Who Is Harvey Pekar?

In 1983, I was shopping in Talking Leaves, a hippy-lefty bookstore (still open!) in my hometown of Buffalo, New York, when I stumbled across my first issue of American Splendor, #8 (1983), tucked into a wall rack alongside copies of Zap, Weirdo, and other underground comics. I was familiar with Crumb's work by then--a few years earlier, as a young teen, I'd illicitly bought Home Grown Funnies at a head shop--and my reaction to Crumb and the undergrounds alternated between wary curiosity and sanctimonious revulsion. (Even though I'd stopped going to Mass, I was still a judgmental little Catholic boy.) I could see, though, that Splendor was different from the epater la bourgeoisie aesthetic of S. Clay Wilson; like Jared Gardner, I considered Splendor a safe underground choice. The cover to issue #8, with its promise of a non-scatological story about "old cars in winter," spoke to me, a sad-sack college sophomore driving a rusty, pea-green '73 Chevy Malibu through Buffalo snowdrifts. (At first, I didn't like Sue Cavey's art on the "Old Cars" story, but my appreciation for her wispy pointillism grew as my tastes matured beyond mainstream, commercial comics art.) I bought Splendor #8, and fell in love with the low-key naturalism of Harvey's stories.

I'm referring to Pekar as "Harvey" here because I was lucky enough to be his friend. After I read and re-read Splendor #8, and dug up other issues at Talking Leaves and local comic shops, I loaned the comics to my friend Tim Madigan. Tim likewise became a fan, and suggested that we write a letter to Harvey. As chronicled in Splendor, Harvey loved to receive letters from his readers, and replied quickly; the early issues of Splendor barely broke even, and Harvey self-published his comic mostly to develop  as a writer and to connect with readers outside of Cleveland via the Post Office. Tim and I got a speedy answer to our letter, and we started a correspondence with Harvey, though Tim wrote a lot more to Harvey than I did.

A few months into our epistolary friendship, Harvey suggested that Tim and I visit him in Cleveland--a reasonable idea, since the drive from Buffalo to Cleveland is only about three hours. Deciding to travel those three hours, however, was a big step for me. All my life, I'd followed the safe path: I lived at home while in college because I was afraid to live by myself, and I stayed in an unhappy relationship with my first girlfriend for two-and-a-half years because I was convinced that no one else would ever want to be with me. Somehow, though, I summoned up the courage to tell Tim that I was game for the road trip, even though I was scared to drive on the Thruway. When I told my parents about our plans, my father got irrationally angry, claiming that my plan was "dangerous" and that Pekar could turn out to be a pervert and/or murderer. I suddenly realized where my desperate attachment to security came from, and I just as quickly understood that I had to make some changes or I'd live and die exactly as my parents had. So I defied my dad and went to Cleveland: as Harvey's writing pushed me beyond the mainstream Marvel comics of my childhood, the prospect of meeting Harvey pushed me beyond my loving, nurturing, but ultimately immature relationship with my parents.

Meeting Harvey and his wife Joyce Brabner was a great experience. I especially remember a dinner at an old-world pizza parlor, where our conversation bounced hyperactively among several different topics, including Harvey's ambitious, semi-systematic attempt to read important fiction from all the nations on Earth. (Maybe it's a cliche to call Harvey an autodidact, but it's absolutely true.) I do remember some tension between Harvey and Joyce--Splendor readers know they could be snappish and impatient with each other--but it was also clear to me that they enjoyed each other's company and were committed to making their then-new marriage last. One of my favorite Pekar stories, "Read This" (1981, drawn by Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm), ends with Harvey breaking the fourth wall (a common tactic in his work) to impart a "lesson" to us readers:

Maybe Joyce was Harvey's romantic equivalent of the sour-faced buddy, the woman who could lose patience with him (as in the painful scene in Our Cancer Year where she repeatedly slaps Harvey) even while she guided him through chemotherapy and bouts of crippling depression with "honesty an' reliability." Anyone who enjoys Splendor owes Joyce a debt of gratitude for just keeping Harvey alive over the last 15 years, and I'm praying for Joyce, and Harvey and Joyce's foster-daughter Danielle, as they grieve and begin to cope with the blunt, cruel fact of Harvey's death.

Tim and I visited Harvey and Joyce a few more times, most notably when a mutual friend threw a party to celebrate the release of Splendor #11 (1986). I met Toby Radloff for the first (and so far only) time at this party, where we talked for 45 minutes about Toby's cat and a Soupy Sales record Toby had picked up at a garage sale. Harvey showed up to the party two hours late, dressed in a dirty Splendor t-shirt and armed with complaints about how he and the "old lady" had had a fight. Around the same time, Tim and I self-published a zine titled Work in Progress (both of us were James Joyce devotees, and "Work in Progress" was the name of Finnegans Wake [1939] as it was released in installments), and we suckered Harvey into writing an article for WiP. I think his article was on Russian novelist Andrey Bely, but I can't be sure, since I've lost all my copies of our single issue of WiP.

