September
23 Pekar Looks Back, Forward

Harvey Pekar’s been writing comics stories about himself for more than 30 years in the pages of “American Splendor.” But until now he’s never written about his life before he began publishing comics. “The Quitter,” a hardcover graphic novel illustrated by Dean Haspiel and coming out Oct. 5 from DC/Vertigo, changes that as Pekar tells the story of how he came to be comics’ most famous real-life curmudgeon.

The decision to write about this period of his life came in a roundabout way and involved repaying Haspiel for a major favor, Pekar says. “Dean Haspiel is the guy who introduced me to Ted Hope, from the movie company that made ‘American Splendor,’ and that was one of the biggest breaks that ever happened to me,” he says. “So I said to Dean, ‘What can I do, within reason, to pay you back?’ And he said that he’d like it if I would let him illustrate a long work of mine.”

Haspiel was at the time working for DC Comics and got the company interested in publishing Pekar’s next work. “At first we were just kicking around different ideas. I didn’t exactly know what I’d have to write in order to get DC to accept it. I guess my stature had grown to the point they were willing to consider stuff from me. I thought I might have to write something that was pretty much a compromise.”

Originally, the project was to be fiction, but morphed into nonfiction in the development.
“When I started doing this stuff, it just seemed to me to be so much better if I wrote it as it happened in an autobiographical way. And so I just did that and fortunately they liked it. They got behind it. I have to say I’ve gotten great support from them.”

At just over 100 pages, “The Quitter” is the longest story Pekar has written, but it retains the honest, warts-and-all look at his life that has been the hallmark of his work. The title comes from Pekar’s penchant to give up on various pursuits as a kid and recounts problems controlling his temper and holding a job.

“The reason I covered the period I did was I had never really gone to any great length to write about the years prior to the age of 32, when I first started publishing autobiographical comics,” Pekar says. “So I thought I’d write about what made me such a neurotic curmudgeon. It seems people are always interested in the curmudgeon angle.”

Pekar says he has no problem writing about his own faults or mistakes he’s made in his life.
“It’s not difficult because, maybe I’m a freak, but I don’t think I did anything that I should be ashamed of. I certainly made some bad judgments and got myself really badly messed up, but I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t ruin anybody’s life or anything like that. There are much worse that you can do to people,” he says. “I try and talk about my faults and hope that others will identify with what I write. I mean, what’s the point of writing self-aggrandizing autobiography? To me, there is none.”

Pekar says he still writes comics the way it was portrayed in the 2003 “American Splendor” movie, using stick figure layouts with captions and word balloons for the artist to work from. Pekar and Haspiel had previously worked together on a handful of pages and Pekar says he was very happy with the results on “The Quitter.” “To my amazement, he was able to bring off practically to the letter what I asked him to do — or wanted him to do, anyway. He did some things that I hadn’t thought of, but they were all good.” Pekar says he and Haspiel have a few more collaborations in the work, including short strips for Playboy and Spin, and a short story for Dark Horse Comics.

“He’s got pretty good connections in New York and he was able to line up some jobs for us. And as far as I’m concerned, if he can line up work, I mean by using my name, well go ahead,” Pekar says.

Finding a place in the market hasn’t always been easy for Pekar, whose work often was lumped in with superhero comics by general audiences and largely ignored by comicbook fans who preferred superheroes and fantasy. Pekar published “American Splendor” himself at a loss and never expected to make money on the venture, especially after a series of well-known appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman” in the 1980s had no real effect on his sales. It took the “American Splendor” movie to change that.

“I didn’t think my comics had any kind of commercial potential,” Pekar says. “I thought, ‘God, if I can’t get people to buy comics — go on the David Letterman show and act the fool — and not get any response, it’d take like an act of God to sell these things.’ But when they made the movie, they put out a companion volume, a trade paperback, and that sold real well. And since then I’ve put out a couple of more books and they’ve sold pretty well, too.”

Pekar says he has a few more longer projects in the works and is pleased with the way comics have matured as a creative medium even if the realities of working in comics don’t necessarily match the perceived popularity of the medium.

“I’m personally very pleased that after so many years comics have opened up to works of unlimited length. It’s ridiculous that at one point a novelist could write as much as they wanted but a cartoonist was limited to at most a few dozen pages. Matter of fact, that’s one of the main things I got into comics to accomplish, was try and make it — I mean I don’t know how much influence I’ve had — make it a medium that doesn’t do just superheroes and talking animals,” he says. “I think there’s no subject that you can’t deal with in comics.”