Splendor and More Splendor : ...

I believe it was Pat Oliphant who in a recently televised speech announced that we are now living in a golden age--of cartoonists. He spoke in reference to political cartoonists, but the same applies to the field as a whole. In our short-attention-span, media-oriented culture, cartoons have achieved a new status, whether in the pungent satire of a Garry Trudeau, the bizarre natural history of a Gary Larson or the wry humor of a Bill Watterson. They are filmic, telling their stories frame by frame, but remain manageable, concrete, personal. With the publication last year of “American Splendor” (followed this summer by a second volume, “More American Splendor”), Harvey Pekar has expanded the field, bringing comics up to the level of adult literature.

A less likely pioneer into the cloistered world of serious literature could hardly be imagined. Pekar did not graduate from college, attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or go to an art school. In fact, he does not even do his own drawing, by his own admission bullying cartoonist friends such as Robert Crumb into bringing his crude sketches to life. He is a self-described “working class intellectual,” a tough Jewish guy from the streets of Cleveland who draws upon his everyday experiences. Late night TV viewers may be familiar with him from his occasional appearances with David Letterman, where he comes across as exactly the kind of driven, bad-tempered character he is in his stories. When Letterman once tried to tease him about his new fame and fortune, Pekar hoarsely shot back that he still hadn’t made a dime on his books, and that a rich jerk like Letterman had a lot of nerve.

In fact, the cover of “American Splendor” shows Pekar on a Carson-style talk show playing the quintessential blue-collar slob, offending one and all. What you see is what you get--almost. Pekar clearly relishes his long-sought celebrity. He has free-lanced for years, contributing music reviews to magazines like Downbeat and trying to sell his articles on history, politics and economics. But it’s in the adult comic genre that he has achieved success, perhaps because there is no entrenched establishment to overcome.

There have been “adult comics” before. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, EC comics and others published a wide variety of potboiler horror and detective comics for adults, before a board of censors was established and confined the industry to childish trivia. In the ‘60s counterculture, a number of “adult comics” came out in defiance of the censors, extolling the new psychedelic, free-love life-style. Some of these (including Crumb’s own “Zap” and “Mr. Natural”) were wildly original and provocative, but most were pointless, often pornographic fantasies, and the movement soon lost momentum.

Recently, in both Europe and Japan, an adult audience has arisen for a kind of comic-book reminiscent of the old EC crime dramas. Descended from “fumetti,” in which frames from movies or series of stills were given balloon-dialogue, they are meticulously illustrated, often using photolithography for heightened realism, and evoke a smoky, decadent world of sex and murder.

However, none of these, either foreign or domestic, has really dealt with the poetry and prose of everyday life. Crumb and his sometime girlfriend Aline Kominski began to explore the territory with “Dirty Laundry,” a joint project in which they exposed their private lives, but the result was trivial and contrived. Pekar is the first to capture in cartoon form the larger drama of ordinary existence.

Almost all of the stories in these two books are autobiographical, following Pekar through his workday or his times out of work, meeting his friends, his wives--he has been married three times--and the various other characters that populate his neighborhood and his life. They tell of huge frustrations and small victories, of a constant struggle to be found worthwhile, to matter, to be taken seriously.

“American Splendor” is really a series of vignettes, anecdotes in which we are introduced to Harvey and his friends. We start out with Harvey just talking to us, telling us about his unusual name, wondering about a couple of other Harvey Pekars who appeared and then disappeared from his phone book over the years: “What were they like, I thought. It seemed that our lives had been linked in some indefinable way.” Then comes his days as an addicted jazz collector, his small aggravations with his first wife, his depression when nothing seems to be going right for him.

In “Awaking to the Terror of a New Day,” Harvey is already divorced. One desperately lonely evening, he calls up his ex-wife, only to become abusive when she tells him she is involved with someone else. The next morning, the snow is coming down and everything looks hopeless. Still, walking to work, Harvey begins to make plans for the day, and this alone cheers him up. “I’m pretty far from having it made, but I ain’t dead yet.”

Little by little, Pekar’s world emerges. There is Freddy, his mooching buddy from Brooklyn who can’t bear to part with a dollar. There are the little Jewish ladies who infuriate him with their haggling in the supermarket. Harvey has an empty affair with a woman named Carla, each using the other until things just fall apart: “Yeah, I know, it was sordid and disgusting. I got involved with Carla because I was goin’ crazy from loneliness, so I traded one kinda bad for another . . . if I had to do it over again under the same circumstances, I probably would.”

Not all the characters are unpleasant or sad. There is Mr. Boats, a little old black gentleman at work who quotes poetry in a crowded elevator, ignoring the annoyed look of the other employees: “Avoid the reeking herd/ shun the polluted flock/ live like that stoic bird/ the eagle of the rock . . . heh, heh.” He and Pekar exit to continue a long-running discussion about music; at the end, Mr. Boats strolls off humming Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa.”

