen Crane and Sinclair Lewis, he writes stories populated almost entirely by the lower and middle classes. His writing style usually eschews the neat packaging of traditional plot; his stories often seem to be all middle and no ending. This is hardly startling stuff for prose fiction, but in the traditionally escapist and formulaic medium of sequential art, to imitate Balzac and George Eliot is an avant-garde move.

Though many of Pekar's short pieces look very much like gag comic strips, they usually end on a reflective or ambiguous note. Readers accustomed to the iron-bound Aristotelean structure of the standard three-panel newspaper strip often simply miss the point of Pekar's stories. Says Pekar, “I try to avoid pat endings; plot means nothing to me.”²⁶ Pekar's approach to incident is essentially atmospheric, meant to evoke the chance encounters and dimly apprehended meanings of daily life. For example, the one-page “A Case Quarter”²⁷ shows Harvey holding change in his palm as he approaches a postage stamp vending machine at the hospital where he works. A workman already at the machine asks, “Hey, Harvey, you gotta case quarter for two dimes anna nickel? This machine only takes two quarters an' I awreddy got one in but I need another one.” Harvey tells him, “Well, actually I was gonna use these f'r stamps myself.” Harvey checks his pockets, finds more change, and gives the man a quarter. The final panel is split diagonally into two parts, with each man heading in an opposite direction, both looking satisfied as they hold their stamps. The narrative caption reads, “Less than thirty seconds later … stamps for the world.”

This story is indeed an imitation of a completed action, and the three tiers constitute a beginning, middle, and end, but Aristotle might well question the magnitude of the incident, and “A Case Quarter” has no climactic punch line that would be recognized on the newspaper comics page. The emphasis here is on the speech of the characters, especially the distinctive phrase “case quarter,” as the title indicates. The slang adjective “case” denotes a thing which completes a series (as in “case ace,” the last ace in a deck of cards being dealt). As the parodic universalizing of the narrative voice suggests, the theme of this vignette is the way people help to complete each other's lives in small and almost unnoticed ways.

Pekar has published dozens of such one-page stories, and in them he is usually more concerned with accurately rendering daily speech than with making formal jokes. When the stories in American Splendor do have punch lines, it is usually when the people around Pekar fall habitually or unconsciously into comic modes of presenting themselves, as in “The Last Supper”, drawn by Robert Crumb.²⁸ The master comedian Crumb often draws the traditionally humorous stories by Pekar as opposed to the more autobiographical or reflective parts of American Splendor. In “The Last Supper,” a slouching office worker named Rudy is late to work. Rudy explains that his father died in the middle of last night's supper and that his mother is mad at him. A woman asks why, and Rudy replies dead-pan, “UH … I asked if I could finish his pudding. …” Though the ironic title and the blackly humorous punch line make this a gag strip, the story combines vaudeville slapstick with a visual character study of an office oddball. The story emphasizes the workaday atmosphere that Crumb's cartoony drawing style so lovingly evokes: the lounging office worker, the cluttered file cabinets with comic strips taped on the side, the varied expressions of Rudy's listeners.

While many of Pekar's stories and vignettes are funny and interesting in their own right, the repetition of characters and scenes and the accretion of a variety of incidents make reading American Splendor a cumulative experience, unlike the self-contained gag strips in the newspapers. In a comic book that is thoroughly rooted in the life of a single person, the relativity of individual identity becomes a major thematic subtext.

In traditional prose autobiography, the author creates an “I” over which he or she at least ostensibly has total control, and this identity usually remains stable in the text. But since Pekar does not draw his own stories, the visual component of his character is continually being interpreted by his artist-collaborators, and these versions of Harvey overlay the fictional personae he adopts for himself. Pekar says: “I think that ultimately it's been an advantage to work with a whole variety of artists. I'm like a casting director. While I may not have the control I'd have if I was drawing the stuff myself, I've got guys that together can cover pretty much the whole gamut, where an individual couldn't. I can get guys that collectively can do things that no one person could do, with all the styles I have to draw from.”²⁹ Despite the singleness of his autobiographical vision and the willed smallness of his arena of action, Harvey Pekar is many people, and in American Splendor the sequential art medium embodies in its material form the collaboration of other people in the construction of individual identity.

The variety of “Harvey Pekars” appears overtly in “A Marriage Album”.³⁰ Pekar cites this narratively complex reminiscence as an attempt to translate the prose stream-of-consciousness technique into comic-book form.³¹ In “A Marriage Album,” the author-figure is called both “Herschel” (Harvey Pekar's Yiddish name) and “Harvey”; his wife is simply called “Joyce.” Herschel/Harvey sees his wife off to an appointment, works at writing for a while, then lapses into a reverie about his new marriage. Joyce, meanwhile, tells her part of the story to her friends, and the two halves of the narrative combine in counterpoint to one another.

