American Splendor: From off the Streets of Cleveland

AUTHOR: Pekar, Harvey

ARTIST: Greg Budgett (illustrator); Robert Crumb (illustrator); Gary G. Dumm (illustrator); Spain Rodriguez (illustrator); Joe Sacco (illustrator); Gerry Shamray (illustrator); Frank Stack (illustrator); Joe Zabel (illustrator); Mark Zingarelli (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Harvey Pekar; Dark Horse Comics; DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1976-1991; 1993-2008

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1987

Publication History

Harvey Pekar self-published the first fifteen issues of his autobiographical American Splendor from 1976 to 1991. He began recording his personal experiences in his thirties. Pekar could not draw, but he found willing underground comics publishers and illustrators, although it was not easy to tap into these resources from Cleveland. A further difficulty Pekar faced was the fact that comic artists found it difficult to draw in the “novo realism” style Pekar requested for his stories. Then, in the mid-1970’s, Pekar’s comics lost their main outlets when the head shops that sold underground comics became widely outlawed for selling drug paraphernalia.

Such complexities motivated Pekar to self-publish and led to the birth of American Splendor in 1976. Pekar also handled distribution during this time and kept back issues in print. A panel in American Splendor shows an exasperated Pekar sitting on undistributed bundles of issue 7 around the time he met actor Wallace Shawn, star of the film My Dinner with André (1981), hoping to make connections to buyers.

American Splendor’s publishing history after 1990 is sporadic. Pekar contracted lymphoma and became involved with multiple publishing companies including Tundra Publishing, Dark Horse Comics, and DC Comics. Dark Horse published several American Splendor one-shots: Comic-Con Comics (1996); Odds and Ends, Music Comics, and On the Job (1997); Transatlantic Comics (1998); Terminal (1999); Portrait of the Author in His Declining Years (2001). Dark Horse also released themed issues or miniseries, such as American Splendor: Windfall (1995), containing two issues covering six months from 1993 to 1994 that center on Pekar’s concerns about hip replacement, and American Splendor: Unsung Hero (2002), about an African American war hero. DC Comics published one issue, Bedtime Stories, in 2000, which was the last limited series of American Splendor (four issues in 2006 and five issues in 2007), and American Splendor Season Two (2008).

Pekar had numerous collaborators, such as Robert Crumb, who illustrated the first American Splendor in 1976. Throughout the years, stories in American Splendor were gathered into trade paperbacks. Pekar died nine months before his last book was scheduled for release.

Plot

Story lines in American Splendor emerge from the daily minutiae of real life in Cleveland, notably the author’s own life, including episodes from his job as a clerk for the Cleveland Veterans Administration hospital, and are developed for adult readers as aesthetic representations of his mundane encounters. Important story lines involve some of Pekar’s significant relationships, such as those with his wives and, particularly, Crumb, whom he met in 1962 when Crumb lived in Cleveland and worked for the American Greeting Corporation. Crumb’s friendship significantly influenced the direction of Pekar’s life and work. Crumb’s edgy comic drafts, his overnight success as a greeting-card artist, and his later stardom in underground comics in San Francisco provided significant motivation for Pekar in the inception of American Splendor, as told in “The Young Robert Crumb Story.”

Story lines follow Pekar’s march through time. They involve the hero’s confrontations with mundane experiences or fellow workers, his interactions with wives and girlfriends, and his own thoughts expressed in philosophical monologues. Important turns of plot follow the events in the author’s real life, such as his contracting lymphoma in 1990. Pekar’s need for the security of his government job gave consistency to his stories and provided an overall story arc until his retirement from civil service in October, 2001.

Drawings by diverse illustrators of the central character have tended to destabilize the visual identity and, thus, plot stability. In addition, Pekar sometimes narrated his experiences through Jack the Bellboy, the “sides hustler,” or collector jazz records, or through Herschel, the intellectual author, both of whom look like Harvey. Just as Jack collects jazz “sides,” readers of American Splendor collect Harvey “sides” in the multiple perspectives offered through the different lenses of the many illustrators.

Although Pekar was the most powerful unifying force, another element that lends stability is the setting of Cleveland, a microcosm of the United States that one panel advertises on the side of a bus: “The best things in life are right here in Cleveland.” The sign goes unnoticed by a depressed hero as he climbs onto the bus and is characteristic of Pekar’s narrative style in his use of irony and social commentary.

Volumes

•The Comics Journal: Special Harvey Pekar Issue (1985). American Splendor panels from various issues are included in a twenty-page script of a phone interview with Pekar and Gary Groth titled, “Harvey Pekar: In This Interview: Stories About Honesty, Money, and Misogyny.”

