Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar got pretty damn famous when the film adaptation of his autobiographical comic, American Splendor, was released to great acclaim in 2003. Since then he’s had great success with the books, Our Movie Year and a new Best of American Splendor collection but you’d never know it when you talk to Harvey. He’s one of the most worried and nervous but very funny people you will ever meet. Now you can discover his origins in the new book, The Quitter. Drawn by indie comic book creator Dean Haspiel, it tells the story of his troubled teen years for the first time. He failed to impress all either in sports, school and even his family. Harvey finally found his niche but those fears he developed live with him even now.
Buy The Quitter
Daniel Robert Epstein: Why did you want to write The Quitter?
Harvey Pekar: Dean Haspiel was the one who hooked me up with the guy who produced the American Splendor movie. That has been very beneficial to me. I asked Dean if there was anything I could do to pay him back. He said he wanted to illustrate a long work of mine. I tried to come up with something for him and The Quitter was it. It was a period of my life that I hadn’t written about much and I figured I could write a long narrative and he could illustrate it. I’m not saying I would never have written about this had I lived to be 500 years old, but that’s what started me in that direction.
DRE:
Was this the longest comic story you’d ever done?
HP:
Yeah, except my wife and I collaborated on Our Cancer Year which was twice as long.
DRE:
I’ve read most of your work and The Quitter was the first time you really tried to use a normal structure. It wasn’t just the small moments. These were a lot of big and important moments in your life you were hitting.
HP:
These were a lot of what most people would call big moments. But this was the structure I chose to accommodate these moments.
DRE:
Did you think of this structure beforehand or did you just write the story?
HP:
I just sat down and wrote it. It didn’t take me very long to write at all. In fact, I had finished it before I’d even gotten a contract from DC/Vertigo. We talked about it and they’d agreed to accept it. Then they said they’d send me a contract and it took a relatively long time for them to get it. By that time I’d finished the story.
DRE:
[laughs] So as soon as the contract showed up, you signed it and sent it back with the story.
HP:
Yeah, sort of.
DRE:
Has Joyce [Brabner] heard all these stories before?
HP:
I think most of them, yeah. I never sat down one day and said “listen I want to tell you about my biography from the time I was born until I was like 25 or something like that.” But I don’t think she was real surprised by anything.
DRE:
I was very surprised to find out that you considered yourself a quitter. You can’t be a quitter if you self publish a comic for as long as you did.
HP:
It’s mostly about the first part of my life where I couldn’t get anything together. After I got a steady job that made everything possible. I didn’t hate the job, the pay was enough for me to start writing. I got married and it didn’t last forever but it lasted about 12 years. So for a while there my life was pretty stable. I hung on for dear life. There were very few jobs that would have met my requirements. The job was simple enough for me to hold onto without driving myself nuts about it. Another reason I called it The Quitter was because I wanted people to realize that I was pointing out faults that I had. Sometimes people don’t realize you’re doing it deliberately. I’m not perfect and I want people to identify with me. If you’re portraying yourself as someone without fault it’s pretty hard for people to identify with that.
DRE:
I’m Jewish and of course there is the stereotype that Jews are plagued with self doubt. Was that part of it?
HP:
It may be. I don’t think it’s genetic. It’s probably because Jews have had a history that made them feel insecure. My parents came from Poland and they weren’t exactly treated like royalty around there. In a lot of places all over the world at various times Jews have been treated very badly and it hasn’t exactly made them feel more secure .
DRE:
How do you think Dean did with the book?
HP:
I thought he did a very fine job. Everybody thinks that Dean did a really good job.
DRE:
How much of Dean’s work had you read before you worked together?
HP:
I met Dean through a guy named Josh Neufeld who had done some artwork for me. When Dean found that Josh was illustrating stuff for me, he wanted to do something too. So he sent me some of the samples of his work and we got to corresponding and then we did a story.
DRE:
Did you play to Dean’s strength’s or just do what you normally do?
