Harvey Pekar's Cleveland

Written by Harvey Pekar
Art by Joseph Remnant

I didn't start reading Harvey Pekar's comics until just before he died a few years ago, and has slowly been dipping my toes into his brand of crotchety autobiography.  Harvey Pekar's Cleveland is kind of an odd book - it's as much a history of the city that he's so closely associated with as it is his own memoir of the city and how it shaped him.

The book meanders quite a bit - it opens with a history of the fortunes of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, before giving us a condensed story of how the city grew (and then began to shrink).  In between, Pekar shares some of his own memories of growing up, and living in the city through its roughest moments.

Like many an industrial city in the US, Cleveland has seen better days.  It has lost its manufacturing base, and has seen its population shrink (Pekar is especially interested in charting the exodus of white people; I often forget how obsessed Americans are with their racial divide).  Still, Pekar has remained, working as a career civil servant, and writing for comics and music magazines.

This book doesn't really make the reader want to visit Cleveland (although I'd love to hang out at John Zubal's bookstore, which Pekar devotes a fair amount of space to), but it does humanize the place.  Much of the material in this book is familiar - it seems that Pekar spent a lot of time revisiting the same themes and events in his life - but it kept my interest.

American Splendor: Another Day

Written by Harvey Pekar
Art by Ho Che Anderson, Zachary Baldus, Hilary Barta, Greg Budgett, Gary Dumm, Eddie Campbell, Richard Corben, Hunt Emerson, Bob Fingerman, Rick Geary, Dean Haspiel, Gibert Hernandez, Leonardo Manco, Josh Neufeld, Chris Samnee, Ty Templeton, Steve Vance, Chris Weston, and Chandler Wood

This is the first that I've read any of the late Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics series American Splendor, and I was surprised by two things.  The first is the caliber of artist involved in this anthology project.  Look over the list above - there are some incredible artists contributing here.  What I enjoyed most about that is seeing the different ways in which they draw Harvey.  He's always recognizable, but each artist plays with his image subtly, emphasizing different aspects of his personality or appearance.  I think Richard Corben's take on him was the furthest from the mark, but it was still very cool to see how he went about it.  I love Chris Weston's contribution, and am always up for some Ty Templeton.

The second thing that surprised me was the utter aimlessness of the writing.  I expected that Pekar's stories would be small, slice of life things, built around the struggles of everyday life.  What I didn't expect was that they would be so dull in their depiction of the quotidian.  A typical story in this collection has Harvey get up in the morning, go to the bank, and then go to the pharmacy to get his prescription filled.  When it isn't ready, he has to go to the HMO.  End of story.  There is no observation about life, or lesson learned; that's just it.

Another good example has him call over the neighbour to help him fix the toilet.  Then he feels gratitude.  That's it.  There's another toilet-fixing story earlier in the book, but at least in that one, we can revel in Harvey's victory.  Better stories involve conflict with his foster daughter, and there is one in which he remembers hurting a friend as a child.  These fit better into the autobiographical mode.  I know that the minute attention to boring detail was Pekar's thing; it just doesn't make for compelling reading.  Thankfully, the art is really good.

The Beats: A Graphic History

Written by Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle, and others
Art by Ed Piskor and others

Like a lot of people, I went through a pretty heavy Beat phase in my last couple of years of high school, which carried over into university.  I loved Kerouac's free-flowing and frequently annoying prose, and tried my best to get into Burroughs, although that was often pretty difficult.  I read some of the poetry, and developed a long-lasting love of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's work.  I did, however, outgrow them, and have only occasionally strayed into their territory since I turned 22.

This 'graphic history' was a nice reintroduction to some old friends.  The book mostly consists of graphic biographies of the Beats, although the further one gets into the book, the more free-flowing the comic strips are.  The first one hundred twenty pages or so are made up of biographies written by Harvey Pekar and drawn by Ed Piskor that focus on the central figures of the movement.  Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs get lengthy entries, as befits their status as the holy trinity of beat-ness.  These parts are great, and while they didn't tell me much that I didn't already know, I appreciate the conciseness and economy of their tales.

After that, Pekar and Piskor focus on the minor beats, giving a few pages each to people like Philip Whelan, Ferlinghetti, and LeRoy Jones (Amiri Baraka).  At this point, the book is given over to a number of independent cartoonists, and becomes much more erratic in its quality.  That said, some of the best parts of this book are included at the end.

The bio of Kenneth Patchen (by Pekar and Nick Thorkelson) does a great job of infusing the text with Patchen's own poetry.  It was at this point in reading that I realised how little room was being given over in this book to examine or sample the Beats' actual writing.  This was a refreshing change.

Perhaps the best segment in this whole book though, is Joyce Brabner and Summer McClinton's 'Beatnik Chicks', an exploration of the women who were on the periphery of, yet central to, the Beat Movement.

In all, I appreciated this well-researched and well-produced book.