Pekar, Harvey

PEKAR, HARVEY (1939-2010). One of the most influential figures in English-language graphic novels, Pekar considered himself an ardent if pessimistic leftwinger, a devoted essayist and reviewer. Most of all, he made himself a comic scriptwriter, editor and sometime publisher. As British actress Helen Mirren said after he died, Pekar had shown artists and audiences around the world that they could look at comic art in a different way.

Born in Cleveland and remaining there all his life, Pekar grew up in a Yiddish-fluent, lower middle-class household of three generations. His parents, both immigrants from Poland, together owned a small grocery store in a blue-collar neighborhood. Pekar grew up ambivalent about upward mobility, more given to joke-telling and neighborhood life than to success in school. His mother, an avid reader of the Daily Worker, sent him out to leaflet for Henry Wallace in 1948, and he retained the sentiments of the Left, but without any affiliations.

A dropout after a year at Case Western Reserve University, Pekar took a series of low-level clerical jobs, ending up as a file clerk at a Veterans Administration hospital for thirty-five years. He had begun writing reviews of jazz records during his twenties for several of the best known speciality magazines of the field, and in time turned his interest toward literary reviews, later winning an award for review-essays broadcast on National Public Radio. He found his destiny, however, after meeting Robert Crumb by accident at the dawn of the 1960s.

Taking his new friend in hand, making him welcome in Cleveland, Pekar drew upon Crumb’s own inspiration and encouragement in writing scripts for a series of alternative comics as he gathered the confidence to publish his own, American Splendor, from 1976 onward.

This unique and ongoing effort, with a series of artists including Crumb responding to Pekar’s scripts, set a precedent in American comic art and arguably a precedent elsewhere in the world. Comics could and would escape the fantastic or even dramatic, and descend into the texture of everyday life, in this case the stories of a melancholy Jew living and working in the blue-collar world of a once vibrant, now fading city. His roster of artists included a handful of those rising to fame in the field of comic art, including Joe Sacco, Spain Rodriguez, Frank Stack, Jim Wooding, Chester Brown, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez, Drew Friedman, Ho Che Anderson, Rick Geary, Ed Piskor and Gary Dumm.

By 1986, his work had gained enough attention for a first anthology, drawing upon the first ten issues of American Splendor. That year, David Letterman invited him onto his late night talk show, and Pekar quickly became a dour, iconoclastic figure eager to challenge the corporate world. In 1984, he met and married his third wife, Joyce Brabner, who readily became a collaborator. Together with artist Frank Stack, they won a National Book Award for Our Cancer Year (1995), a saga of his illness and treatment. Pekar and Brabner also wrote together for artists in several well-received anthologies.

Pekar’s reputation soared with the release of the prize-winning film biopic “American Splendor” (2003), with Paul Giamatti playing Pekar himself. The process of production proved too stressful for Pekar, who felt compelled to quit his long-held job. His work continued in a variety of contexts, and his fame grew with an appearance on Anthony Bourdain’s show, and he spoke widely at colleges, offering sharp criticisms of the US invasion of Iraq, and equally sharp criticisms of the divisions of wealth in the United States. Pekar also turned toward in-depth US histories, in comic art form, in a sustained collaboration with historian Paul Buhle, over the course of a half-dozen books: Wobblies!, Students for a Democratic Society, The Beats, Studs Terkel’s Working, Yiddishkeit and FDR and the New Deal for Beginners. He also contributed a comic story and advised editorially in the three volume Jews and American Popular Culture, a favorite subject of his.

Struck down repeatedly by ill health, Pekar succumbed in his home in Cleveland Heights in 2010, perhaps by an accidental overdose, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer for a third time. His work continued to appear in several books prepared before his death, including Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, and Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland.

Rhode, Michael G., ed. Harvey Pekar: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).