Harvey Pekar: Conversations (review)

Harvey Pekar: Conversations includes almost twenty-five years of transcribed interviews with the creator of American Splendor from various sources such as fanzines, public radio shows, and the Washington Post. Together these interviews offer a close look at Harvey Pekar, a Jewish writer who rarely foregrounds his Jewishness, but someone quite outspoken on comics, politics, music, money, and success. More important to comic scholars who recognize the impact of Pekar’s long-running, initially self-published comic, the book offers insight into the creative processes of Pekar and many of the artists he has worked with over the years.

Michael Rhode begins the edition with a short introduction that notes the significance of his subject in the history of comics, the one who introduced realism to American comics. Rhode explains that while Robert Crumb and Justin Green did autobiographical work of a humorous or scatological nature, Pekar was the first to “create a comic book memoir on its own terms” (p. viii), making him the true founder of memoir comics. Pekar also diligently stuck with his endeavor despite his lack of success, self-publishing for many years before being picked up by Dark Horse comics. As one will find in other books in the University Press of Mississippi’s Conversation with Comic Artists Series, Rhode follows this short, but informative introduction with a handy timeline of Pekar’s life, including significant life events as well as a list of publication dates.

Rhode’s book is most interesting as a psychological study. As readers sift through the various interviews, they will get a better understanding of what it means to be Harvey Pekar. Anyone familiar with the American Splendor comics will likely recognize the gamut of attitudes and emotions that play intermittently throughout the interviews (despite Rhode’s lamenting the inability to convey Pekar’s joy in music from a transcription). What does come across is bitterness at his lack of success, a deep desire for recognition and approval, and the flashes of anger that accompany any sort of social injustice. His fight with David Letterman on late night television, mentioned throughout the early interviews especially, is an example of this. Interviews later in the book likewise reveal a politically activist spirit one might associate more with Pekar’s wife, Joyce Brabner, which perhaps explains the success of their marriage (his third) since both seem dedicated to comics and human rights.

What Conversations also reveals is a conflicted desire to be both popular and substantive, something Pekar seems bitterly cognizant of as a contradiction in terms. This seems most obvious in his discussions of jazz in the interviews. His criticism and tastes are best described as experimental and somewhat eclectic, something that promises little popularity. At times Pekar very nearly warns his interviewers that he is not the “common man” that he is often perceived to be. Though he did not finish college, he is well read, and his interest in comics only returned with the advent of the underground comix movement and an opportunity to experiment beyond something “aimed at adolescents or people with an adolescent intellect” (p. 36). Pekar is clearly disparaging of the superhero comics that first turned him off the medium at an early age. Yet superhero comics remain popular today. Marvel and DC enjoy far more success in both comics and movies precisely because they appeal to mass audiences, to popular tastes. Thus Pekar laments the deplorable state of comics publishing and popular entertainment at the same time as he laments his lack of financial success, realizing that one surely comes at the cost of the other. The idea of “selling out” is a temptation that often reverberates throughout the interviews, and it is perhaps his inability to ever truly sell out that makes Pekar appealing as a subject in his autobiographical comics. After all, every good story needs conflict.

However, the success of Ted Hope’s American Splendor movie (2003), another popular topic in the interviews, allows Pekar greater independence...