•From off the Streets of Cleveland Comes . . . American Splendor—The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (1987). Collects issues 1-9. This collection of comics from 1976 to 1984 features an introduction by Crumb. Pekar is listed along with Crumb as a cover artist.

•The New American Splendor Anthology: From off the Streets of Cleveland (1991). Collects a mix of stories from American Splendor and other stories from Pekar.

•American Splendor Presents Bob and Harv’s Comics (1996). Collects issues 1-9, 12, and The People’s Comics, issue 1. This collection of comics from 1972 to 1984 includes Pekar’s first comic, “Brilliant American Maniacs Series, No. 1: Crazy Ed,” first published in 1972 in Crumb’s The People’s Comics. Pekar is listed along with Crumb as a cover artist.

•American Splendor: Unsung Hero (2003). Collects issues 1-3 of American Splendor: Unsung Hero. A three-issue biography of Robert McNeill, an African American veteran of the Vietnam War.

•American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (2003). Collects trade paperbacks American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar and More American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar.

•American Splendor: Our Movie Year (2004). Recounts the making of the 2003 film American Splendor.

•Best of American Splendor (2005). Collects American Splendor essays from the 1990’s and 2000’s.

•American Splendor: Another Day (2007). Collects issues 1-4 of 2006-2007 series. Numerous artists collaborate with Pekar on more stories of everyday life.

•American Splendor: Another Dollar (2009). Collects issues 1-4 of 2008 series. Stories look at the process of creating comics; others follow Pekar through the aging process.

Characters

•Harvey Pekar, the eponymous hero based on the author. The character is both the protagonist and his own antagonist. He is generally described as irascible, fidgety, and never satisfied. The character also has a philosophical nature and a tendency to examine the morality of acts that are often overlooked or considered insignificant.

•Jack the Bellboy is a “sides hustler,” a collector of jazz and other musical recordings that he tries to sell to fellow employees. The narrator describes him as an “obsessive-compulsive jazz record collector,” or a “demon record hustler.” He is drawn as Harvey’s visual doppelgänger. A facile reading identifies him with the author, since Pekar was known as a jazz record collector.

•Herschel is another split image of Harvey. The narrator describes him as a man who knows what he wants. He works as a file clerk in a government job, but writing is the most important thing in his life. He has been writing and publishing on many aspects of popular culture since he was nineteen, and he wants public recognition for his work.

•Robert Crumb is an avant-garde artist and writer of 1960’s underground comics, such as ZapComix (1968-2005) and Fritz the Cat (1965-1972). The character, a reticent, educated, and talented young man who hits the San Francisco scene, provides a stable thread based on his long friendship with Pekar.

•Toby Radloff is perhaps the most famous of American Splendor characters since the character’s namesake, real-life Toby, became “Genuine Nerd” for MTV. Radloff was hired at the Cleveland Veteran’s Administration as a file clerk in 1980. The character is featured in issue 9, “Lent and Lentils,” in 1984.

•Mr. Boats is Harvey’s wise supervisor who quotes poetry and homilies. He gives free violin lessons at a community center and worries about the degeneration of youth and music.

•Joyce Brabner is based on Pekar’s third wife. All of his wives figure significantly as characters in his stories and in his life. Brabner’s character vacillates between depression and being controlling.

•Danielle is Pekar’s and Brabner’s adopted daughter.

•David Letterman is a character based on the NBC talk-show celebrity; his appearance marks important turning points in Pekar’s life and stories. For a year, Pekar had become a regular on Letterman’s show. Although his appearances bring needed publicity, the relationship ends when, as represented in the story, Pekar’s wife becomes dissatisfied with his relationship with Letterman and Harvey aggressively challenges Letterman on air to condemn General Electric, the parent company of NBC.

Artistic Style

Pekar storyboarded his scripts with stick figures and sometimes collaborated as the artist on covers. He viewed his stories as play scripts that gave stage direction to the illustrator. Pekar came to know what to expect from the many illustrators who, in their own way, helped visualize and actualize his stories, such as Crumb’s drawings in the “Maggies” story, which actualized and intensified the humor. Pekar could count on the intense physical responses that Crumb gave to characters, whereas for other illustrations, Gary Dumm’s, for example, Pekar knew that the dialogue or narration would receive greater prominence.

