American Splendor: Our Movie Year by Harvey Pekar et al.

American Splendor: Our Movie Year

Collection published: 2004
Contents originally published: 2000-04
Read: May 2023

Stories: Harvey Pekar

Art: R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Mark Zingarelli, Josh Neufeld, Gerry Shamray, G. Budgett, Frank Stack, Ed Piskor, Joe Zabel, Dean Haspiel

American Splendor is, of course, the comic book about the life of Harvey Pekar in all its humdrum glory, usually told in the form of short observational stories. Every once in a while, I pick up an American Splendor book I haven't already read; this time around, that brought me to Our Movie Year, which collects a number of stories that depicted what happened in Pekar's life when the 2003 film came out, or were written around that time, or came about as a consequence of the film. As is frustratingly normal for an American Splendor collection, there's no contextual material: when and where did these stories originally appear? you will just have to infer it.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, more than most American Splendor collections. Part of the issue is that much of the material is redundant: I think there are three different accounts of how the movie got made. Each originally appeared in a different venue, I believe, but put them all in the same book and you get the same story three different times. Some other stories re-tell the story of American Splendor itself. Again, useful if Pekar's debuting in some new venue, but longtime readers don't need to be reretetold the story of how he met R. Crumb.

This panel cracks me up, because it makes Harvey look like he's threatening the guy and making him uncomfortable when he gives him a compliment.
original publication unknown* (art by Ed Piskor)

 
Pekar is at his best when he's hyper-detailed, when he's (for example) spending thirteen pages telling the story of how he waited for a jump outside the movie theater when his car died, or thirteen pages about him fretting about missing a flight back home to Cleveland so he can check his mail. These stories and similar ones were my favorites.

Harvey Pekar: able to make much out of little.
original publication unknown* (art by Gerry Shamray)

On the other hand, some of these stories cover a lot of ground; eighteen pages for the entire making of the movie is not a lot, and I found myself wishing he'd decompressed some of those scenes more, giving us more of the curious but everyday neuroses of being Harvey Pekar, even when meeting a film producer or Paul Giamatti or whatever, but alas, there's little of that here. One does notice his continual interest in everything financial; both stories about his trip to Sundance make sure to note that the condo was well-stocked with food, while throughout he's worried what will happen now that he's retired once his money from new writing opportunities spurred by the release of the film dry up. If you want to know how the film affected Pekar personally, that's clearly it: it's a way for him to hopefully get more professional opportunities when he really needs them, little more.

Harvey Pekar: can never enjoy a good thing.
from Sundance Film Festival Daily Insider (art by Mark Zingarelli)

There was a run of "stories" where it's Pekar cramming facts about some musical act into 1-2 pages; sorry, but even you can't make me care about jazz, Harvey. I was a bit surprised to learn that even before Ego & Hubris, he was telling stories of Michael Malice.

TLDR.
from Gambit Weekly (art by Gary Dumm)

As is often the case by now, his artistic collaborators are well chosen. There's a fun reunion with R. Crumb, and I particularly like Gerry Shamray's work in this one, though we also have a lot of solid contributions from Gary Dumm.

Next up in sequence: Best of American Splendor

* Possible this book was their original publication. Who knows?

Review: American Splendor presents Bob & Harv's Comics by Harvey Pekar & R. Crumb

I embark on Series Four of Big Finish's Fourth Doctor Adventures with The Darkness of Glass over at Unreality SF. What's that, you say? I've skipped Nick Briggs's series opener? Surely not. Why would I do that?

Comic hardcover, 86 pages
Published 1996 (contents: 1976-88) 
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2015

American Splendor presents Bob & Harv's Comics

Stories by Harvey Pekar

Art by R. Crumb

It's been a long time since I've read a volume of American Splendor, longer than I would've liked, and if I'd known better, I wouldn't have read this one. Not that it's bad-- far from it-- but it mostly, if not entirely collects comics I've already read. (There were a couple I didn't recognize, but that might just be because I forgot them.) This dips through the entire American Splendor series to pick up the ones illustrated by R. Crumb, thus reprinting comics that already appeared in American Splendor and More American Splendor and The New American Splendor.

That said, it's nice to see Pekar and Crumb at the top of their game: this set includes classics like "The Harvey Pekar Name Story" (four pages of Pekar just telling you about his name), "Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines" (exactly what it sounds like), "Freddy Visits for the Weekend" (Pekar is visited by a friend trying to scam meals off him), and "American Splendor Assaults the Media" (Pekar is asked by a magazine to submit writing and they don't print it, resulting in three-page screed). It struck me that there was much less, well, serious content in these stories: Pekar can really dig into the emotions and tribulations of his private life sometimes, but there's little of that here, no stories about Pekar's sickness or his romantic relationships.