Harvey and Joyce recall how they met through corresponding about American Splendor and, despite personal obstacles (such as Harvey's two previous marriages and his thorny idiosyncrasies), eventually got married. As Joyce flies to Cleveland to meet Harvey in person for the first time, she reflects on what she knows of his appearance. Her thought balloon is filled with eight different versions of Harvey's face, each drawn in the style of the one of the artists who works on American Splendor: an angry, sweating Harvey as seen by Robert Crumb, a profile of Harvey in Sue Cavey's elegantly stippled style, a reflective Harvey in Gerry Shamray's impressionist mode. When Joyce meets Harvey, his multiple identities resolve for her into a single real person, but for readers of the story this Harvey is simply another representation in Val Mayerik's fluid line. The stylistic diversity of Pekar's many artist-collaborators, the various fictionalizing personae Pekar adopts, and the wide range of his narrative approaches (slice-of-life vignette, reminiscence, ethnic anecdote, character study of friends and acquaintances, confessional story, philosophical rumination, and others) all serve to keep his comics from being monotonous in tone, despite their steadfast focus on the author himself.

As Pekar has refined what he does best, his own presence in the stories becomes more overt and self-consciously central. For example, Pekar has published one story twice, and the differences between the two versions indicate how his approach has subtly altered. The first version, “Overheard in the Cleveland Public Library: March 21, 1977” ³² is a typical example of Pekar's strips that focus on odd characters and emphasize the offhand weirdness of everyday speech. A raggedly dressed middle-aged man asks a kindly old librarian to evaluate his poetry, so she recommends that he take it to the Cleveland Area Arts Council. The man complains that no one likes his poetry and that he doesn't understand the poems in intellectual magazines such as Harper's and the Atlantic. Taken aback, the librarian replies, “Sir, there's nothing wrong with writing poetry that rhymes.” As the title and the documentary subtitle suggest, this strip strives for a transparently immediate rendering of real speech. The silent author/observer appears only in the right foreground of the first and last panel, and he stands just a little closer to the action than does the reading audience. Gary Dumm's simple, almost crude artwork suggests that no artifice stands between the event and its depiction in Pekar's story.

The second version, “Library Story: Take Two”,³³ reverses the focus of the first strip from the would-be poet and the librarian to the figure of the writer himself. Michael T. Gilbert's visual technique is much more sophisticated than Dumm's, both in line and shading and in page and panel layouts. Where the first strip pretended to be a chunk of reality taken directly from the world and rendered without artifice, “Take Two” is placed firmly in the ongoing context of Pekar's life and art. The caption tells us that the scene is linked to the previous story, “The Kissinger Letter:” “Here's our man trying to look up what year he saw Henry Kissinger on a T.V. show called Town Meeting of the World. He stops for a minute to dig a conversation between an old librarian and a shabbily dressed guy who's bugging her about something he wrote.” The Pekar-figure, “our man,” takes up the foreground of the panel, and the librarian and the man are well in the background. The librarian's words extend all the way across the top of the panel, and the configuration of the balloon physically depicts the words going into the eavesdropper's ears.

The first version is a series of speeches and reactions between the two central characters, and the page layout makes the librarian's double take the physical center of the page. In “Take Two” the exchange between the two is confined to the first two tiers of the page, and the woman's silent reaction shot has been drastically reduced in size and in compositional importance. In its place is a similar shot of “our man” pondering the incident he has just witnessed. Pekar often uses these silent panels to time the rhythms of his stories; he says, “I like to use silent panels for punctuation almost as if I'm an oral storyteller.”³⁴

In the second telling of the library story, the repetition of the phrase, “There's nothing wrong with writing poetry that rhymes,” ensures that the idiosyncrasy of speech is still stressed. But the focus shifts away from the speakers to the writer, who moralizes on the event, “That was nice. When the old lady saw he was serious about his writing, she gave him some encouragement,” then wonders about its suitability for one of his stories, “But it sounds like the punchline from a corny old joke.” The move of the writer to center stage in this story is not one of simple self-aggrandizement; instead, it indicates how Pekar becomes increasingly comfortable with his role as mediator between experience and its representation.

The centrality of Pekar's guiding consciousness becomes the humorous subject of “A Harvey Pekar Story.”³⁵ In this story, Harvey's friend Jon Goldman stops him on the street and tells him, “I had a Harvey Pekar story happen to me.” Over coffee, Jon tells Harvey about his odd encounter with an old man at an office furniture clearance sale, and the story switches to Jon's point of view. Jon goes into the sale and finds the place deserted; the man running the sale comes out, and they discuss the sale of a filing cabinet. The old man forcefully urges Jon to take some women's underwear for free and tells him that he is liquidating his wife's garment business and that he himself is a surgeon. Jon asks his name, and when the old man replies, “Lapidus,” Jon asks him if he is the Morris Lapidus of whom Jon has heard. The old man glares in return, then begins to rant about Morris Lapidus.

Oh no, not me, not that one. I'm Irving Lapidus, not that one. He's a crook, a goniff. People used to confuse me with him.

He's a thief and they blamed me. You know, one time …

As he continues to rave, Jon excuses himself from the doctor's diatribe, saying he has to get to work. Lapidus tells him, “I'm sorry I took up so much of your time. It's when I think of that Morris. … Boy he burns me up.”

The narrative cuts back to Jon and Harvey sitting in the coffee shop, as Jon asks eagerly, “So wasn't that a Harvey Pekar story?” The story ends with Harvey's reply, “Damn near, Jon, damn near.” Jon Goldman is right. This mildly bizarre unearthing of the hidden misery in another person's life is American Splendor's meat and potatoes. The story begins with Jon's chance decision to go into the sale and ends inconclusively, evanescing rather than reaching a climax, like so many of Harvey's stories. But Harvey is right, too. What makes this anecdote “a Harvey Pekar story” is not its oddness but the fact that Jon feels compelled to tell it to Harvey Pekar—and he to us.

