Notes from a famous nobody

Harvey Pekar remembers high school football, street fighting, and life before "American Splendor."

By Douglas Wolk

Oct 6, 2005 | More than virtually any other celebrity of any caliber, Harvey Pekar is famous for being nobody in particular. He's lived in Cleveland all his life; he worked as a file clerk at a V.A. hospital for decades, and read a lot, and listened to jazz records, and wrote about them for pin money. His life wasn't fascinating by the usual standards; his stroke of genius was deciding to document it anyway, in comic-book form. "Why [can't] comics be about the lives of working stiffs?" he asks in his new book, "The Quitter." "We're as interesting and funny as anyone else." Pekar started writing as if his resentment about washing dishes was something the rest of the world should be interested in -- and eventually they did start paying attention.

Pekar started publishing his autobiographical comics series "American Splendor" in 1976, and it's appeared in one form or another almost every year since then. From the get-go, it featured a bunch of cartoonists' visual interpretations of Pekar's scripts -- most famously Robert Crumb, an old friend of his whose presence in the early issues made readers take notice.

At first, "American Splendor" rarely showed anything like a significant moment in Pekar's life. Instead, he focused on relentlessly quotidian incidents and conversations: interactions with co-workers, domestic non-events, chatter about his name. The series was startling for what it "wasn't" -- in the mid-'70s, basically the only other American comics were mainstream pulp adventure and sex-and-drugs-obsessed "undergrounds."

But what "American Splendor" was was pretty fascinating too: a refracted memoir, focusing on the ordinary and valorizing it over the extraordinary. Every few pages, readers saw a different artist's interpretation of Pekar's words, in a way that broke the illusion that the only person telling the story was the person it had happened to. Pekar made memoir-comics possible, although it took a string of gifted writer-artists to make them fashionable. By the late '80s, a wave of autobiographical and semiautobiographical comics had begun in the wake of "American Splendor," and it's kept going ever since: Chester Brown's "The Playboy" and "I Never Liked You," David B.'s "Epileptic," Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis," Ed Brubaker's "Lowlife," and dozens of others.

Meanwhile, in the mid-'80s, Pekar started appearing on David Letterman's show, and his interactions with Letterman naturally started showing up in "American Splendor." He eventually got banned from the show (for wearing an "On Strike Against NBC" T-shirt) -- a story that was told in the comic too. When Pekar fought lymphoma in the early '90s, he and his wife, Joyce Brabner, turned their experience into the script for a graphic novel, "Our Cancer Year"; when the 2003 "American Splendor" film about his life became an indie hit, Pekar responded with another book, "Our Movie Year." But it's hard to write about life outside the spotlight when the spotlight has moved onto you.

So "The Quitter," drawn by Dean Haspiel from Pekar's script, covers territory he's only dealt with glancingly before: the years before he started writing "American Splendor." It's narrated in the same mock-conversational first-person style Pekar usually adopts, with "yeah" and "let me tell you" and "anyway" everywhere, but this time the scope of his story is far wider than he's ever attempted in the past.

At first, "The Quitter" looks like it's going to be about Pekar's street-fighting career, or his habit in his early years of giving up on anything he couldn't immediately master. Young Harvey -- or, as his Polish immigrant father calls him in Yiddish, Herschel -- gets in fights with groups of kids in his mostly black neighborhood (Haspiel draws the scuffles in Dynamic Superhero Comic Book style, with limbs flying everywhere and nobody's feet on the ground); then he moves to another neighborhood, wins a couple of one-on-one fights, gets involved in sports and has his bar mitzvah.

Next, he gives up on sports after he doesn't make the starting football team, can't find a better job than working in his family's store ("It never even had a name. There was an ancient Salada tea sign on one of the windows, but no name"), and decides to redirect his energy into making a name for himself by beating up other kids. A little later, he discovers his lifelong fondness for jazz, then tries file clerking for the first time.

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