HP:
His style is noticeably different between this book and the earlier stuff he did with me. I asked him “This thing is way grimmer than anything we’ve done before. Do you think you can come up with an appropriate style that’ll highlight that grimness?” He said he’d been thinking about that too so I don’t know if I would have had to ask him to do this, but I did anyway. So it came about and it worked out real well. I knew that the guy had a variety of styles that he could use. I had seen some of his other drawings and stuff, although he didn’t draw that way very frequently in his comic book stories.
DRE:
The Quitter doesn’t have as much of your trademark humor in it. Like you said it’s a grimmer story.
HP:
I’ve written stories that have been pretty serious before. It didn’t feel any different. I want to write a good story, but it doesn’t have to be a funny story.
DRE:
How’s The Quitter selling?
HP:
They tell me that by their standards it’s selling pretty well at DC. They’re satisfied with it. I’m not sure that they expected it to sell as well as it has.
DRE:
I think one of my favorite artists that’s drawn your stuff is Ed Piskor. I believe you guys are doing another book?.
HP:
Yeah, I’m working on a book with Ed called Macedonia.
DRE:
What’s that about?
HP:
A few years ago I met a woman just before she left for Macedonia. At that time she was going to college and she wanted to write a thesis about how they avoided war in Macedonia when the rest of the former Yugoslavia had wars all over the place. She said she was going to try and interview people and put together a paper on it. I am interested in politics and I asked her if she would mind taking notes so I could ask her about it when she gets back. I’ve been thinking about doing something political. Then when she came back, she sent me a 140 pages worth of notes. We’re doing a whole graphic novel based on that.
DRE:
Is it going to still be through your point of view though, even though it’s her notes?
HP:
I’m just going to present her adventures . It is going to be like Unsung Heroes, the Vietnam war book I did. It will be entirely from the point of view of the person I’m writing about.
DRE:
How do you like the process of doing it from someone else’s point of view?
HP:
It’s fine as long as what they say is interesting. I like to hear things from other people’s point of view. I’m working on a book now. It’s a biography in that it’s about this person telling to me about their life.
DRE:
You’ve retold the story about how you first decided to do comics many times. When you first started American Splendor you wrote that you felt there was still so much to do in comics. Do you still feel that way today?
HP:
Of course. But I don’t think comics are in much better shape than they were years ago. I think we’re on the threshold of something, but I’m very disappointed. I thought that the underground comic book movement would really be a lot more momentous than it has been so far. I thought it would bring about all sorts of change and that comics would be used in all these different ways. But here we are in the 21st century and superheroes are still the best selling comics.
DRE:
Yeah, I don’t get it either really.
HP:
People didn’t see the potential that comics have and they still don’t.
DRE:
Are you still going to write the actual American Splendor comic?
HP:
I’m going to, yeah. I haven’t been doing it for a couple of years because I’ve been working on these graphic novels and I’ve been involved with the movie. But now I’m starting it again with DC. I’ve already written enough stories for two issues. It’s shorter stories and a fair amount of them are humorous.
DRE:
One thing you always touch on in your work is how much money you make and need. Is DC treating you ok?
HP:
DC treats me really well actually. They treat me better than any other publisher has. But it’s a book to book thing. I don’t feel I really have a real solid base of support among readers. That’s because although they’re comic books in form, they’re not typical comic books in content. Regular comic book content would be superheroes. Consequently I think that the people who would be most interested in my work are those who read novels and short stories. But a lot of them don’t know anything about me because my work comes out in comics. On the other hand comic book readers like superheroes. I’m trying and right now things look ok but I feel like every book I do has got to sell pretty good. That’s scary because before the movie my books didn’t sell well at all. When I was on the David Letterman show I thought it would increase my sales some, but it didn’t. So I thought that the movie wouldn’t help my sales at all. But it turned out that the movie got people to buy it. Now I’ve got a pension, I’ve got social security, so far I’ve been able to make it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Featured Interviews
All interviews
