I Coulda Guessed Half of That

On Harvey Pekar and ‘American Splendor’

Harvey Pekar with David Letterman on the Late Show, 1988

When I was a young boy, I’d sit in the backseat of my parents’ car as we passed the Limerick city Garda station. In front of this station is an old statue of a robed man clutching his head, which seems to be at once melting and splitting into three other heads. One time as we passed this statue I asked my parents who it was that was being depicted, and my mother answered, That’s what’ll happen to you if you think about that statue too long. After that moment, I was terrified of stumbling on a thought that featured the man in the statue, lest my head melt as well. Years later, I learned about physiognomy — the archaic theory that a person’s thoughts and feelings could affect the development of their facial features and reflect them like a seismograph. Think happy thoughts, have happy looks. So now it’s Today A.D., and I’m quite terrified of stumbling upon people who embody negative thoughts. Well if ever there was a man with an appearance that embodied negative thoughts, that man would be Harvey Pekar.

Like many people, I first came across Pekar through his appearances on Letterman spanning the 1980s, which have luckily been preserved and compiled on YouTube in a video totaling over 90 minutes that is frankly better entertainment than 99 percent of movies released these days. He was first brought on as a soup du jour clown of the week, but the writer was offbeat and eccentric enough that he was invited back again and again. On the show, he was stingy and uncooperative, at one point picketing against NBC’s parent company, General Electric, before calling Letterman a shill and getting booted off.

The repartee between Pekar and Letterman was always characterized by mutual mistrust and admiration. On the one hand, Pekar only ever saw Letterman as a way to hawk his wares — his autobiographical series of comic books, American Splendor, which followed his life in Cleveland. He loathed cable television, hated the philistines who ate it up, and above all resented yuppies like Letterman who, in his mind, had drifted through life in a symbiotic mediocrity pact with an audience that had been systematically dumbed down by an American culture that siphoned pleasure for profit. Fun guy, right? At least in the early days, Letterman saw Pekar as a kook and a foil so ridiculous that the late-night host didn’t have to lift a finger to get the crowd on his side. I mean, for Chrissakes, you’re suspicious of the guy before he even opens his mouth. As Letterman said, “You look like the type of guy you see sleeping on buses.”

At the same time, you can tell Letterman admired his interlocutor’s honesty. Yes, when the comic book writer declared on his first appearance, “I’m no showbiz phony, folks! I tell the truth!” it reads as phony and affected. Yes, Pekar underestimates his “wrestling fan” audience and overestimates himself when he assumes that “prostheses” and “repartee” are the most archaic of obscurantisms, then proceeds to trip up over the term “lowest common denominator.” But when he tells you he gets paid a hundred bucks for coming onto the show, he’s not lying. When he says it’s a chore to go on television every night doing simple-minded bullshit, it’s the truth. When he says no one’s buying his books, so why bother telling the crowd about them, he’s really telling how it is. The guy’s not lying — he can’t sell books for shit. But was Pekar fascinated with his host? I always felt he was. Being all the things he hated, Letterman was everything Pekar was not. Charismatic, he could play the crowd like a violin. And at the end of it all, he’d built his career, like it or not, on his own wits. Still, neither of them could move comics.

Pekar was born five weeks after the start of World War II to Jewish Polish immigrants. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was destined to spend the rest of his life. His father, a shopkeeper and rabbinical scholar, wanted his son to go into a profession, but instead Pekar played football, started fights, and flunked through a series of menial jobs. He read a lot and eventually started writing jazz criticism for local magazines while working a day job as a file clerk, a job that he kept with no promotion until his retirement, when he received for a pension a percentage of his wage.

There’s a long list of things Pekar hates, but somewhere above no-parking signs and below typewriters I would place the comic book as we know it — superheroes, talking cats, simple-minded cartoons. Pekar sought to reinvent the medium of the comic book and make it adult, serious, and literary, as per his mantra: “A comic is words and pictures, and you can do anything with words and pictures.” So, he began writing his own stories, and by 1976 he had compiled enough stories for a whole bona fide issue. Unluckily for Pekar, by 1976 the underground “comix” boom had come and gone. Many writers had had the same ideas as he did, and with the blossoming of youth counterculture, a market had opened up for the sleazy, grimy, and outrageous. By the mid-1970s, in fact, comic publishers were printing less than ever, and what they were printing was being headed by sure-sellers in the scene, like Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb. No one was willing to print his stories. So, for a year Pekar lived cheap (see: cheaper than usual). He ate hot dogs for lunch and potato chips for supper, and after a year he had saved up enough dough to publish American Splendor by himself. How do I know this? Because he chronicled it in American Splendor.

