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108 CHAPTER 1 “I MADE THAT WHOLE THING UP!” THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS About four-fifths into the comics memoir Our Cancer Year, lymphoma victim Harvey Pekar hauls himself out of bed, slowly, groggily—his mind addled by a psychoactive painkiller, his body numbed to near-paralytic heaviness as a result, apparently, of chemotherapy. Narcotized and reduced to merely “rocking through patterns,” Harvey continues to slip in and out of consciousness even after he stands. In fact he slips in and out of self-consciousness as well, for his mind keeps turning over that most basic of questions, “Who am I?” At the bottom of the page in question (fig. 39), Harvey rises with a wordless groan, head sagging. His image is dark, formed of heavy contour lines and brusque, energetic cross-hatching; his surroundings are white and detailless , the panel that holds him borderless, exploded. The page itself, its surface broken into six panels, is organized and dominated by large patches of empty white space. In this open space, Harvey appears free, adrift, and very much in danger of losing himself. Turning the page, recto to verso, we face a much different surface (fig. 40), more fragmented yet also more claustrophobic. Images of varying size crowd together, some bordered, some not; some are defined by thin hatching, others by blobs of inky black. Across the top, two panels of dense brushwork show Harvey’s face in extreme close-up, a shadow against a shadowy background . Dry brushstrokes pick out his features—half-conscious in the first image, then alert in the second, as a title suddenly pops into his mind: American Splendor. Harvey’s eyes widen, staring directly at us as the distinctive logotype American Splendor appears in a thought balloon over his head. American CHAPTER FOUR THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS 109 Splendor seems to be part of the answer to his question , “Who am I?”—but only that, a part. In the next tier of panels, he in effect reiterates the question : seeing himself in a bathroom mirror, he turns to his wife Joyce (that is, Joyce Brabner) and asks, “Am I some guy who writes about himself in a comic book called American Splendor? . . . Or I am just a character in that book?” Uncertain of who he is, Harvey stands naked, bereft and puzzled, isolated within a round frame that focuses everything on the question of his identity. Is he author and character, or just character? Harvey, obviously, is far gone. His body has betrayed his mind, and his mind, reduced to zero, now has to struggle to recover the fundamentals of his identity, in both personal and vocational terms. In short, Harvey must recover his sense of who he is. Even as this alarming sequence (co-written by Brabner and Pekar, and drawn by Frank Stack) reveals the psychological and neuropathic fallout of cancer therapy , it turns on a broader, more abstract issue: how we fashion our very selves through the stories we tell. Who is Harvey—creator, creation, or both? This is a question that readers of Pekar’s autobiographical comics have faced for the better part of thirty years, for Pekar, more than any other comics author, has demonstrated the interpenetration of life and art that autobiography can achieve. Harvey is the main character in the magazine/comic book series American Splendor, and Pekar its scripter and guiding hand; though not interchangeable, the two are one. Through its sporadic serialization (since 1976), American Splendor has offered readers a chance to grow with both Harvey-the-persona and Pekar-theauthor , always with the tantalizing possibility that one might be collapsed into the other—or perhaps not. Pekar has succeeded in mythologizing himself, transforming “Harvey” into a property that belongs to him (or he to it?) but which nonetheless exceeds him. By turns gregarious and recessive, openhearted and suspicious, sensitive and coarse, the workingclass hero of American Splendor emerges as a complex , provoking character who just happens to bear an unmistakable likeness to his creator.1 Pekar’s achievement is to have established a new mode in comics: the quotidian autobiographical series, focused on the events and textures of everyday existence . Joseph Witek’s groundbreaking study Comic Books as History (1989) aptly describes this mode as one of consciously literary yet “aggressively humdrum ” realism (128). For Pekar, such realism is a matter of paying attention: his distinctive approach depends on keen-eyed (and -eared) observation of anything and everything around...

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