Comix legend, Harvey Pekar dead at 70 (Interview)

Today, comic fans around the world are mourning the loss of Comix innovator, writer, thinker, irascible curmudgeon, Cleveland icon and all around wonderul human being, Harvey Pekar.

He was found last night, just before 1 a.m. by his wife Joyce at their home.   He was 70 years old.

Harvey Pekar began his life-long, groundbreaking, chronicle “American Splendor” in 1976, with the help of his old friend (and comix legend in his own right); R. Crumb (It was later transformed into a successful movie (starring Paul Giamatti)).

“Splendor” is one of those creative touchstones that occur once every few generations.  With it, Harvey invented a new language of expression in the comic book form.  He literally flipped the entire paradigm on its head, replacing the superhero with the “anti-hero”, thus giving a voice to the work-a-day proletariat, and more importantly than that, provided inspiration for countless other artists who followed in his footsteps, from Joe Matt to Jaime Hernandez.

I will remember him most for unvarnished and uncompromising writing-style.  He had a way of describing the minutiae of life that gave it a depth and relevance that was never before realized in quite the same way. More than a storyteller, he was a truth teller.  His spare, almost poetic descriptions of every day events cut to the core of things.  Like other great poets and writers of the same cloth (Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski) he wrote only what was needed in an unvarnished beauty that broke your heart.

He could be touching, funny, angry, but he always told the truth..

He will be sorely, sorely missed.  

Harvey Pekar was one of a kind, but most of all, he was a real mensch… something his oft times curmudgeonly exterior belied….  

A while back I had the distinct honor and privilege of interviewing Mr. Pekar for our website.  He was warm and generous and displayed all the wit, humor, intelligience and insight that you would expect from him (reprinted below).

In honor of this good man’s passing, take the time to read what was to be one of his last interviews.

God bless you Harvey.

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ORIGINAL DATE OF INTERVIEW SUMMER 2008

Who Is Harvey Pekar?

I’m not even going to try and list all of Harvey Pekar’s accomplishments in some neat little opening paragraph, with links to sites and stuff like that.. In the first place Harv doesn’t even use the computer, and in the second place this kinda goes beyond that…I wouldn’t even know where to begin really.. I think all I can do is write a personal note of warm thanks to Dino Haspiel for setting the interview up.. It’s a rare thing when you get the chance in life to meet a real bona fide hero of yours.. It’s rarer still when he turns out to be such a down to earth, sweet and yes LOVABLE guy…

I gave Harv a call on my lunch break.. and we talked for well over an hour.. I was pretty nervous, but he was fantastic… What struck me about him, was how unaware he was that so many people out there loved and respected him so much… I dunno.. I was overcome with the guy I have to say, he’s a very special cat!

Who Is Harvey Pekar? Let him speak for himself…

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Out of all the comix legends still out there today, you’re probably the one that’s had the most direct impact on the industry, not only on the artists and how they tell their stories, but on the reader as well, creating a new way of perceiving comix as part art, part entertainment, part literature and all truth.. There was stuff going on before you arrived on the scene, but what you created really became the blue print for what we’ve come to know as independent comix.. Not to mention the influence you’ve had on independent film and music… Do you take great pride in this legacy of yours, knowing in some way you’re partly responsible for so much art both good and bad out there today…

Uh, Well to tell you the—I mean, I can’t help the bad work, but as far as the good work I feel pretty good about that. Actually, it was a long process for me to develop a concept like I did… You wanna know what I did?

Of course!

Ok when I was a little kid – I told this story before so if it seems like its old and corny you don’t have to use it – When I was a little kid, between the ages of 6 and 11, I used to read comics like a fiend… I’ve always been a fiend for one thing or another, either sports or a comix or, you know… JAZZ, different kinds of literature… ANYWAY, so when I got to be like in the 6th grade or something like that, I just, you know all the comic book stories, I could see that they had recurring elements and they were a lot of clichés, like the most obvious being that GOOD ALWAYS WINS and other things beside that… anyway… So I just gave up on comix from then until the underground stuff started coming out in the 60s with the exception of the fact that I really liked Mad Magazine a lot, I mean KURTZMAN’s (Harvey) work… and that was a big influence on underground comix.

