Harvey Pekar Talks About Street-Fighting, Growing Up and Dealing with 'Limited' Comics...

Harvey Pekar is surely the king of modern-day disaffection?as the author of the ongoing graphic biography American Splendor (adapted in 2003 to a movie starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis and Pekar himself), he's made an art of the study of irritation, boredom, unhappiness and insecurity. In his latest graphic novel, The Quitter, illustrated by Dean Haspiel, Pekar explores his post-WWII childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, to find out where his paralyzing fear of failure and wracking insecurity come from.

The result, which Kirkus Reviews called "a lean and angry work, anchored by a mellowing sense of self-discovery," shows a young street-fighting Jewish kid filled with the kind of rage Pekar fans may be unaccustomed to in their browbeaten hero. Growing up as the only white kid in an African-American neighborhood, Pekar was often on the losing end of brawls. By high school, Pekar was more interested in fighting than studying, and his fear of failure was in full effect, causing him to abandon anything at which he wasn't immediately successful. After aborted stints with the school football team and in the civil service and the Navy (among other things), Pekar at last began to find his footing in the world of jazz music and comics. As Kirkus said, the book is "handled with Pekar's usual self-mocking, breezy forthrightness, as though he's got no time to mess around by playing nice," and Dean Haspiel's black-and-white illustrations give Pekar's narrative "a bright, dramatic graphic treatment." The graphic-novelist recently took time out to talk to The Book Standard about retirement, the fading promise of comic strips and how he "got to be so messed up." That discussion begins after the jump. ?

The Book Standard: Before working on The Quitter, you were originally working on a story about Jewish boxers?can you tell me a bit about that?

Harvey Pekar: Yeah, well. At first I was kind of at a loss as to what to do with [Quitter publisher] Vertigo, because they were asking me for fiction stuff. But I thought, "Well, maybe I can do a book on Jewish boxers." A lot of people don't know that there were a lot of really good Jewish boxers in the '30s and stuff like that, and I knew something about that. So I considered that. And I started to do some fiction, based on my experiences, and it just felt like it would be better if I did the regular stuff, just how it happened, autobiographically. So I just did that and hoped that they would like it, and they did, so that's how it came about.

TBS: And this is the first time you've ever really written about your childhood?

HP: Well, I've written bits and pieces about it in various short stories, but I haven't really taken it in a sweep like this.

TBS: Was it as interesting to write about for you as your memories of your life as it was happening?

HP: Oh, yeah, I really got into it. At first I thought if I described it to DC [Comics], DC wouldn't want it. They kept talking about fiction. And they were talking about, well, there was supposed to be a romantic interest for me in the story and stuff like that. And I thought, "Nah."

TBS: Why did they want a romantic interest?

HP: I don't know. They're just. . . . romantic people over there, I guess. So I don't know. It's weird! Vertigo's supposed to be a different kind of groundbreaking company and it hasn't been. When I first started talking to them, I got the feeling that their idea of groundbreaking was doing something about vampires instead of doing something about superheroes. In other words, they were still firmly in the genre camp. But I just decided that I wanted to do something good. And my memories of what happened to me as a kid were still extremely vivid. I had given them a lot of thought, and I thought I could write a really good book about them. About my early years, my early influences, how I got to be so messed up, you know, needing approval so badly and things like that. So I just went ahead and did it, and sent it in, and they liked it.

TBS: What do you think Vertigo could have to do to be more groundbreaking?

HP: Well, the one thing that they could do?which I've been hollering about ever since I got into comics?is just do stuff that's not genre-based. And that leaves a huge area. You could do fiction, you could do nonfiction, you could do all sorts of stuff. But just don't have it be superheroes, or like it used to be, cowboys. I mean that stuff is played out. It has been. And it was never intended to really get anybody interested but kids, for Christ's sake.

TBS: Are there people now working in adult comics or graphic novels whose work you do enjoy?

HP: Oh yeah, sure. What happened with me was, I used to be a real avid comic-book reader when I was in elementary school. I learned how to read that way. But then after a while the stories became very predictable to me. I saw they were based on formulaic kinds of writing and I got bored with them and I started reading novels. Then in 1962, Robert Crumb moved to Cleveland, and he's three years younger than me. I met him?he lived around the corner from me?and I saw some of the things that he was working on, cause he still hadn't been published yet. Like this one sort of graphic novel called The Big Yum Yum Book, and I thought, "Yeah, comics can do anything. I've been wrong about them. You can do any kind of story in comics. They're not a limited medium." The people who deal with and produce the comics are limited?they're afraid to try anything anyway. So I thought, "Wow, here's a chance to be a big innovator." The kind of stuff I decided to do was autobiographical and put an emphasis on quotidian life. But there are any number of things that would be good to do in comics. I don't know if you know too much about the early underground comics, but there was a guy named Leonard Rifas who did these nonfiction comics that were called Educomics, a lot of which were sort of very political. I dug that. At that time, things started to really open up. And I thought, "Wow, there's no going back. People see that comics can be used in any kind of way. It's just going to be like this great golden age." And it didn't happen. Superheroes are still in the saddle.