As Pekar continues to publish American Splendor, the production of the comic book takes up more and more of his life. The publication by Doubleday of the two volumes of collected stories from American Splendor brought Pekar national publicity, including several appearances on David Letterman's late-night television talk show. As a result, the stories in American Splendor become increasingly self-reflexive at the same time they remain autobiographical. Harvey visits a San Diego comics store for an autograph session in “Jack Dickens' Comic Kingdom”;³⁶ Harvey picks up a new edition of American Splendor in “At the Bindery,”³⁷ and an old doctor at Harvey's job tries to think of jokes that Harvey can put into his book.³⁸ “American Splendor Assaults the Media” overtly discusses Pekar's struggles as a writer, of course, and other stories pick up the theme.

In “Hysteria,”³⁹ Harvey calls the editor of a local Cleveland magazine and harasses her about a review of his book that she has promised. Harvey works himself into a frenzy of paranoia and indignation, then realizes that his shouting into the telephone threatens to overstrain his voice. “Hysteria” ends with a sheepish Pekar waking up and testing his voice, “How d'you sound t'day Harvey, how do you sound t'day?” (the letters are drawn incompletely to signify the weakness of his voice). Longtime readers of American Splendor remember that Pekar once lost his voice for several months in 1977, and his inability to communicate severely strained his then recent second marriage.⁴⁰ Harvey's anxiety about his voice forces him to rein in his volatile temper, and only if we have read “An Everyday Horror Story” do we fully understand the emotional issues of “Hysteria.”

Interlocking stories are only one way American Splendor becomes self-referential. An unusual opportunity to gauge a Harvey Pekar story against the event it represents occurs in “Late Night with David Letterman.”⁴¹ Pekar first appeared on Letterman's talk show on October 15, 1986, and was invited back for repeat appearances in 1987 and 1988.⁴² In his first appearance on television Pekar came across as nervous, defensive, and contentious; he squirmed in his seat, told the studio audience to “shut up,” and attacked Letterman for the paucity of the backstage food. Letterman and his audience seemed to enjoy Pekar's manic abrasiveness, but the more serious discussion of Harvey's comic-book writing was unclear and fragmented.

In American Splendor, Pekar's story about the television show frames a depiction of the show itself with an explanation of Harvey's attitude toward the appearance. The story opens as Joyce tells Harvey that he has been booked onto the Letterman show. While putting away groceries, Harvey ponders how he will handle himself on television; he absentmindedly puts the detergent into the refrigerator. A few days later, as Harvey walks around thinking of the upcoming show, he considers his strategy for dealing with the condescendingly ironic Letterman:

No sense in tryin' to talk about anything substantive—all the guy wants t'do is banter an' get laughs … light weight shit.

People talk about what a great put down artist he is. Shit … He's just in there with dummies, 'at's why he looks good. I musta rapped with dozens a'faster guys in delicatessens.

Gotta get in his face, take his game away from 'im. Smother 'im from the start.

He's middle class, polite, he Jon't talk fast. I'll overwhelm 'im—even if'e gets off a good one I'll hit 'im quick with two or three shots—won't give the audience a chance to react to 'im.

Street fighting tactics oughta keep 'im off guard, he ain't useta guys like me. … gotta keep cool enough not to freeze an' forget what I'm sayin' or screw up my timin'.

Looks good on paper. I gotta lotta experience, but not on TV. It worked onna street corner, but will it work on TV?

In New York, just before the show, Harvey scrounges around producer Bob Morton's office for free books and food; he tells Morton that since he's only being paid one hundred dollars, “I need t'get as much free stuff as possible t'make this trip a success.” Morton tells him, “Look, Harv, act like you're acting now on the show. Be aggressive.” Harvey replies, “Don't worry about a thing man; aggressive is my middle name.” Harvey thinks, “Good, he digs my shticks.” The frame story here makes clear what no television viewer can know; Harvey's seemingly spontaneous behavior on the Letterman show is a “shtick,” planned in advance and approved by the producers.⁴³

A comparison of the show and the comic-book story shows that sequential art can approximate some of the effects of television quite well. The rectangular borders of the panels work to frame the action as does the television screen, and both media rely on “camera shots” for their individual perspectives. Gerry Shamray's art sometimes follows the producer's camera angles, and Shamray uses a mixture of panels and borderless pictures to capture the seamlessness of video cuts. He likewise often uses lines leading to dialogue drawn directly on the image, rather than standard dialogue balloons; much of the dialogue in the story comes from the show nearly verbatim. But in overall tone the story is quite different from the show itself. Pekar writes the story as a personal victory, “this sour faced, sloppily dressed file clerk turning the tables on Mr. Condescending Wise Guy.”⁴⁴ But for those watching the show, Pekar's hyperactive baiting of Letterman seems to be less a clever strategy and more the nervousness of an abrasive person on television for the first time.

The rhythm of Pekar's narrative does capture the flow of the show itself, with one major exception. After Pekar and Letterman have a long and argumentative discussion about why Harvey can't make a living as a writer, they move on to American Splendor itself. In the comic story, Harvey explains how writing comics is like writing for dramatic media: “… Writing comics is similar to writing for the theatre or movies because what it involves is writing dialogue and directions to the actors and directors on the one hand or the illustrators on the other.” Letterman responds, “Sure sure,” and the two get into brief squabble. Harvey mimics Letterman:

PEKAR:
Sure.
LETTERMAN:
Relax, relax.
PEKAR:
Don' worry about it.
LETTERMAN:
You don't worry about it!
PEKAR:
I don't worry about it. I got a job.

