Quarter Bin #15 "American Splendor"

I do seem to write most about superhero comics, but that’s not all I’m capable of processing. For instance, let’s swing the other way and spend some time with the one guy who probably did the most to give readers a completely different concept, Harvey Pekar.

Technically springboarding off:

AMERICAN SPLENDOR #1-4 (Vertigo)
From November 2006-February 2007.

Most people will know about Pekar through the movie of the same name, the 2003 AMERICAN SPLENDOR starring Paul Giamatti (the big role that helped ignite his leading man career, after years of standout supporting roles). Noting that it came out in 2003 is kind of big for me, because that’s by no means the year I first saw it. It’s another of those things that’s a little of a mystery to present me, but for some reason, even though I was always a fan of Giamatti, I grew more and more hesitant to see the movie the more critics gushed over it. It was only Giamatti, in fact, who finally convinced me to give it a chance. The truth was, I’d never heard of Harvey Pekar before, and to suddenly have all this praise going to a guy who for all intents had been completely invisible a year earlier just seemed like typical critic bullshit to me, gobbling up the peculiar new item on the block just because it was exotic and seemed to prove some point or other, and otherwise probably wouldn’t have been noticed at all. You might recall that for a while, Pekar became quite the hot commodity, writing pieces for a variety of high profile publications, putting comics storytelling in places it wasn’t typically seen. I found at least that interesting.

Anyway, I finally did get around to seeing it, and while preparing to write this piece, I watched it again, and it strikes me almost as a junior cousin to MAN ON THE MOON, the 1999 Jim Carrey movie about avant garde comedian Andy Kaufman, in which Giamatti happens to costar. You may recall that one of Kaufman’s most infamous public appearances was on David Letterman’s old NBC show back in the 1980s, in which he had a confrontation with professional wrestler Jerry Lawler (there was coffee involved). Pekar was a regular on Letterman’s show, and may have made his biggest pop cultural mark on his last appearance, in which he finally rethought his participation. I assume there was a certain amount of appeal in telling the story of how exactly that happened, just who this Harvey Pekar really was. The Letterman connection interests me, anyway.

In many ways, Pekar really is another Kaufman, a social oddity whose sensibilities don’t easily translate, which is funny, because he tried to make a living (never really happened, though) talking about his everyday problems in comics form, one of the first true independent voices, who got to have his chance at the limelight thanks to the underground movement that grew out of the 1960s scene that also gave us R. Crumb, someone Pekar knew personally (and no doubt facilitated his ambition more than he ever appreciated).

In a lot of ways, Pekar’s comics are a direct predecessor to the Twitter generation, whose ilk includes bloggers like yours truly and the Facebook crowd. (Imagine Harvey with a smartphone!) While he tended to write about only the depressing episodes and thoughts that reflected his general pessimistic outlook on life, Pekar still managed to chronicle his life in a way that had previously been reserved for biographies, all in comics form (since he couldn’t draw his own, Harvey relied on a vast network of illustrators, including Crumb). He originally published his comics out of his own pocket. Obviously by the time of the movie, there was interest in providing him with slightly wider distribution. DC imprint Vertigo handled Pekar’s graphic novel THE QUITTER, and then the new AMERICAN SPLENDOR I eventually got my hands on.

It’s funny about that, too, because a friend of mine gave me those, and I was originally reluctant to read them, because as you can tell, I don’t typically read comics that don’t feature superheroes (I admit it!). Pekar’s writing isn’t the most eloquent, and his episodic storytelling can border on the trivial if handled incorrectly. In many ways, it’s like reading a comic book TV show (which does make you wonder if Pekar wasn’t subconsciously drawing on television for inspiration, or why no one has thought to turn AMERICAN SPLENDOR into a small screen project; HBO released the movie, I might add), a sitcom or one of those dramas that would probably get high critical praise but generally terrible ratings. The film itself is a mix between documentary, some static animation, and typical movie storytelling. You could turn Harvey’s life into a cartoon, or even a comic strip, and still not lose much in translation. One might almost imagine PEARLS BEFORE SWINE’s Stephen Pastis drawing inspiration from Pekar.

As you might imagine, “American Splendor” is a pretty ironic epitaph for this enterprise, but in the end, is pretty reasonable, too. Harvey Pekar was a man who very much trusted his worldview, and despite his own cynicism managed to make a real mark, simply by telling his own story, one mundane anecdote at a time.