A Pekar Notebook


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Wednesday, August 4, 2010


Pekar as drawn by Crumb.

Some jottings from my Pekar notebook:

Pekar and Crumb. When I saw Harvey Pekar earlier this year, we chatted a bit about Crumb. Pekar was very pleased by one thing I said, which was that I thought he was as important in the evolution of Crumb’s career as Crumb was in the launching of Pekar’s career. What I meant was this: that drawing Pekar’s stories enlarged Crumb’s sense of what comics could be, made him more attentive to quiet moments and the potency of a well-shaped narrative. There was a tendency in the early Crumb to go for the easy shock or the satisfyingly quick yuck-yuck laugh. Pekar taught Crumb to trust the audience more, to be more circumspect and less in-your-face. I think the lessons of Pekar can be seen in the strong run of stories Crumb did in the 1980s for Weirdo, particularly “Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis” (Weirdo #7). To some extent Crumb was already heading in that direction (see “That’s Life” from Arcade #3), but Pekar unquestionably pushed Crumb into a more meditative direction. I’m also thinking that Crumb’s habit of adapting classic (Boswell, Sartre, Genesis) might have its root in those Pekar collaboration in the sense that they made Crumb realize that he enjoyed the challenge of coming up with pictures for other people’s stories. In a sense, adapting a classic work gives Crumb the benefits that the Pekar collaborations did without the difficult of dealing with Pekar’s ornery personality.

There is a good essay to be written about the Crumb/Pekar collaboration, how they were crucial figures in each careers. I can’t think of another comics collaboration that has been so fruitful (Lee/Kirby by contrast seems like a bad marriage held together for the kids and Kurtzman/Elder was wildly uneven). If for some reason you only want to have one Pekar book, it should be Bob and Harv’s Comics, which is absolutely peak material.

Where Pekar Went Wrong. Writing in the New Republic, David Hajdu made the case against Pekar: “In the tradition of blunt candor that Pekar held dear, I will admit that I have found much of his work overrated—indulgent, didactic, and verbose.” I wrote something similar in my obit: “His later stories tended to be didactic and verbose, losing the lively vernacular colour of his early work.” To refine the point a bit, Pekar had one of those unusual careers where his very best work came early, and he gradually lost the skills he had. Even before he started American Splendor he had written some excellent work for various underground comics, like the great little vignette “A Good Shit Is Best” (illustrated in 1974 by Willy Murphy). These underground stories and the first dozen or so issues of American Splendor constitute the bulk of Pekar’s achievement. Over the last twenty years, his comics have not been nearly as great (with the exception of a few stories illustrated by David Collier and Joe Sacco).

Where did Pekar go wrong? It’s a commonplace that he was a prisoner of his artists: Crumb could bring much more to the table than most artists. But part of the blame might also be in Pekar’s taste for realistic illustration: early on he worked with some very lively cartoony artists like Murphy but later in his career he seemed to prefer rather stiff artists working in the illustration. Coupled with that is the fact that Pekar was a victim of his own ideology of “realism”: in his early stories you can see that he was shaping his material to make it interesting and focused. That’s what writers do. But later on, he seemed to believe, naively, that all he needed to do was to replicate the incidents of his life. This ideology of realism grew stronger in Pekar in part as a reaction to what he saw as over-celebrated works of Spiegelman and the Brothers Hernandez, all of whom took greater liberties with “reality” than Pekar did. But Pekar was wrong to criticize those cartoonists on the grounds of realism since their reshaping of experienced incidents into narratives (or use of fantasy or anthropomorphic conceits) was actually their strength, not their weakness. It was a strength that Pekar shared in his early work, but lost when realism became an ideological program for him, rather than a rough-and-tumble rule of thumb.

It’s also the case that Pekar’s talent was for the short story or even something smaller: the resonant anecdote, the small conversational nugget you overhear in an elevator.  Pekar never figured out how to wok on  a longer narrative canvas, how to shape books rather than stories. Finally, I’m wondering if Pekar’s retirement didn’t lose him an important source of inspiration. Many of his best tales were about his co-workers. Once he retired, he lost that ever-fresh spring of stories.

Pekar and Politics. Over at Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss raised the possibility that one of Pekar’s last works, dealing with his relationship with his Jewish identity, might be bowdlerized for political reasons now that he’s no longer here to supervise the project. I’m not prepared to judge the issue before the book is published but Weiss raises an important issue. I think reviewers might want to keep Weiss’s warning in mind about since there are several posthumous Pekar projects still in the works. Something to keep our eyes on.

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7 Responses to “A Pekar Notebook”
  1. Robert Boyd says:

    I think Pekar’s retirement hurt him in multiple ways. First in the way you suggest. Second, by freeing up his time, it gave him freedom to create longer narratives, which were not as good as his shorter, more focused pieces. He just wasn’t a good “graphic novelist,” as opposed to a short-story teller.