So in ’62, Robert Crumb moved to Cleveland from Philadelphia, and he lived about a block and a half from me and he’s the guy that sort of — he and his roommate — hipped me to the underground scene, you know… and he stayed in Cleveland… he worked for the American Greeting Card company for about four years and then I guess he figured he went as far as he could go here and then moved out to San Francisco in the Winter of ‘66 or ’67… But by that time — see I was really into underground comix and I was mainly doing jazz criticism then — I started thinking that comix were generally… you know especially in those days, people looked down on comix, if you said something was like a comic book you know, you were putting it down…. But I saw there was no reason to think that they were intrinsically a limited form… ‘Cause you could choose ANY word that was in the dictionary… You got the same choice of words as SHAKESPEARE… and you got a huge variety of art styles that you could use. Comix are WORDS and PICTURES… WORDS AND PICTURES… you can do ANYTHING with WORDS and PICTURES…

So I just realized that comix at that point had never got beyond the superhero stuff mainly because of the publishers. They were just in it to make a buck and this is what sold and they didn’t want to get away from that formula. Which, I guess, if you’re a businessman and you don’t care about art too much then that’s what you can expect.

So anyway, I started thinking about ways that comix could expand and one thing I thought about was more REALISM… ‘Cause comix never had a realist movement like just about all other art forms had. So I figured if I could do some realistic comix, even if people don’t like ‘em , then maybe I would’ve gained a footnote in history… and so then I thought about doing stuff about the QUOTIDIEN LIFE… you know, “every day” life… because, for one thing, that’s all I knew… I always had a flunky job and lived in these little cramped apartments and was UNRELIEVED at that life. Day after day… BUT you know, I got excited about things like other people and stuff… you know, maybe I got worked up over a hundred dollars where someone else would get worked up for about a million, it’s the same thing… It’s all relative… It’s still a LOT OF MONEY… it’s just a question of scale…

Anyway… and also the quotidian life just is not dealt with very much in any art form because it’s thought that if everybody can identify with it, then people think it’s too COMMON to write about… BUT I DON’T.

People don’t write about things like how fucked up they get when they can’t find their keys or something like that so I thought people could really identify with that and would be really fresh…

“You invented the ENTIRE genre, that so many artists, like Joe Matt and Chester Brown, for instance, they took your blueprint and ran with it…

Yeah well, I think they’ve cited me as an influence.

But, yeah it was a long time… I didn’t even start doing the comix until 1972. Crumb was visiting me, he was living in California, and I decided to write a bunch of comic book stories. These were stories that had been in my head for YEARS. These were stories I used to tell… I was kind of like the class clown on the street corner comedian… So I had all these stories in my head and I wrote down about ten of ‘em and I gave ‘em to Crumb and I said, “Whaddaya think… are these VIABLE?” and he came back and he said, “Yeah, I’d like to take ‘em home with me and draw some of this stuff” … But he NOT ONLY DID THAT, illustrated some of my stories, which I think I’m about the only guy he ever did that for, which is something that really makes me feel good, ‘cause I have a lot of respect for Robert’s work, BUT he also told other guys about me and showed these stories around…

There was a guy named Willie Murphy who was a real good cartoonist who died young who did some of my stuff and that came out real nice and some of the stuff that Bob Armstrong did… Armstrong was in Crumb’s band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders… and he’s a good cartoonist and he did some stuff… and then as time went on I started getting more ambitious and I started thinking of writing LONGER stories and more complex stories and they were so long that they were longer than the normal comic book of that day… some of them would be like 35 pages long… So I decided — and the comic book business was in bad shape and everyone was having a hard time placing their work — so I decided in 1975 that I would PUT OUT MY OWN COMIC BOOK – AMERICAN SPLENDOR and I assumed I was gonna lose money on it, but I figured that I’ll quit spending all this money on all these rare jazz records and it’ll come out about even… AND THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED!

And after that, I got some nice articles written about me like in the Village Voice, not a whole lot, but it was encouraging. And so I just kept on going, that’s all… and it got to be more and more important to me.

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