In “More American Splendor,” Pekar allows himself more length and scope. Sometimes he gets repetitive, rehearsing the litany of dreary days in government jobs and broken relationships. It’s as if Pekar feels the need to go back to the beginning each time to see how far he has come. He does seem less frantic, calmer. There are moments here of real tenderness, as well as some hard lessons. Having abused his voice by shouting too much, Harvey develops a nodule on his vocal cord and loses his voice for several months. Suddenly handicapped, he is forced to learn patience and gains new insight into the trials of the handicapped people he sees at his job in the hospital, and he learns to control his temper.

Harvey talks about the rage and frustration of being mugged at gunpoint, about the problems of Jewish identity. He mentions in passing that he is the son of a Talmudic scholar, a surprising fact that explains a lot about him and the odd changes of voice in his stories. Pekar and his characters sometimes jump weirdly from street-corner gossip into concerned discussions about affairs or philosophy. What we feel is Pekar’s urgent desire to transcend the street corner, to engage in more meaningful issues, but it jars his consistency of tone. Similarly, his habit of moralizing in the first person can tend to get cliched or bathetic in contrast to the freshness and subtlety of the stories themselves. Pekar’s strength lies in being true to his characters and letting the moral explain itself, as in “Miracle Rabbis,” set in the hospital where Pekar works. An old Jewish doctor is interrupted in the midst of telling Harvey a bad joke about rabbis by a man who insists the doctor saved his life. “No, you must be mistaken, sir . . . I can’t take z’ credit for zis.” The man wanders off, perplexed. When he is out of earshot, the doctor continues: “Zo anyway, here’s anuzzer story--”

Pekar’s best cartoonist is Crumb, the only artist from the ‘60s underground comic world to achieve wide recognition. Crumb, as always, is funky and funny and manages to match both Pekar’s moods and the gritty details of his circumstances. In his foreword, Crumb describes his first meeting with Pekar in 1962 when he too was living in Cleveland, working for American Greeting Cards. “(Pekar) was seething, intense, burning up . . . just like a character out of Kerouac.” Cleveland was a grim place: “I came near committing suicide when I lived there,” Crumb admits.

It was not until more than a decade later that they would decide to collaborate--or rather, that Pekar would decide. One of the funniest stories in the first volume shows Crumb bumming a place to stay off of Harvey after not contacting him for more than a year. Pekar decides that this gives him an excuse to insult, bully and harangue Crumb into illustrating some of his stories: “Lissen, you lousy schmuck, yer a has-been! Yer over the hill! I’m onna way up . . . I’m offerin’ you a chance to hitch your wagon to a star--ME!” However, before Doubleday picked him up, Pekar had almost bankrupted himself publishing his own work in comic-book format.

Many other artists work with Pekar, but none of them is really up to Crumb’s standard. Only Val Mayerick has had much work published outside of “American Splendor”; his work is professional, but somewhat cold. Gregory Budgett and Gary Dumm, who work as a team, are not great draftsmen. Kevin Brown’s slick, mannered style is often distracting, and Sue Cavey’s work, while striking, is better suited to fantasy. Gerry Shamray’s graphic style comes closest--after Crumb’s--to finding the right expression for Pekar’s Cleveland.

Still, the artists must be given credit for struggling with tough material. As Crumb says, “there’s so little comic-book-style action . . . mostly it’s just people standing around and talking.” The artists all diligently try to search out the telling details: Pekar’s torn T-shirts, the peeling paint in his apartment, the street signs and shop signs of his neighborhood. At first, one might wish that Crumb had drawn the whole thing, but taken together, the work of the several artists enhances the final product. The stories themselves are all told from Pekar’s point of view. The artists, however, uneven as they are, treat us to a variety of separate perspectives on Harvey and his world.

Crumb sums it up well: “Pekar has proven once and for all that even the most seemingly dreary and monotonous of lives is filled with poignancy and heroic struggle.” He has also proven that comic books can grow up. Compared with everyone from Dreiser to Wally Shawn to Dostoevski, Pekar remains unique. There is some analogy to Woody Allen’s keen observations of urban life, but Pekar’s humor, such as it is, is understated and ironic. His Jewish identity does not share in the warm nostalgia of Brooklyn or Manhattan’s Lower East Side; it is tempered like that of Saul Bellow by the hard times and cold, bitter winds of the Great Lakes. Superficially, he recalls Charles Bukowski, another writer whose work Crumb has illustrated, but Pekar’s obsessions are different. He is not interested in displays of sexual or alcoholic bravado, or wallowing in the gutter. Usually Pekar shows himself to be shy or inept with women, and nothing annoys him more than his own fits of self-pity. Like a loading-dock Dangerfield, all he wants is a little respect. In many ways, the author he most resembles is Raymond Carver; his first volume ends with a tale reminiscent of Carver’s story, “A Small, Good Thing,” in which the smell of fresh bread somehow smooths over life’s ambiguities.

In high school, Harvey tells us, he had secretly admired Stetson shoes but was too nonconformist to wear them. Decades later, he finds a pair for sale in a thrift shop and buys them. “Imagine me finally wearin’ Stetsons. I knew I’d make it to the top someday.” Pekar gives us American splendor, Cleveland style. C’n y’dig it?