    But these was something else. In many stories (“Working Man’s Nightmare” for example), Pekar deals with his need for the structure and security of having a job, of having steady income. He envies the freedom of full-time artists, but simultaneously fears the uncertainties of their lives. He is frequently pondering how his life would be different if he were an artist full time instead a clerk/artist. What I think is implicit in many of these stories (off the top of my head, “Hypothetical Quandary,” “An Argument at Work,” “American Splendor Assaults the Media,” and “Grubstreet U.S.A.”) is how important the daily job was as a thing that enabled his art to happen as it did.

    When he retired, I think he may have been somewhat at wits end about what to do. We know he had psychological problems in that period. I think we can also say that his work during that period was not as good as it was at his peak, and I would go so far as to say that some of it seemed hacked out…or at least not terribly inspired. I think losing the bedrock structure of a day-job and a paycheck hurt Pekar’s work a lot. I admit that this is callow amateur psychoanalysis, but that’s hard to avoid. Pekar’s work invites it to a certain extent.

  2. EH says:

    Hey Jeet-
    I might be one of the few who reads both Mondoweiss and Comics Comics on a regular basis. I think you should correct your above post: the book that might get censored deals with Pekar’s relationship with Israel, not his Jewish identity, which is a very important distinction to make.

  3. Rob Clough says:

    Jeet,

    I’m going to have to strongly disagree with you about a couple of your points, because I saw Our Cancer Year as the peak of Pekar’s career.

    First, the expressionistic art of Frank Stack gave the grim events a certain tension. I would disagree further with you that Pekar started emphasizing realism above all else in his choices for artists; Stack is a good example of this, but Budgett/Dumm were there all along as examples of very mundane stylists, and his recent Vertigo series had some truly whimsical collaborations. I posited that Pekar chose his artists based on what he wanted to express emotionally. For stories where he wanted his words to leave the greatest lasting impression, he chose the most naturalistic of artists. For stories where he wanted emotions to take center stage, he chose someone more expressionistic (and when you saw Stack doing one of his stories, you knew it would have heavy emotional content). In Our Cancer Year, Stack gets at the pain and ugliness of the experience of not only having cancer, but how family relationships change (and not always for the better) during the experience.

    Second, Our Cancer Year to me proved that he was capable of a longer narrative that was successful. Writing with Joyce, this book not only conveyed the raw emotion of being diagnosed and treated for cancer, it balanced it with Joyce’s experience of working with war-stricken teens across the world.

    It’s the complexity of the narrative, the complexity of his feelings for Joyce and vice-versa, and the complexity of the realtionship of the teens with each other (esp in the face of the Intifada, starting at that time) that elevate this book into a first-rank achievement.

    I’d agree that he never quite got as good as this again, but I think to dismiss his body of work after AS #12 is to ignore a number of fine stories. His 2000 comic, “Portrait of the Artist In His Declining Years” in particular has a number of poignant short stories. “Bedtime Stories” talks about his relationship with his foster daughter in a brutally truthful manner.

    There’s plenty in his Vertigo series that’s excellent, and I thought that Macedonia was extremely well-done. In a manner similar to how Crumb expanded as an artist by telling Pekar’s stories, I’d say that Harv expanded as a writer by telling the stories of people around him.

    I would agree that his post original-series AS work is no longer as consistently innovative as his early work (again, with the exception of Our Cancer Year, a stunning work then and clearly influential now), but I think it’s a mistake to say that it’s without consistent merit. I think it certainly should be revisited.

  4. Nicole Rudick says:

    I don’t know whether this adds any bit of insight into his latter-day work, but around 2007, when I was at Bookforum, I commissioned and edited some short reviews by Harvey for the magazine. He was very interested in rather experimental narratives and in books that mixed multiple genres. He covered Giorgio Manganelli’s “Centuria,” which is composed of 100 stories, each about a page in length, and Aidan Higgins’s “Scene from a Receding Past,” which has been compared stylistically to Joyce’s “Portrait of an Artist.” He’s also the person who introduced me to JT Waldman’s “Megillat Esther,” a phenomenal book. There could very well have been a disconnect between his comics writing and his independent reading, but given his choices in literature, it’s fair to say he had an affinity for works that stretched and reshaped the boundaries of reality.

  5. keith z says:

    you use the term ‘incidences’ a few times in this piece. maybe i’m wrong, but i think you mean incidents.

  6. Jeet Heer says:

    Corrected!

  7. […] frattempo, il bravo Jeet Heer ha scritto un più meditato intervento retrospettivo su Pekar, discutendo pregi e difetti dell’autore, e spiegando perché la parte inziale della […]

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