Rather, his collaborations with Crumb focus on the encounters Pekar has with various strange characters that populate his life, especially the staff of the VA hospital where Pekar works as a file clerk. There are a lot of two- or one- or even half-page tales here, quick encounters with people dispensing weird life advice, or being rude, or selling pickled okra, or whatever. As always, Pekar's eye for the everyday and Crumb's deliberately shabby art conspire to make these fun little gems of an ordinary life well observed.

There's also a pair of forewords, one by Pekar about Crumb, and one by Crumb about Pekar. I don't think I've read them before, so they were nice to read.

Review: The New American Splendor Anthology by Harvey Pekar

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 1991 (content: 1974-91)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2014

The New American Splendor Anthology
by Harvey Pekar
art by Robert Armstrong, Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm with Laura Darnell Dumm, William Fogg, Drew Friedman, Rebecca Huntington, Bill Knapp, Paul Mavrides, Val Mayerik, Alan Moore, Willy Murphy, Spain Rodriguez, Gerry Shamray, Carole Sobocinksi, Frank Stack, J. R. Stats, Colin Upton, Ed Wesolowski, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, and Mark Zingarelli

The short story, I think, is Pekar's element-- aside from The Quitter, his long-form work has failed to interest me as much his shorts. The New American Splendor Anthology collects a wide range of his material, from his earliest comics work to his then-latest, though mostly it collects issues of American Splendor that came out after More American Splendor, I think. There's perhaps some stuff here that's not great, but that's okay, 'cause it's always over with right away, and Pekar is spinning you a new yarn in his distinctive voice: buying food at West Side Market, going to comic book signings (including a cameo by Ed Brubaker!), being obsessive about losing something or forgetting something, picking his wife up from the airport, or driving from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland overnight. I empathize with his small obsessions that he tries to clamp under control, and his occasional irrational inflexibility.

This collection also includes writeups of many of Pekar's appearances on Letterman's Late Night. I don't think Pekar is as clever as he thinks he is, but I think he knows that. (I love the one where he tries to get free stuff off the Late Night producer and ends up with a couple crackers.)

Alison Bechdel and Alan Moore draw stories in this one. Seriously: Alan Moore! For some reason Bechdel is one of five artists whose name is left off the cover, and distressingly, there is no credit to the artists on the title page, just Pekar. (Also no good publication data.) By this point, Pekar has gotten good as selecting artists who work well with his style of writing: I imagine that drawing normalcy is more difficult than it looks, and these guys do a great job on the whole, especially Joe Zabel & Gary Dumm and Bill Knapp.

From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes...

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2003 (contents: 1976-87)
Acquired January 2012
Read February 2012

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar
and More American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar

Stories: Harvey Pekar with Joyce Brabner

Art: R. Crumb, Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Gary Dumm, Gerry Shamray, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, Val Malyerik

As far as I can tell, this shouldn't have worked. American Splendor isn't ever about anything, or rather it's about everything, with Harvey Pekar just picking moments in his life that he finds vaguely interesting. Or not even that.

Many of Pekar's stories are almost anti-comic in the amount of narration that Pekar provides to go with the art. There's no word/image hybridity here; without the narration, the pictures would just be isolated fragments, and it would be nearly impossible to deduce the stories. In the story "American Splendor Assaults the Media," there's so much text that there's barely room for images in the panels-- and the images are just Harvey Pekar as he tells you about the events. With little-to-no-alteration, it could be a straight text piece.

But somehow, American Splendor is utterly comics. I'm not sure why the pictures are there sometimes, but if they weren't, you'd have something very different. The stories might be dominated by Pekar's voice (so much so that sometimes who the artist is seems irrelevant), but the art does a lot to give it that voice. The first story in the book, "The Harvey Pekar Name Story," is the clearest demonstration of that. This story is just four pages of headshots-- the incidents the story describes never appear on-panel-- meaning that the illustrations are used to convey Pekar's body language as he "tells" the story. Though the narrative communicated would be same if Pekar had simply typed up the story as straight prose, the comic form gives it a sense of timing and humor. I actually once did an experiment where I gave the story as prose to my class and then as a comic, and all of them reported enjoying it much more as a comic. I myself liked American Splendor a lot, and I think I would have found it unsatisfying in any medium other than comics, so clearly Pekar is doing something right.

(My favorite story, by the way, was the one about Harvey's relationship with the guy he would bum rides off of, but refused to do any favors for in return.)