The story shows Harvey articulating his ideas about comics clearly, only to be cut off by Letterman's brusque, “Sure.” Perhaps Pekar's smooth discourse on comic writing and drama is what he meant to say.⁴⁵ But a viewer of the actual show sees that, perhaps because the transition from the earlier banter to the serious question is so abrupt, at this point Harvey begins to freeze and lose track of what he is saying, just as he had feared. He stutters, his speech is filled with “uhs,” and “mans,” and very nearly every other word becomes “y'know.” Letterman's interjection of “sure” and “relax” seem meant to help Harvey over his rough spot, and Harvey apparently seizes on Letterman's words to bail himself out of his nervousness.⁴⁶ Though this incident in the comic book fails to communicate the nuances of what happened on the show, Pekar does not try to make himself look good in his story. In fact, the panel which shows Harvey telling the booing audience, “Hey, shut up,” pictures him looking much more maniacal and angry than on the show, where he is clearly joking.

Of course, in a comparison of the story and the show, the television show cannot serve as a base “reality” by which to judge the verisimilitude of Pekar's story. Both sequential art and video are representational media, and neither medium shows the whole story; the television show misses by necessity Harvey's thoughts and his encounter with the producer, and the comic cannot communicate Pekar's bristling energy, or the way the two men interrupt each other's words, or Harvey's light but raspy voice. Pekar's articles in the Village Voice and the Cleveland Plain Dealer add further nuances to the story which neither the comic book nor a tape of the show can reveal. The show finally is not an objective grounding event outside of any telling of it but rather a nexus around which the various narratives revolve. There can be no outside “reality check” for Pekar's stories; they either convince as does an anecdote told by a friend or fail to convince at all.

Pekar's appearances on national television highlight the two halves of his public persona: the feisty file clerk and the autodidact “working-class intellectual” writer. Pekar considers the relations between these elements of his identity in “Hypothetical Quandary.”⁴⁷ An unnamed Pekar-figure drives to the bakery on Sunday morning; as he goes, he thinks about a call from a representative of a “big publisher” who never got back to him. The call leads him to speculate on what his life would be like if he were to become successful as a writer. He thinks of the leisure and freedom from routine a writer's life would give him, then he considers the consequences:

But then I'd sort of be out of the struggle, sort of in an ivory tower watching the mainstream of life go by rather than participating in it. …

I'd be alienated but I wouldn't think I had the right to feel bad about it. I mean, I'd be a well-paid, famous author. What right would I have to complain about anything?

Maybe my writing would suffer. I've got a pretty unique viewpoint. … I'm a writer but in a lotta ways I've got a working man's outlook on life. I'd have to as long as I've worked at regular day jobs.

As he goes into the bakery, buys some loaves of bread, and walks back to his car, he worries that success might make his life and attitudes more bland and boring. Then he thinks, “But then, knowin' myself, I could always find something to get shook up over and write about. Let's face it, I'm not gonna become a mellow man over night, no matter what happens!” He decides that, since the woman from the publisher didn't call him back, the question of his corruption by success is moot. The story ends as he leans over the bag from the bakery, sniffs deeply, and thinks, “Ah, fresh bread!” His sensual enjoyment of present experience contrasts with his fretful speculations about his career; the “real life” he values so deeply finally stands as his bulwark against cooptation by the high culture to which he aspires as a writer and which he also fears as a threat to his autonomy. His status as a working man gives his writings the authenticity of an eyewitness, just as his role as a writer allows him to separate himself from those who are doomed to a lifetime of workaday drudgery.

“Hypothetical Quandary” raises the question that lies behind American Splendor as a cultural product. Why should anyone be interested in the daily life of a hospital file clerk in Cleveland? Pekar must tread the thin line in documentary realism between an accurate, compelling rendering of experience and the too precise recreation of boredom. He casts himself as an American lower-class Everyman, while his idiosyncratic personality and quirky perspective on life raise his stories and vignettes beyond the banality of a camera eye; he is at once both universal and unique.

American Splendor is finally not precisely an autobiographical project but more of a “Life and Times.” Pekar's works look two ways: the stories featuring the Pekar figure are introspective and revelatory like confessions and autobiographies, and the short tales and vignettes look outside the self of Harvey Pekar to examine, celebrate, and decry the customs and mores of contemporary American society. But these are not two separate categories; the pieces without Pekar finally show as much about the observer as the observed, while Pekar's stories of his personal triumphs and tragedies form an extended critique of a cultural situation which is finally hostile to the assertion of individuality.

The tension between the public demands of society and the private impulses of individuals is the subject of several stories in American Splendor's twelve-year run, but “society” is rarely the organized apparatus of the state as much as it is the attitudes and actions of other individuals. One place where Pekar does butt heads with social institutions is in “Jury Duty,”⁴⁸ where Harvey refuses to participate in what he perceives to be an unjust legal system, to the chagrin of the prosecutor, the amusement of the defense attorney, and the bafflement of the judge.