In what is perhaps the most egomaniacal collection of words and pictures ever assembled, American Splendor is written by Harvey Pekar, with art direction by Harvey Pekar, and follows the hyperordinary goings-on of the protagonist, Harvey Pekar. Now, by a tragic twist of fate, Pekar never learned to draw, so each issue features a goody bag of artists, some better and some worse, each illustrating one of about a dozen vignettes that compose an issue. It’s in these vignettes that Pekar’s writing shines as really one of a kind. Somehow, I kept coming back for more. With titles like “My Struggle with Corporate Corruption and Network Philistinism,” “How I Quit Collecting Records and Put Out a Comic Book with the Money I Saved,” “Peeling and Eating a Tangerine (And Disposing of the Seeds),” and, last but not least, “Going to Work,” the stories follow the author’s quotidian life. He steals his neighbor’s paper and feels guilty. A buddy from work compliments him on his shirt. One vignette is nothing more than an internal dialogue about why his second wife left him. That’s all fine and well, you’re thinking, but why the fuck would I want to read that? My life is miserable enough as it is.

Well, take a single look at the state of our entertainment, at our films and shows, our books. Everything produced seems committed to depicting an alternate reality. You don’t have to go anywhere near the fatberg of superhero content in the culture. As a rule, ostensibly realist stories are totally detached from actuality. As Sergei Dovlatov once put it, “In this kind of milieu, it’s more dignified to lose than it is to win.” So, when you read American Splendor, you feel totally Pekar’s subservience to the marginalia of everyday life. Pekar often wrote down conversations word for word immediately after having them, and they’d land unchanged in an issue that year. He continued this process until his death in 2010.

Dean Haspiel, who illustrated Pekar’s 2005 work The Quitter, suggested that Pekar’s prolific output and attention to detail were the result of his fear that he’d die of Alzheimer’s disease, as both his parents did, and it shows. If you’re the type of person who’d enjoy snooping through someone’s diary, you’d probably enjoy this. I think my favorite vignette is in issue three, titled “Awaking to the Terror of a New Day,” which depicts the hero’s journey from Point A (waking up in bed) to Point B (walking into work). It’s not a terribly complex plot: in his freezing apartment, Harvey decides to wake himself up by masturbating:

Who should I think about? Linda? She got a good body. Onna other hand, she treated me like shit. Fuck her. I aint givin her the satisfaction. It aint right for asshole chicks t’ have good bodies . . . . Hmm, I’ll think about Susan. She’s good lookin and she was real nice t’me, too.

After, he runs himself a warm bath, puts on fresh clothes, reexamines the women in his life who might potentially have sex with him, like a pauper opening up his fridge for the fourth time in an hour, and fantasizes about the coming of summer. By the time he arrives at the office, he has enough things to look forward to to get him through the day: “I’m pretty far from havin it made, but I aint dead yet.”

On the surface, it’s Joycean. Let’s think back on the start of Ulysses: our hero wakes up, has breakfast, shits in an outhouse as the odor fills his nostrils, reads a magazine, goes to the butcher, walks behind a girl whose ass reminds him of two hams. So there’s that, but there’s something more at play in American Splendor. Because of the brevity of its stories, and maybe because the medium of the comic book has so conditioned the reader to expect a dramatic payoff, I’ve found that whenever I’m reading a Pekar original, I unconsciously expect a punchline even though I know there is none because I’ve already read a hundred of these. In most stories, Pekar deliberately puts what might be called a punchline somewhere in the middle or beginning of the story rather than the end. There’s a peculiar kind of suspense created here, maybe without the author’s intention, like a literary Kuleshov effect or a Norm Macdonald joke that goes on for so long you can’t imagine it ending without a payoff. Surely someone is going to collapse and die? Why else is there a whole panel devoted to the precarious placement of a painter’s feet on a ladder? When Harvey gets into a car with a stranger who promises to give him a lift to work, you think surely this guy is a kidnapper — why else are there multiple telegraphed instances of the stranger’s backstory not lining up? Because, Pekar says, that’s life.

And I admit, I find pleasure in reading about self-publishers experiencing the same trials that my friends and I have gone through. Finding no publisher until Dark Horse Comics picked him up in 1993, many years after the release of the first issue, Pekar reportedly lost thousands of dollars on expenses and didn’t break even until 14 years into writing. Comic shops didn’t stock him, and he nagged editors for essay gigs before getting ghosted. In one issue, after he’s achieved marginal cult status, Pekar is invited to a signing. So he lugs a suitcase full of books on an economy flight, only for a single fan to show up, with whom Pekar discusses Saudi Arabian politics until the end of his shift. Sorry Harvey, says the owner, we didn’t advertise. A lot more woulda showed up if we advertised. Not a bad day. Usually you’d expect money to come hand in hand with name recognition, but Pekar knows better. He’s no showbiz phony, folks! So who could blame him for being an opportunist? Listen to this: one time, he gets a call from Hollywood actor Wallace Shawn just as he’s wrapping the 1981 picture My Dinner with Andre (a picture, incidentally, not un-Pekar-esque). Shawn’s a fan of American Splendor and invites Pekar to a screening and then lunch. What do you think? Harvey finds out Shawn’s father is the head editor of the New Yorker: “The New Yorker? Maybe he’s got publishing connections. Seems like he could really do me some good.”

