Drawing Harvey’s Head

This is the third in my series celebrating Harvey Pekar. You can read previous entries here and here.

Harvey Pekar couldn’t draw. He would plan out his comics with stick men, allowing his artists to interpret his life as they saw fit. In previous entries, I’ve featured images of Harvey drawn by some of his regular collaborators: Robert Crumb, Greg Budgett & Gary Dumm, Gerry Shamway and Sue Cavey. In this post, I wanted to feature the work of some of Harvey’s more recent artists.

Art by Chris Samnee

Art by Richard Corben

Art by Zachary Baldus

Art by Josh Neufeld

Art by Gilbert Hernandez

Art by Ty Templeton

All selections from DC Vertigo’s Another Day, currently only a fiver here!

“Here’s our man…”

This is the second in my series of posts about Harvey Pekar. You can read the first one here.

Why read about the life of a Cleveland file clerk? Why follow his melancholy tales of queuing at the supermarket, fixing the car or visiting the doctor? Simple. It was all about Harvey’s voice.

Art by R. Crumb

Pekar’s typical mode is reminiscence. He’s often in his stories twice, as both protagonist and narrator. Working over the events of his past, he gleans significance in small moments. Which is not to say that this retrospective voice is always calm or considered…

Art by Greg Budgett & Gary Dumm

That look off-frame and the “Uh, am I still on?” help to undercut Pekar’s anger. Although he frequently lectures us as readers, he’s always aware that his outrage is funny.

The direct address of Harvey’s narration, the look out from the comic book frame into the reader’s eyes, is one of the reasons reading American Splendor seems so personal. We are invited to see the world as Harvey does, described in working-class demotic, sprinkled with jazz slang.

Look back at my example above. In the penultimate frame, Pekar freezes. It’s a moment of dead air, as he pauses for breath, thinking. It’s as though he’s broadcasting live.

Here’s another example, from The Young Crumb Story. Harvey pauses, as though improvising (look out for my posts on Pekar’s jazz criticism later this week!). Here, his hesitations lead on to embarrassment and then relief:

Art by R. Crumb

The door appears behind Pekar as though willed into being. What is that limbo space that Pekar-as-narrator occupies? Dolly Clackett suggested to me that it’s reminiscent of a TV studio’s blankness, which fits my narrator-as-lecturer analogy. In this space between story and strip, Pekar mediates action.

Sometimes, we even find ourselves literally inside Pekar’s head:

Art by Gerry Shamway

Pekar’s mode of narration, those moments in which he speaks out to us, are essential to the flavour of his comics. Admittedly, focusing on this framing device risks misrepresenting the stories, which usually centre upon his interaction and communication with the people of Cleveland. But it seemed important to me that I begin this series on American Splendor with thoughts about the interiority of Harvey Pekar.

Here’s our man…

Art by S. Cavey

Radio silence

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to apologize for not blogging at the end of this week. I’m attending a conference which is taking up all my free time. I’ll be back next week, blogging in the run up to the broadcast of Sherlock on 25th July.

Until then, here’s Harvey. Have a good weekend!

Pekar's PC, art by R. Crumb

From off the streets of Cleveland comes…

Harvey Pekar, author of the underground comic American Splendor, died on Monday.

Many of his obituarists have expressed a feeling of personal loss. Little wonder; Pekar’s autobiographical tales of life as a Cleveland file-clerk vividly portrayed the petty frustrations and small triumphs which punctuate our lives.

What’s extraordinary is that Pekar self-financed the annual publication of this uncommercial proposition on his government wage, supplemented by money he made through music journalism. And all this at a time when most adult Americans would have sniffed at the thought of reading a comic book.

Robert Crumb, Pekar’s long-time friend and collaborator, once wrote, “Yeah, Harvey is an ego-maniac; a classic case… A driven, compulsive, mad Jew… Watching him eat – he eats faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, shovelling it in as if somebody had a gun at his head and was threatening to kill him if he didn’t get it all down in ten seconds. It’s something to see. But how else could he have gotten all those comics published, with almost no money… only an ego-maniac would persist in the face of such odds.”

How I Quit Collecting Records And Put Out A Comic Book With The Money I Saved

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be blogging a good bit about Pekar and the range and effect of his work. So keep your peepers peeled for posts on Pekar’s first-person voice, on his other life as a prolific jazz critic, on his adversarial appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, as well as a review of the movie of American Splendor.

Harvey Pekar 1939-2010