A more typical example of the way public concerns become private ones is “May 4-5, 1970,” drawn by Brian Bram,⁴⁹ which deals with the personal consequences of the National Guard shootings at Kent State University. The splash panel sets the scene in two phases of historical time. The panel consists of newspaper clippings laid on top of one another; their headlines show how history moves from the other side of the globe to become a local concern though still a public one: “Sihanouk Ousted”; “Nixon Orders Troops into Cambodia”; “Nat'l Guard Fires on Students at Kent State.” Paper-clipped to the clippings are notes bearing the dates of their publication, showing that we see these events in retrospect. The scalloped lines around the title dates foreshadow the tensions which arise in the story, and the dates themselves suggest that the story will be about the consequences of the action at Kent State, since the killings happened on May 4, the newspaper tells us, and the story covers May 4-5.

In the story the Pekar figure, here called Carl Alesci, chats with a middle-aged plasterer named Mr. Lucarelli at the hospital where they both work. When the talk turns to the recent troubles at nearby Kent State, the two men find that they disagree about the students' right to protest. Carl maintains that the students are peaceful, while Lucarelli becomes indignant, and says, “They keep on raisin' hell, the police need to shoot a couple of 'em!” Carl breaks off the conversation. The next day, after the shootings by the National Guard, Carl is asked to wear a black armband with a peace symbol on it to protest the killings; after some hesitation, he accepts. Lucarelli spots Carl with the armband and confronts him about it, and the two men argue sharply.

Later that day, Carl, appalled at the older man's insensitivity and at his hypocrisy of touting law and order while remaining friends with a local mobster, snubs Lucarelli in the cafeteria and in the hallway. After work in the parking lot, Lucarelli tries to make up with Carl, who fiercely demands that the older man admit that he has the right to his own opinion. The story ends with Lucarelli gazing sadly as the still angry Carl stomps away; the last panel is an iconographic image of the “generation gap.”

Here history is a chain of events that leads inexorably from Cambodia to a hospital parking lot half a world away, and the split between public history and private autobiography becomes an illusory one. The headlines at the story's beginning link up with the protests at the local college, pass to Carl through his brother-in-law, “He lives in Kent, y'know,” and through the newspapers, to spark this conflict between friends; the history of the newspaper headlines is acted out in miniature between the two men. Attitudes like Lucarelli's, the story implies, bring about the killings at Kent State; reactions like Carl's are what end the war in Vietnam. There are no heroes or villains in this story, just people acting in their daily lives.

Carl is not passionately antiwar; he is initially puzzled about how to react to the student protests, and he hesitates before accepting the armband because, “I might get some people here mad at me.” His confrontation with Lucarelli is a result not of his political convictions but of his personal, almost instinctive revulsion to the shooting of the students. While the story has little sympathy with Lucarelli's political views, they are explained at least partly by his immigrant's loyalty to his new country; he says fiercely, “Ay, I don't consider myself Italian—I'm an American!!!” Carl's rejection of his friendly overtures at the end is morally ambiguous; the story shows Carl to be right in his views but self-righteous and hurtful in his actions.

Pekar himself emphasizes the negative aspects of the persona's behavior. He compared this story to another one in which he treats lower-class political attitudes, and he told an interviewer, “In both, I show myself taking a self-righteous attitude toward older people who have hard-line right-wing political positions. In the Kent State story I am actually mean to an old plasterer after he tries to bring about a reconciliation.”⁵⁰ In this story, the Kent State killings are important not solely as an event in a public political process but because they lead people to act badly toward one another.

While Pekar's relentless examination of his private concerns might seem to be a shrinking away from the kind of historical issues that Jack Jackson and Art Spiegelman confront directly, all three really have much in common. Jackson does deal with sweeping historical processes involving complex cultural interactions, but Comanche Moon and Los Tejanos depict history through the eyes of individual characters such Quanah Parker and Juan Seguin. In the single person of Quanah Parker we can read the fates of both the white race and the red; in Juan Seguin we see a place where cultures momentarily came together, only to split apart again. In Maus, Art Spiegelman takes on an even more problematic historical event, the Holocaust, but he uses the personal relation between Vladek and Art as the fulcrum to move his ambitious project.

Individuals are the means by which larger units of history become accessible and explicable; Vladek Spiegelman enables us to see the piles of bodies in the death camp that we would otherwise be unable to look at, because we know that Vladek might well have been one of those bodies, but was not. Harvey Pekar's American Splendor takes this emphasis on the individual even further and in so doing explodes the distinction between public and private history. The large movements of nations and institutions that we call history finally become an aggregate of individual choices and actions, and Harvey Pekar's refusal to serve on a jury may ultimately be as significant in its own way as a Supreme Court decision. Harvey Pekar's insistence on the importance of daily life finally is not self-aggrandizement or solipsism but rather an evocation of the inescapable interconnections between human beings.

Why history, personal or otherwise, in comic-book form? Comic books have traditionally staked their appeal to readers on their mytho-poeic and imaginative power, not on a connection to literal truth. While the verbal/visual dialectic of sequential art lends itself to a variety of narrative effects which can communicate a great deal of complex information (such as names, dates, chronology, and so forth) while also rendering specific incidents with an immediate and visceral impact, comic books have generally emphasized the physical side of the dialectic and have tended to show grandiose violations of the laws of physics in the context of the most basic sort of Manichean, good-versus-evil conflicts. The underground comix forever demonstrated that the fantasy and escapism of comic books was an artificially imposed cultural constraint, but the willfully adversarial and transgressive stance of the comix ensured that they would remain at the fringes of the culture at large.