So he watches the movie and is impressed. He can see how Shawn would be interested in his comics — maybe he’s not such a bad guy. Pekar, Shawn, and a mutual friend and his wife meet up at the latter’s home in a poor but gentrified neighborhood. They hit it off, talking about philosophy and Bergman. Shawn is an amiable guy and just wants to chew the fat with these like-minded friends after a long trip, but internally Pekar can’t wait to get Shawn one-on-one to butter him up. Then Shawn mentions that his girlfriend is forced to bartend, and Pekar is struck with the realization: “Looks like he’s in about the same shape I’m in . . . . Shawn was broke. It was doubtful whether he could do himself a lot of good, let alone me.” Now, driving around Cleveland, Pekar tries to harebrain a way to get the actor alone but, demoralized, gives up on the whole idea and exits the car to walk on foot. What’s the point — Shawn couldn’t help him if he wanted to: “Well, I’ve met my quota of celebrities for 1981. At least he didn’t try to borrow any money from me.”

Yes, I’ve always felt that Pekar was more interested in success and reputation than in the substance of his writing. By his own admission, he enjoyed the creative process and deemed it culturally important, but it was also a means to an end: he wanted people to praise him, to like him, to respect him for it. Maybe that’s the story of every successful artist — Pekar was just willing to admit it. In my estimation, and in as few words as possible, American Splendor is the story of the obsessive pursuance of fame and fortune, by way of writing, by a man who, incidentally, also just so happens to be great at writing.

Like Robert Crumb, whose illustrations are my favorite of all the writer’s collaborations, Pekar came of age during the spring-well of youth culture that was the late 1960s. And like Crumb, Pekar was an outsider to the outsiders. He wasn’t a hippie, beatnik, longhair, junkie, or wino. He read obscure old epistolary novels, but academics saw him as crude, so he was neither hip nor of the old guard. Something you get to see in his earliest comics is the counterculture as normie. Seeing the world through his eyes, one gets the impression that any movement big enough to bear a name is just another carnival range for social games, for easy men and conniving women to wear costumes as cow tags, and for the powerful to take advantage of the vain. But don’t get it twisted: Pekar was New Left and campaigned in his fiction for unions, labor reform, and social justice.

A fun exercise would be to imagine what Pekar would be doing if he were writing today rather than in the ’70s. Would he have more success being published? Less? All I can say is that if depicting human relations earnestly was at risk of being deemed unpopular or chauvinistic then, today it is outright unacceptable. You don’t see Pekars published by the Big Five today or by any mainstream outlet. You find them on the internet, in forums and unsavory nooks — nooks decidedly incel-ish. You find them on Frogtwitter and 4chan’s /lit/ board. Or maybe they stay off the internet altogether and write nothing at all. I don’t want to devolve into a juvenile “if he were alive TODAY, he’d be on MY side” screed, but I can’t help think, reading American Splendor, of Pekar as one of those dissidents whose opinions are calculated to outrage the largest amount of people, the most apparatchiks you can while you’re still alive. Maybe when you’ve been ostracized long enough, any ticket to acceptance seems like a personal betrayal, and you dig your heels only deeper into contrarianism. I’m reminded of this exchange that happened on air:

“You wanna know what my politics are, Dave? I’m a strident leftist!”
“Well, Harvey, I coulda guessed half of that.”

Late in his life, after he’d battled cancer, Pekar was the subject of a 2003 film starring Paul Giamatti. By his own account, the film boosted sales of his books enough to keep his head above water (though he never moved out of Cleveland) and garnered him enough recognition that he was brought on for books at DC and Random House, even though his long-form works like The Quitter and My Movie Year never reached the heights of his vignettes, to my taste. Pekar would die in 2010 while preparing to undergo further cancer treatments.

Well, since I’ve already mentioned it, I’ll leave you with a review of Ulysses by one George Bernard Shaw:

I have read fragments of Ulysses in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization, but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity. To you possibly it may appeal as art; you are probably (you see I don’t know you) a young barbarian beglamoured by the excitements and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material; but to me it is all hideously real: I have walked those streets and know those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations . . . . In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.

Daniel Gavilovski is a Russian essayist, playwright, and archaeologist. He’s had fiction featured in Tales of the Unreal and &amp magazine, and nonfiction in Futurist Letters. He writes for Unreal Press, which is releasing his collection of plays titled Carbon Pages.