Harvey Pekar
1939-Yesterday
Almost everything you read about Harvey Pekar starts with a question. And usually that question is, Who is Harvey Pekar?
The really strange thing is that it’s the wrong question. People who have seen him, read American Splendor, or seen the movie know who he is. If you’re reading this, you probably already know OF him at the very least. So I think the question isn’t who.
Harvey Pekar has built a career out of not being special. He worked as a government file clerk, possibly the most boring and mundane thing you could think to do. He lived in Cleveland, the city that’s not quite Chicago, not quite New York, not quite anything, really. It’s The Drew Carey Show, to New York’s Seinfeld. And for god’s sake, the best name they could come up with the football team is the “Browns?” But somehow, out from his cave of jazz records and the pages of his comics, Pekar became a minor star, appearing periodically on Letterman.
The obvious question here seems to be Why? Why would someone who writes comics about nothing end up on the Tonight Show? But that’s not the right question either. It’s not the right question because the comics, though often mundane, are something special. They really are. Nobody else has done the autobiographical comic with the skill, the commitment, and the unique vision as Pekar has.
The best comparison I can make is to Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes was a daily comic strip the way daily comic strips are supposed to be. They were artistic, fast-paced, and actually funny. You might read one and actually laugh. I don’t know the last time you laughed at a Blondie strip, but for me it was ten years ago plus never. But more than that, Calvin and Hobbes embraced an unseen and underutilized facet of comic strip appeal, and that was the appeal of continuity. Calvin and Hobbes was good for a laugh once in a while, but the more you read, the more you appreciated the jokes, the funnier the strips were, and the better understanding you had of this entire world that Bill Watterson had created. In short, the strips could be appreciated as individuals without a problem, but they were also greatly enhanced when viewed as pieces of a whole. And that’s the appeal of American Splendor. There is something sort of boring about the comics most times, but the cumulative effect is impossible to deny.
It would probably be wrong of me to try and attach a significance to the work of Harvey Pekar. As just a guy who read the comics, it’s not my place to do that.
But fuck it.
Here’s the thing about Pekar: a lot of people would tell you he’s a loser. When people are being nice, they call him a curmudgeon. But “curmudgeon” is just a nice way of saying, “tolerable asshole with some valid points.” When people are not being nice, they’ll say he’s a standoffish, abrasive jerk. And they’ll say he has no ambition, which makes him a loser. That’s where they get it wrong.
For whatever reason, ambition is supposed to be something we all embrace that makes us worthwhile as humans. A friend of mine in middle school got an A on an invention project, but the teacher kept him after class to let him know that the project was beneath his abilities and that if grades were based individually instead of in the larger context of the group, my friend would have gotten a much lower grade. Much like my buddy’s invention of a diary lock that holds a CD case shut, Pekar’s American Splendor often had a lazy feel to it. At the same time, however, it was a unique piece of American history, the life of an average dude, something you really don’t here about in most eras. We know about Shakespeare, but we don’t know about Dave, his neighbor who was pretty much happy to just go about his life. We know all kinds of stuff about the Kennedys, but what was the workaday slob doing at the time? More importantly, do we learn more about American history from hearing about people like the Kennedys, a bunch of toothy jagoffs with perfect hair who did shit like yachting, or from people like Pekar?
Harvey was smart, but he didn’t give a shit that other people knew or acknowledged it. He was educated, but he didn’t care if anyone knew that either. He was hilarious, insightful and caring, and we were lucky that he decided to let us in on that one.
Someone once said that “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen is a great song because nobody else could ever do it. No other group could do that song as well, let alone come up with it. What Harvey Pekar did, no one else could ever do. And even the imitators can’t do it as well. Harvey was a lot of things in his life, but in his death he is not a loser. Losers don’t work with Robert Crumb, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez, Bob Fingerman, and ALAN MOORE. Losers don’t show up on Letterman and make me laugh more than most of the people who call themselves comedians. A loser couldn’t make American Splendor truly live up to its title the way Harvey Pekar did.