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.

Labels: Harvey Pekar, Heer notebook, R. Crumb