The monochromatic stories are depicted in black and white, and the imposition of the mental in thought bubbles and narration add to the intellectual tone that Pekar sought in his stories. The use of bubbles also emphasizes the importance of individual life in each of the panels. Pekar also captures individuality with his keen ear for a character’s speech dialect. When it occurs, narration is generally straight across at the top or bottom of the panel. In first-person narration, the narrator and Harvey sometimes compete for space. This happens, for example, in “The Young Crumb Story” drawn by Crumb, where, in the end, narration disappears in the struggle and an embarrassed cartoon-Harvey apologetically takes over the black space of the last panels as the only character in the black void of fiction, as if neither fiction nor reality can exist independent of the other.

Most artistically significant is the graphic construction of Harvey, the central character. Artistic input was especially important in the aesthetic creation of Harvey, because the stories revolve around the author’s personal experience. Through the medium of pictures, Pekar and his illustrators are able to re-create the tension in personal identity between, paradoxically, the fragmentation and the coherence of disparate aspects of a self. By drawing other characters, such as Jack the Bellboy and Herschel, to resemble Harvey visually, the illustrators re-create the interior tension in the interplay between fragmentation and coherence of the self. Adding to the weirdness of this interplay and tension is a more focused attempt to imitate the visual reality of Pekar. For example, Pekar had said that Gerry Shamray took photographs of him in various positions and traced the photographs, and that Crumb began drawing Pekar from Shamray’s renderings. These attempts to trap reality within the space of comics add to the author’s insertion of his mundane world in the fictive world of representation, an important theme of American Splendor that the film adaptation captures more graphically.

Themes

American Splendor involves the everyday struggles, aspirations, or moral dilemmas that challenge the characters in the comic. Pekar saw American Splendor as his ongoing autobiography, and his belief in the intimacy of art and life, the interplay of the fictive and the real, the mental and the physical in the daily life of an individual were major thematic concerns in his life and work.

The author’s interest in capturing reality in comics, combined with artistic and narrative techniques, works to develop this fundamental theme of the displacement of personal experience into an artistic space for an ultimately greater understanding of the small things that play a big role in the daily life of a regular, working guy. The characters are depicted as trying to understand their predicaments or feelings through rational thought and language.

Illustrations and characters express Pekar’s philosophy of the intimacy between life and art. Harvey ultimately realizes that he “sublimates” things that bother him by writing stories about them.

Impact

American Splendor pushed the edges of the potential of comics as a storytelling medium. Pekar became an advocate for the comics medium in the early 1970’s. His stories about the daily lives of ordinary characters drawn from his everyday life blazed a new path for comics, which had previously focused on fantasy themes or talking animals. Although Crumb had been instrumental in the underground comics scene in San Francisco, evading censorship and the Comics Code Authority and taking comics into new political and sexual territory. Pekar’s idea was that comics had the resilience and flexibility of prose as a storytelling medium. Pekar’s “novo realism,” as he called his style, influenced comics published in the wake of American Splendor, such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets (1981-1996).

The series gave minor celebrity to several of the characters’ eponyms, such as Toby Radloff, who became the “Genuine Nerd” roving reporter for MTV in the 1980’s and gained more fame after the movie adaptation in 2003. Joyce Brabner, Pekar’s third wife, began writing comics and was coauthor of Our Cancer Year (1994).

For many years, commercial success eluded the author until after the film adaptation and his retirement as a civil servant. But American Splendor gained critical acclaim early on from respected reviewers. Although Our Cancer Year, which lacked the AmericanSplendor logo, was the weakest selling of all of his books, it won the 1995 Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Original Work and its stories were included in the film adaptation.

Films

American Splendor. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. Good Machine/HBO Films (2003). This film adaptation stars Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar, Earl Billings as Mr. Boats, and Hope Davis as Joyce Brabner. The film stirs up fiction and reality more graphically than the comics and won the 2003 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film.

Further Reading

Campbell, Eddie. Alec (1981- ).

Crumb, Robert. TheComplete Fritz the Cat (1965-1972).

Pekar, Harvey, and Joyce Brabner. Our Cancer Year (1994).

Thompson, Craig. Blankets (2003).

Bibliography

O’English, Lorena, J. Gregory Matthews, and Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay. “Graphic Novels in Academic Libraries: From Maus to Manga and Beyond.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, no. 2 (March, 2006): 173-182.

Pekar, Harvey. “Maus and Other Topics.” The Comics Journal 113 (December, 1986): 54-57.

Sperb, Jason. “Removing the Experience: Simulacrum as an Autobiographical Act in American Splendor.” Biography 29, no. 1 (Winter, 2006): 123-139.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1989.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “From Genre to Medium: Comics and Contemporary American Culture.” In Rejuvenating the Humanities, edited by Ray B. Browne and Marshall W. Fishwick. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992.