TBS: Well, but your approach to comics?focusing on quotidian activity?has actually influenced a lot of younger graphic novelists and comic artists. Do you enjoy any of this newer stuff?

HP: Yeah, sure. Houghton Mifflin recently hired me to edit the first volume of a series that they're putting out?I guess it's called Best American Graphic Stories. So they sent me a whole lot of stuff to look over, and I saw a lot of stuff by young people, some of whom I'd heard of, like Chris Ware, and some of whom I hadn't heard about. The distribution is so crappy for non-traditional comics, you don't get to see anything. But I saw a lot of stuff I liked.

TBS: A lot of people have been surprised by the revelation that you have a street-fighting past?which you reveal in the book. Why do you think that is?

HP: Well, just simply because I never talked about it before. Well, I wrote a couple of stories about it that I guess went unnoticed. I was doing stuff in the '90s for Dark Horse, and they weren't distributing my stuff very well. Like nobody knew what the hell I was doing, even though I was publishing them. But when I started writing autobiographical comics, it was like autobiographical as in today. I would very often write about things that had just happened to me. There were very often things happening to me that I felt I wanted to get them down. I wrote about them as quickly as I could while they were fresh in my mind. So I didn't write a lot about my past?I did a bit, but really not a whole lot. And I realized that I hadn't really spoken a lot in one place about my childhood, my adolescence and stuff, so I decided that I would do it there, and that's where the street-fighting stuff came in. I didn't write about it when I started doing comics when I was in my 30s, because at that time, that phase of my life was over.

TBS: You've retired from your day job now, right?

HP: Yeah.

TBS: How's retirement?

HP: Well, I don't know if I'm better off or not, but I did it. I got to a point where I'd been with the federal government [as a file clerk at a Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland] for so long that I couldn't really make much more money with my pension, and I figured well, I've been with them for 37 years, it's time to go. I didn't realize that my pension and social security would cover so little. I still have to work as a comic-book artist, and make money as a comic-book artist, to support myself and my family. That sort of puts a lot of pressure on, because it's not like the future of comics is assured, by any means. I wish that it was a more secure field, but the die is cast. I'm going to just try and do the best I can.

TBS: How did you first get involved with Dean Haspiel for the book?

HP: Well, in the '90s, I met a guy by the name of Josh Neufeld, who was a friend of Dean's, and Josh was doing illustration for me. And Dean was real interested in working with me, too. So we did some?not a whole lot, but we did some illustrating, some collaborating. And if you're wondering about how he came to illustrate this book?is that what this is leading up to?

TBS: Yes.

HP: What happened was that he was doing some freelance illustrating in New York for a movie company called Good Machine, and he hipped me to the fact that one of Good Machine's producers, Ted Hope, was interested in doing a movie based on my work. So we contacted Hope and a movie was made. And I benefited greatly. As a result, I asked Dean what I could do to repay him, at least in part, for the favor he'd done for me. And he asked me if he could illustrate a long work of mine. It took a while for us to figure out what the work was, who was going to publish it, and the style he was going to use. But we got it all worked out. And I'm pretty happy with it.

TBS: The Quitter is about your tendency to give up on things, but you've stuck with comics all this time. What do you think it is about comics that made you persevere?

HP: Well, I got repaid. I got?if not money, then I got critical support. And that made me want to go on. Some people realized that I was doing something that I thought was pretty important, and that kept me going. I suppose if nobody had?I mean not too many people read my stuff anyway?but if everybody had just completely ignored it or something like that, I think eventually I would have gotten discouraged. But I got the kind of feedback I wanted. And there were people who said, "Wow, this is really great stuff, this is fresh, this is innovative." I always did think I had a good idea there, and I just wanted to develop it. Through most of the time I've done comics, I've had a day job and supported myself and put out comics, too. So it wasn't a matter of importance if I lost couple of thousand bucks. I wasn't going to go under or something like that. I could afford to do that. The main thing was to get this stuff out.