By 1986, I'd moved to Champaign, Illinois for graduate school, and Harvey and I stopped exchanging letters. I was glad to watch his David Letterman appearances, even when they got strident and uncomfortable, and the last communication I had with him was in the early 1990s, when I taught "The Harvey Pekar Name Story" (1977) in a basic writing course I was teaching at the University of Illinois. I assigned my students a basic exercise based on "Name Story"--"Using Pekar's comic as inspiration, write a short essay explaining your feelings about your own name," blah blah--but this was really just an excuse to smuggle Pekar into my syllabus and class discussion. I loved (and still love) "Name Story" and I wanted to talk about it. The three-panel sequence at the bottom of page two was especially significant to me:

Harvey talks about how the kids at school would make fun of his name (e.g. Harvey "Pecker"), until he gained their "respect" by threatening to beat the crap out of them. The insults stopped, and he could then forget about the relative uniqueness of his name. As Harvey says "John Smith" in the middle panel, Robert Crumb's drawing of Harvey's face lightens, dropping contour crosshatching and darkness around the eyes; to emphasize Harvey's invocation of the generic "John Smith" name, Crumb makes the face in this panel slightly more cartoony, generic and flatter, than the rest of the Harvey faces in "Name Story." I didn't see this until probably my fiftieth reading of "Name Story," but when I did, it hit me with the force of a revelation: I realized that subtle graphic modulation could move me as much as Kirbyesque bombast, preparing me for the quiet moment-to-moment transitions of Acme Novelty Library. 

After my students handed in their "name" essays, I send copies of them to Harvey, a move that still embarrasses me. (Why did I think Harvey would want to read my students' mediocre essays?) Harvey responded with a hand-written postcard, in which he graciously mentioned a few of the essays by title and encouraged all the students to keep writing. And that was it. My last direct contact with Harvey. And now he's gone, and I'm sitting in front of the computer alone, regretting that I didn't keep in touch.

Although the "hero" of the Splendor comics is often an insensitive, neurotic curmudgeon, the real-life Harvey that I knew was unfailingly generous and kind. I wonder if Harvey made himself look unsavory as a way of dealing with the moral quandaries of memoir: if he depicted himself as a bigger asshole than everybody else, then the VA co-workers and friends who also appeared in Splendor couldn't complain of unfair treatment. (The dangers of strip-mining one's life for material is a central concern of other comics memoirists too: as Jog points out, Eddie Campbell tackles the issue at the conclusions of both The Fate of the Artist and the newly-released Playwright.) Plus, it was undoubtedly a blast to get Crumb to draw a portrait of you with snot coming out of your nose and flies fluttering around your sweat-stained armpits. The Harvey that I'll remember, though, was a good friend, a valuable mentor, and a world-class artist.

Comments

[David Rachels]

Is that supposed to be Jimmy Carter on the cover of #8?

[Mark C. Rogers]

Craig--I really enjoyed reading about your early friendship with Pekar. I knew him a little bit (he spoke at Walsh in 2007) and you really captured his personality.

[Ava Wolf]

Talking Leaves Bookstore! That takes me back as I am a grad of Buff State and UB. Spent many happy, and a few not so happy, years in Buffalo. Not a big comics person, but appreciate the sad loss of a great talent.

[Craig Fischer]

David: During the early '80s, EVERY AMERICAN MALE looked like Jimmy Carter, what with the vested suits and all.

Mark: Care to tell us more about your day with Harvey?

Ava: I graduated from UB in '85. The last time I was in Buffalo, about three years ago, I visited my old neighborhood (North Buffalo, Hertel and Colvin, not so far from UB's Main Street campus) and was almost overwhelmed by nostalgia...

[Squeezegutalley.wordpress.com]

Thanks Craig. Really enjoyed reading about your friendship with Harvey. Many tributes have mentioned how generous he was with his time. 'Read This' and 'Name Story' are two of my favourites too! I've just started blogging about comics so am glad to have found this great site! I am writing a series of posts about Pekar over the coming weeks, hope you can check them out!

[Charles Hatfield]

Wonderful post, Craig, and bittersweet. Your recollections of Harvey strike a chord, though my own experiences with his work have been so different (and came later).

I've just returned from two weeks' travel in New England and a near-total withdrawal from blog writing and reading. I haven't had a chance to track the comics community's response to Pekar's death. What I'd wish for is posts like yours, rich with commentary on specific moments and specific comics.

Among my favorite Pekar stories: "Austere Youth" (that wonderful anecdote of his schoolboy days and his shame at being an immigrant's son, beautifully cartooned by Frank Stack) and the enigmatic "Easter Island," the Zabel/Dumm epic from AS #16 that focuses on Harvey's old friend Sarah and her travels in NM. That one almost approaches mysticism, an odd vibe for an AS story. Oh, and "Festering," from #15, about Harvey's college days.