Harvey Pekar’s Anti-epiphanic Everyday
“Hardly anything actually happens… mostly it’s just people talking, or Harvey by himself, panel after panel, haranguing the hapless reader. There’s not much in the way of heroic
by Tony Venezia
struggle, the triumph of good over evil, resolution of conflict, people overcoming great odds, stuff like that. It’s kinda sorta more like real life…real in late twentieth century Cleveland as it lurches along from one day to the next.” R. Crumb (1996) “A Mercifully Short Preface” “Many of Pekar’s stories are not true stories, but the sort of anecdotes, observations and snippets of dialogue that a writer might jot down in his notebook for later use in a finished work.” Tim Kreider (2005) “Throwing the Book at Comics Artists”, 191
H
arvey Pekar’s autobiographical everyday micronarratives are predicated on their very quotidian-ness. Describing them one runs out of adjectives to describe the comics’ narrative world:
mundane, ordinary, banal, normal, familiar etc. Pekar’s canon of work with numerous collaborators grasps this sense of the everyday as “the landscape closest to us, the world most immediately met.”
(Highmore, 2002, 1). The run-of-the-mill events, occurences and ruminations were also often developed to further encompass the story of their own story-making process as Pekar sometimes worked
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to incorporate and transform self-reflexive commentary into the raw material of narrative. But as the competing prefatory quotations from comics artists Crumb and Kreider indicate, this defining quotidian quality can be criticised as much as celebrated. Indeed, the very ordinariness of Pekar’s work in American Splendor and beyond is precisely what readers seem to respond to. Leaving aside the thorny subject of what exactly constitutes a “true story”, Kreider is absolutely correct to point out that Pekar’s work comprises of “anecdotes, observations and snippets of dialogue”, or as Crumb puts it “[h]ardly anything happens.” What Pekar strived for was a poetics of the everyday, captured fleetingly as part of a constant and evolving process. To examine and illustrate this, we can look closely at one of Pekar’s most celebrated collaborations with Crumb, “Hypothetical Quandary.” The strands of image and text are ingeniously entwined in this micronarrative, showing us Pekar as narrator as he leaves his house to go and buy a loaf of bread. The text is monological, represented via thought balloons that reveal the character’s internal dilemma, his hypothetical quandary, reflecting on how his life would have been different if a major publisher had taken him on allowing him to write full-time (effectively removing him from everyday life and its prosaic problems and thus also his subject matter). The thought balloon is a device that allows the revelation of the interiority of a
Pekar, H. Crumb, R. (1996) “Hypothetical Quandary”, American Splendor presents Bob and Harv’s Comics (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, p. 79)
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
character while simultaneously locating that character within a contiguous social environment, in this case a clearly recognisable Cleveland – Pekar’s hometown, and the setting for much of his work.
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
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