The disappearance of a coherent underground movement in the late 1970s left behind a number of inventive and ambitious creators who were convinced of the power of the sequential art medium and were steeped in its peculiar techniques, such as Jack Jackson and Art Spiegelman, as well as newcomers to the field who had been energized by the accomplishments of the comix but were interested in writing other kinds of stories, as was Harvey Pekar. In addition, the undergrounds introduced the potential of the medium to an audience of readers who either had been unfamiliar with comics in general or had associated them solely with juvenile literature.

The move to history in comic-book form is an implicit rejection of the death grip that fantasy has long held on the medium. At the same time, as modern culture becomes less print oriented and more visually literate, comic books become more attractive as a narrative form. Comics are much less linear than prose and more simultaneous in the narrative effects that are possible, while they remain connected to traditional prose narratives by their extensive generic and thematic heritage.

The works of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar hardly constitute a coherent “movement” in contemporary comics. Many artists continue to work in the by now familiar underground modes, and others have transformed the superhero and adventure genres into vehicles for “adult” narratives.⁵¹ Other developments in the comic-book scene, like the emergence of self-published “new-wave” comics and various other “alternative” productions, may have far-reaching effects on the cultural place of comic books. But when comic books become an appropriate medium for new visions of American history, for startling examinations of epochal events such as the Holocaust, and for bluntly honest depictions of the individual's plight in modern society, and when these productions vie for literary awards with biographies of Chaucer, then certainly the realm of Superman and Mighty Mouse has undergone a revolution. Pekar fiercely states the conviction implicit in the works of creators such as Jack Jackson and Art Spiegelman:

Comics is as wide an area as prose. It's a medium, and it can be used for fiction, for non-fiction, for any number of purposes. And the fact that it's been used in such a limited way is totally crazy. It's some kind of historical aberration, I think. What I hope people start to realize is that comics can be as versatile as any other medium. … What it takes [for comics to gain a wider audience] is for people to realize that comics aren't an intrinsically limited form. When more people do that, and when more good work is produced, [it will happen]. Because nothing will attract people to comics like good work. If people have a prejudice against them, nothing will negate that prejudice like good work.⁵²

In his first appearance on David Letterman's television talk show, Harvey Pekar gave a succinct and heartfelt explanation of why he works in the comic-book form. He said, “It's words and pictures. And you can do anything you want with words and pictures.” As the sequential art medium begins to cast off the long decades of critical scorn and cultural marginalization, more and more creators are discovering that what they want to do with words and pictures is to tell true stories.

Notes

1. The phrase appears as a subtitle to two collections of selections from Pekar's comic books: From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes—American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (New York: Doubleday, 1986); and From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes—More American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

2. Robert Crumb, introduction to American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar.

3. Harvey Pekar, “Stories about Honesty, Money, and Misogyny,” interview with Gary Groth (August 1984), Comics Journal 97 (April 1985): 46.

4. Robert Crumb, American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, introduction.

5. Harvey Pekar, interview, tape recording, Cleveland, Ohio, 11 November 1988.

6. Donald M. Fiene, “From Off the Streets of Cleveland: The Life and Work of Harvey Pekar,” Comics Journal 97 (April 1985): 73.

7. Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, “A Fantasy,” American Splendor no. 1 (1976).

8. Harvey Pekar, Greg Budgett, and Gary Dumm, “Awaking to the Terror of the New Day,” American Splendor no. 3 (1978).

9. Budgett's work does not appear in American Splendor nos. 9 and 10.

10. Fiene, “Life and Work of Harvey Pekar,” 69-70.

11. Harvey Pekar, “Stories about Honesty,” 49.

12. Writers of autobiographical stories in the comix include, among others, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Guy Colwell, Dori Seda, Spain Rodriguez, and, as I will note below, Robert Crumb. More recently, artists such as Lynda Barry and Michael Doogan have produced autobiographical stories in comics form.

13. Harvey Pekar, interview, 11 November 1988.

14. Justin Green, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1972).

15. Pekar's comic book stories appeared in The People's Comics (1972), Bizarre Sex no. 4 (1975), Comix Book no. 4 (1976), Snarf no. 6 (1976), and Flamed Out Funnies no. 1 (1976). Pekar tells the story of his friendship with Crumb in “The Young Crumb Story,” American Splendor no. 4 (1979), and “A Fantasy,” American Splendor no. 1 (1976).

16. Robert Crumb, Big Ass Comics no. 2 (San Francisco: Rip Off Press, 1971).

17. Tales from the Leather Nun (Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1973).

18. Zap no. 10 (Berkeley: Print Mint, 1982).

19. Both from The People's Comics (Princeton, Wisc.: Kitchen Sink Press, 1972).

20. Robert Crumb, “The Confessions of R. Crumb” (1972).

21. Some of Crumb's recent autobiographical stories, like “Uncle Bob's Mid-Life Crisis,” Weirdo 7 (Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1983), seem to be influenced by Pekar's more mundane approach, but as one critic notes, “despite his serious theme, Crumb still plays his tormented self-pity mainly for laughs.” Steve Monaco, “A Worthwhile (But Weird) Grab-bag,” review of Weirdo, Comics Journal 106 (March 1986): 31.

