American Splendor is a one-of-a-kind blend of touchingly insightful personal confessions, rants against the downfalls of middle-class life in America, and great retrospectives of the contributions of unsung heroes in the fields of music and literature, all written by Pekar and illustrated by phenomenal artists such as Joe Sacco, Frank Stack, and David Collier. In April, Dark Horse is publishing the next volume of American Splendor, aptly titled Portrait of the Author in His Declining Years. I recently called Pekar at his job as a file clerk for the V.A. hospital in his neighborhood in Cleveland to talk with him about the 25th anniversary of American Splendor and how his writing has evolved in a quarter-century's time.
Shawna Ervin-Gore: I wanted to start by talking a little about why you chose to start writing comics. It's been 25 years since your first issue of American Splendor, and I'm curious how you decided that comics would be a good medium for you to work in.
Harvey Pekar: It was one of those things where, you know, I'd read comics -- and even collected comics a little -- when I was a kid, and I really liked it as a storytelling medium. It can be very effective. But I eventually grew out of the sort of thing I was reading as a kid and didn't have much to do with comics for a long time after that.
But I always paid attention to media and eventually people started doing different things with comics, specifically in the `60s with underground cartoonists drawing comics and using the medium to tell stories that were nothing like the superhero stuff I'd seen before.
In 1972, I hooked up with Robert Crumb, who I knew from around town here in Cleveland, and he illustrated a couple of stories that I wrote. They were actually storyboarded. That's how I script comics stories.
Anyway, Crumb liked my stuff, so we worked on a few stories together. I started to see all of these possibilities that would work with comics, and I really got in to it. It was really exciting to consider this new -- well, it wasn't new, but using comics like this was pretty new -- format as a writer. A lot of comics before the underground cartoonists came along were aimed at kids, or at least they were big on escapist writing. I thought you could do realistic writing in comics the same as you can in any other medium.
SE-G: Were the first stories you did autobiographical, or did you start with broader topics?
HP: No, they were mostly autobiographical. The thing I know most is my own life, and I thought I could write about it in a way that other people could relate to -- and I wasn't necessarily thinking of comic-book fans relating to my work, but just anyone who might read. My main writing influences were prose fiction writers.
SE-G: One of the last times we talked, you mentioned that you were also influenced in your writing style by standup comedians. And, as you just said, your scripts for comic stories are all done as storyboards. When I look at your rough scripts, it's easy to see where the standup influence comes in, especially when you put yourself in this sort-of narrator position, speaking directly to the audience. What are you thinking about when you're sitting down at the planning level and deciding where you should be in the panel versus where the rest of the story should be happening?
HP: For the most part I'm thinking about timing: how to break up the dialogue, or if I'm trying to be humorous, how to arrange the panel for maximum effect. Sometimes it's just being thoughtful about where to put the final word when I'm finishing up a rap. So pacing and timing are two of the important things to me.
Sometimes I don't end up using as many head-shots in the final product because I like to leave a lot of that up to the artists. I just want to get the words and the pacing in, so I'll storyboard a talking head into the script, but as long as the artist can get the point across and illustrate what I'm saying in the panel, I don't really care if my head's there or not.
SE-G: All of the artists you work with are very competent visual storytellers, too.
HP: That's true. It's also up to me to give them as much reference as possible about the story I've written. I do have a lot of set ideas sometimes, but I always want to discuss things with the illustrators because they can come up with good ideas, too. I don't want to limit them and have it seem like I'm dictating what they do.
SE-G: I'm curious about how you collect your story ideas, say, with the biographical essays on musicians and writers -- do you keep a running list of people you want to write about, either real or in your head?
HP: I just keep stuff in my head. I write record reviews and book reviews, so I'm always in the process of doing research, and I'm always running across people who haven't been talked about enough, and I want to talk about them. I've done a lot of stories about writers and musicians -- not just jazz musicians, either.
SE-G: Speaking of jazz, what have you been listening to lately? What's on your turntable?
HP: Well, I always try to concentrate on avant garde jazz, the stuff that's happening now. That's what critics are supposed to do, or at least, that's what I feel I'm supposed to do. I think it's important to listen to what's going on now and try to write as accurately as possible and present that to readers by saying, "listen, check this guy out." There's this one amazing musician named Joe Maneri, and I've written about him before, even in comics, but he's someone I'm very impressed with. There are a lot of guys in the downtown New York scene, the so-called "new music" scene, and that's what I'm writing about.
SE-G: What about books? In the past you've written about Daniel Fuchs and other relatively unsung or contemporary writers...
HP: I just read a book by Stanley Elkin, and I just reviewed something by Gertrude Stein called Lucy Church Amiably. I feel the same way about writers that I do about musicians, and I like prose fiction, so I try to keep up with what the more modern and more innovative people are doing, because that's where my head's at. I think innovation is the key thing, or originality, at least. People should have their own voice and should contribute to the vocabulary of the art form they're working in rather than copying other people.
SE-G: With that in mind, how has your own work changed or evolved? What are you doing differently now that you may not have been doing when you first got started?
HP: The focus and content of my stories is changing as I go through different stages of life. Now I'm an official senior citizen, you know. I got my "Golden Buckeye" card from the state of Ohio (laughs) and I'm getting letters all the time from the AARP. So that's a lot of different stuff to deal with. And I'm doing a bit more of the biographical stuff, on musicians and other people, and I wasn't doing as much of that before. I'm also starting to work on some longer biographical pieces now, and I haven't done that very much. One of the stories I'm working on is about a woman I've known for a really long time who went from being on welfare to becoming an M.D. and a fierce advocate of poor people's rights.
Another one I'm working on at the same time is about a guy I work with now who was in Vietnam and what happened to him after Vietnam. It's not a typical Vietnam story, or what people would think of as a typical Vietnam vet-type story, anyway. This is someone I've known for a long time, and I think he's got a really interesting story. So, I'm shifting focus that way, trying to do more different things.
My writing has changed, though. From a technical standpoint, I think it's better than ever.
SE-G: That must come from all the writing assignments you do -- the reviews and essays you write -- for various magazines, in addition to your comics writing.
HP: Yeah, I think so. Even though my panels continue to be wordy, and deliberately so, I am able to make points now using fewer and fewer words. I'm using language more efficiently now, and that's something else. These are all processes -- changes in my writing style -- that have taken time to develop, but it's been going on from the start.
SE-G: I think the story in your upcoming issue about your foster daughter, Danielle, is a departure from some of your other autobiographical stories. Even though you've written about very personal topics in the past, like having cancer in Our Cancer Year, something about this story feels more vulnerable than other stories you've written. Do you see a difference there, or do you think it has something to do with having a kid in your life.
HP: I don't know. For one thing, I don't really think of Danielle as being a kid -- I see her more as being another human being that I live with, and I like her a lot. I'm trying to adjust to her and hope she can adjust to me, and I'm trying to be responsible. I can't say "Wow, it's really dramatically changed my life," but maybe it has. It's been kind of a slow process.
We've been taking care of Danielle since 1997, and I never thought I could do it. I never thought I could handle a kid. Maybe if it was more of a jump, if it was a little baby or something, I couldn't do it. But Danielle was nine years old when she came to us, and she's a real bright, sharp kid. She's got some problems to overcome, but she's doing really well, and we're working together on a lot of things. I think whenever anyone moves in to your house and you become responsible to them, it's a big thing and you respond to that.
SE-G: I was laughing reading that story because you mention how Danielle likes Pokémon and Sailor Moon and a lot of those "kid entertainment" things. It made me wonder how you, as someone who's essentially a cultural critic, feels about that sort of entertainment for your kid.
HP: Well, you know, I hope she doesn't still like it when she's 25 (laughs). It's all right with me. I liked a lot of stuff like that, or the equivalent of that, when I was a kid, too. I just hope she moves on. She's already gotten past the Spice Girls, and she's losing interest in Pokémon, but she really likes Japanese animation and even does some drawing.
SE-G: The thing is that a lot of that can be good. I would expect you to like some of it, maybe not Pokémon...
HP: Yeah, some of it's pretty good, and some of it's pretty bad. Did you ever hear of this Japanese film called Totoro?
SE-G: Yes! That's one of the best kids' films, I think.
HP: That was pretty good. She's also into Harry Potter, I'll tell you that. And that's cool with me. I don't try to shape her tastes or anything. .
SE-G: So other than your Danielle story, what else is in this issue of American Splendor?
HP: Of course, I've got one story on my guy Toby, who is someone I work with. You might call him a continuing character or something, because I've written about him a lot. He's got some pretty unusual things to say sometimes. I try to make the stories somewhat different from each other. I've also got one in there about the guy who hooked me up with the movie deal. There's always a movie deal (pending for American Splendor), I guess, but this one seems better than others I've been involved with. So I wrote a story about the guy who helped me get that going.
SE-G: Tell me more about the movie deal. The last time we talked I think you told me you'd written a script for it.
HP: The producer, a guy named Ted Hope at Good Machine (the company that produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm for Ang Lee), is working on this. He's gotten some money to get started on the film -- not enough to finish it, I guess, but it's a start. I wrote a script for it before, and I don't know how much of that they're going to use. We had one prospect for a director lined up at one point, but then he couldn't do it, so Hope came up with someone else. What he (the director) wants to do is a combination of documentary and dramatic elements. He hasn't formulated exactly what he wants to do yet. He'll probably do the next script, since I didn't envision this in quite the same way. I just hope we can get going on it in the next few months.
Dark Horse Comics would like to congratulate Harvey Pekar for 25 years of outstanding contribution to the comics medium and for inspiring generations of talented writers and artists to further break the accepted boundaries of comics to tell more compelling and more innovative stories. With any luck, we'll enjoy Pekar's work for another quarter century. Please join us in recognizing Pekar's work by enjoying his next issue of American Splendor: Portait of the Artist in His Declining Years, available this April from Dark Horse Maverick.