22. Harvey Pekar and Kevin Brown, “Grubstreet, U.S.A.,” American Splendor no. 8 (1983).

23. Ibid.

24. Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm, “Katherine Mansfield,” American Splendor no. 9 (1984), rear cover.

25. Harvey Pekar, “Stories about Honesty,” 46.

26. Harvey Pekar, interview, 11 November 1988.

27. Harvey Pekar and Spain Rodriguez, “A Case Quarter,” American Splendor no. 11 (1986), inside front cover.

28. Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, “The Last Supper,” American Splendor no. 8 (1983), inside front cover.

29. Harvey Pekar, interview, 11 November 1988.

30. Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Val Mayerik, “A Marriage Album,” American Splendor no. 10 (1985).

31. Harvey Pekar, interview, 11 November 1988.

32. Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm, “Overheard in the Cleveland Public Library,” American Splendor no. 3 (1978).

33. Harvey Pekar and Michael T. Gilbert, “Library Story: Take Two,” American Splendor no. 4 (1979), inside rear cover.

34. Harvey Pekar, interview, 11 November 1988.

35. Harvey Pekar and Val Mayerik, “A Harvey Pekar Story,” American Splendor no. 9 (1984).

36. Harvey Pekar and Frank Stack, “Jack Dickens' Comic Kingdom,” American Splendor no. 12 (1987).

37. Harvey Pekar and Val Mayerik, “At the Bindery,” ibid.

38. Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, American Splendor no. 5 (1980), front cover.

39. Harvey Pekar, Val Mayerik, and James Sherman, “Hysteria,” American Splendor no. 12 (1986).

40. Harvey Pekar and Gerry Shamray, “An Everyday Horror Story,” American Splendor no. 5 (1980).

41. Harvey Pekar and Gerry Shamray, “Late Night with David Letterman,” American Splendor no. 12 (1987).

42. Pekar's short career as a media celebrity apparently ended with his 31 August 1988 appearance on the Letterman show. Increasingly impatient with what he saw as Letterman's condescension and triviality, and resolved to “go out with a bang,” Pekar badgered Letterman about the legal problems of General Electric, NBC's parent corporation. Letterman tried to quell Pekar and the show dissolved into rowdy bickering. Pekar explains his actions and motivations concerning his television appearances in Harvey Pekar, “Me ‘n’ Dave Letterman,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1 February 1987, p. 1 (H); Harvey Pekar, “Late Night of the Soul with David Letterman,” Village Voice, 25 August 1987, pp. 45-46; Harvey Pekar, “Getting Dave's Goat,” Cleveland Edition, September 22, 1988, pp. 1＋; and Harvey Pekar, Joe Zabel, and Gary Dumm, “My Struggle with Corporate Corruption and Network Philistinism,” American Splendor no. 13 (1988). Another analysis of the controversial show is given in James Hynes, “The Big Shill?” In These Times (21-27 September 1988): 24＋.

43. Pekar gives further background to his appearance on this show in “Me ‘n’ Dave Letterman.”

44. Pekar, “Late Night of the Soul,” 45.

45. Harvey's words in the story are a nearly exact quotation of the opening paragraph of a recent article by Pekar, “The Potential of Comics,” Comics Journal 123 (July 1988): 81-88.

46. Pekar might have been hesitant in his answer because he felt that he was losing the attention of the audience, of whom he said, “If you used words longer than two syllables, or talked about anything halfway serious, you could feel them going to sleep.” Pekar, “Me ‘n’ Dave Letterman,” p. 4 (H).

47. Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, “Hypothetical Quandary,” American Splendor no. 9 (1984).

48. Harvey Pekar and Sue Cavey, “Jury Duty,” American Splendor no. 9 (1983).

49. Harvey Pekar and Brian Bram, “May 4-5, 1970,” American Splendor no. 2 (1977).

50. Pekar, “Stories about Honesty,” 50. Note Pekar's total equation of the actions of the persona with his own personal behavior.

51. See Lloyd Rose, “Comic Books for Grown-Ups,” Atlantic, August 1986, pp. 77-80.

52. Harvey Pekar, interview, 11 November 1988.

Bibliography

Abbott, Lawrence L. “Comic Art: Characteristics and Potentialities of a Narrative Medium.” Journal of Popular Culture 19 (Spring 1986): 155-173.

Aldridge, Alan, and George Perry. Penguin Book of Comics. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1967.

Becker, Stephen. Comic Art in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.

Brown, Dec. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Carroll, John M. Introduction. The Sand Creek Massacre: A Documentary History. New York: Sol Lewis, 1973.

Daniels, Les. Comix: A History of Comic Books in America. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971.

Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. New York: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, Fla.: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Estren, Mark James. A History of Underground Comics. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1974.

Feiffer, Jules. The Great Comic Book Heroes. New York: Dial Press, 1965.

Fiene, Donald. “From Off the Streets of Cleveland: The Life and Work of Harvey Pekar.” Comics Journal no. 97 (April 1985): 65-84.

———, comp. “Pekar Index.” Comics Journal no. 97 (April 1985): 86-88.

Fiore, R. “Funnybook Roulette.” Comics Journal no. 118 (December 1987): 43-46.

Fischel, Jack, and Sanford Pinsker, eds. Literature, the Arts, and the Holocaust. Holocaust Studies Annual, vol. 3. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill Publishing, 1987.

Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1958.

Gaines, William M. Interview by Dwight Decker and Gary Groth. Comics Journal no. 81 (May 1983): 53-84.

Gates, David. “The Light Side of Darkness.” Newsweek (22 September 1986): 79.

Gehr, Richard. Review of Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman. Artforum (February 1987): 10-11.

Gopnik, Adam. “Comics and Catastrophe.” New Republic, 22 June 1987, pp. 29-34.

Goulart, Ron. Great History of Comic Books. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1986.

Greeley, Horace. The American Conflict. 2 vols. Hartford: O. D. Case, 1864-1867.

Grossman, Robert. “Mauschwitz.” Nation. 10 January 1987, pp. 23-24.

Hamilton, William. “Revelation Rays and Pain Stars.” New York Times Book Review, 7 December 1986, p. 71.

Highsmith, Doug. “Comic Books: A Guide to Information Sources.” RQ 27 (Winter 1987): 202-209.

Holtsmark, Erling B. “Magnus Robot-Fighter: The Future Looks at the Present through the Past.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1979): 702-720.

Horn, Maurice. Comics of the American West. New York: Winchester Press, 1977.

———, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. New York: Chelsea House, 1976.

Inge, M. Thomas. Handbook of American Popular Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Jackson, Jack. Comanche Moon. San Francisco: Rip Off Press/Last Gasp, 1979.

———. “Tejano Cartoonist.” Interview with Bill Sherman (28 August 1981). Comics Journal no. 61 (Winter 1981): 100-111.

———. “Jack Jackson on His Work in the Underground and His New Book, Los Tejanos.” Interview with Gary Groth (10 June 1982). Comics Journal no. 75 (September 1982): 75-84.

———. Los Tejanos. Stamford: Conn.: Fantagraphics Books, 1982.

———. “Jaxon.” Interview by Bruce Sweeney. Comics Interview no. 9 (March 1984): 40-49.

———. Interview with Gary Groth. Comics Journal no. 100 (July 1985): 111-114.

———. “Learning Texas History: The Painless Way.” Comics Journal no. 119 (January 1988): 97-100.

Johnson, Robert Underwood, and Clarence Clough Buel, eds. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. 4 vols. New York: Century, 1884-1888.

Kennedy, Jay, ed. The Official Underground and New-Wave Comix Price Guide. Cambridge, Mass.: Boatner Norton, 1982.

Kurtzman, Harvey. Interview by Kim Thompson and Gary Groth (Spring 1981). Comics Journal no. 67 (October 1981): 68-99.

Legman, Gershon. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. New York: Breaking Point, 1949.

Lupoff, Dick, and Don Thompson, eds. All in Color for a Dime. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1970.

Monaco, Steve. “A Worthwhile (But Weird) Grab-bag.” Review of Weirdo. Comics Journal no. 106 (March 1986): 31.

Overstreet, Robert M. Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. Cleveland, Tenn.: Overstreet Publications, annual.

Pekar, Harvey. “Stories about Honesty, Money, and Misogyny.” Interview with Gary Groth (August 1984). Comics Journal no. 97 (April 1985): 44-64.

———. From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes … American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

———. “Maus and Other Topics.” Comics Journal no. 113 (December 1986): 54-57.

———. From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes … More American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

———. “Late Night of the Soul with David Letterman.” Village Voice, 25 August 1987, pp. 45-46.

———. “Me ‘n’ Dave Letterman.” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1 February 1987, p. 1 (H).

———. “Getting Dave's Goat.” Cleveland Edition, September 22, 1988, p. 1＋.

———. “The Potential of Comics.” Comics Journal no. 123 (July 1988): 81-88.

Phelps, Donald. “Word and Image.” Comics Journal no. 97 (April 1985): 41-43.

Prucha, Francis P. American Indian Policy in Crisis. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.

Reitberger, Reinhold, and Wolfgang Fuchs. Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

Robinson, Jerry. The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974.

Rose, Lloyd. “Comic Books for Grown-Ups.” Atlantic, August 1986, pp. 77-80.

Rosenfeld, Alvin. “The Problematics of Holocaust Literature.” In Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Sawyer, Michael. “Albert Lewis Kanter and the Classics: The Man behind the Gilberton Company.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1987): 1-18.

Shelton, Gilbert, Fred Todd, and Don Baumgart. “Rip Off Press: The Publishing Company That's a Little like the Weather.” Interview by Diana Schutz. Comics Journal no. 92 (August 1984): 69-83.

Sheridan, Martin. The Comics and Their Creators. Boston: Hale, Cushman and Flint; 1942.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

———. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise Mouly. “Jewish Mice, Bubblegum Cards, Comics Art, and Raw Possibilities.” Interview by Joey Cavalieri (New York, 1980-1981). Comics Journal no. 65 (August 1981): 98-125.

Steranko, James. The Steranko History of Comics. 2 vols. Wyomissing, Pa.: Supergraphics, 1970-1972.

Thompson, Don, and Dick Lupoff, eds. The Comic-Book Book. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1973.

Tucker, Ken. “Cats, Mice, and History—The Avant-Garde of the Comic Strip.” New York Times Book Review, 26 May 1985, p. 3.

Waugh, Coulton. The Comics. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

Wertham, Fredrie. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972.

Weschler, Lawrence. “Mighty Maus.” Rolling Stone, 20 November 1986, p. 103.