Framing the Story
by S. I. Rosenbaum
JULY 19, 2010 TAGS:
Harvey Pekar died two years ago: a strange, ordinary, kindly, cantankerous, working-class intellectual of a Jew. He was, like everyone else, a mass of contradictions. Unable to draw, he became a pillar of modern comics. A man to whom nothing truly extraordinary ever happened, he relentlessly chronicled his daily existence. Much of his life’s work, the autobiographical comics series American Splendor, deals with loneliness and isolation; yet it could not have existed without his small army of collaborators.
From their pens emerged a multitude of Pekars: crabbed and goatish, cocky and sardonic, crosshatched or ink-washed or stubbled by Zipatone dots, young and old and all ages in between. Over the course of four decades, more than 70 different cartoonists drew Harvey Pekar’s stories.
I was lucky enough to be one of them.
In 2008, cartoonist David Lasky and I were commissioned to provide art for a two-page Pekar piece, to run in Jewish Currents. I was to draw the story, and David would produce the finished artwork.
When the script arrived in the mail, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Harvey’s script was a single sheet of typing paper, divided into a rough grid with a ballpoint pen and covered with sloping, semi-legible handwriting. I deciphered it with growing horror: This was eight pages’ worth of material, not two. It was an outpouring, a proliferation.
I made a panicky phone call to one of Pekar’s regular artists, Dean Haspiel. What do I do? I asked. I can’t possibly draw all this.
Relax, Dean told me. This is normal.
“You have to take his story and make it yours,” he said. “You add something of you into the mix, and try to serve the intent of Harvey’s script, try to find a point of access so that strangers can relate to it.”
Josh Neufeld, another regular American Splendor artist, told me about the first Pekar script he received: “It had stick figures, but they looked more like chairs to me,” he said. “A chair with a balloon on top. It was scrawled on one piece of paper, sort of vaguely laid out. He would draw like seven boxes on the page.”
For a while, he said, he struggled to interpret the scripts as faithfully as possible. But as he got used to Harvey and Harvey got used to him, their collaboration became more fluid.
“It took me a while to get the courage up to start riffing on the scripts,” he said. “I’d break a panel he had done into two or three, or add a beat of silence ... he was very supportive of that. He didn’t complain about it.”
So I did the same, carving a two-pager out of Harvey’s raw script. On the phone, talking to me in his famous squeaky rasp, he was gracious and good-natured. He took my suggestions seriously. He insisted on some things, let others go. The resulting comic could not have been made by either of us alone.
I drew the pages and mailed them off to David in Seattle, and he inked them beautifully. Looking at his finished art was a strange experience – I’d always inked my own art before, and now I could see my own art style transformed by David’s. It was like seeing something I had drawn in a dream. I wonder if that was how Harvey felt, seeing the final product: at once his own work and someone else’s, someone wholly different from him.
Comics is a multi-channel medium, like film; words and art can convey separate, even contradictory information at the same time. It’s an art form that lends itself to collaboration. And it may have been the only form of art Harvey could use to express himself.
Harvey wasn’t an artist, wasn’t a musician. A worse singing voice has never been heard. He read voraciously, but his raw writing would have been unpublishable as memoir. He was a file clerk at a VA hospital in Cleveland.
“He was another guy on the street no one paid attention to, living an unremarkable life,” Neufeld said. “It was important to him, vital to him, for people to pay attention to him.”
Harvey’s comics were all about paying attention. He paid attention to jazz, to literature, to overheard conversations, to cracks in the pavement. By working with artists - from his friend Robert Crumb to his own wife, Joyce - all those details could emerge in the pages of his comics.
“He found a way to give himself a voice,” Neufeld said.
Who is the creator of the comic Harvey, David and I made? It wasn’t any one of us alone.
When the poets Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop write collaboratively, they say the resulting poems belong to “a third poet, whose name and gender and origin and language we do not know.” The mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky attribute their collaborative work to “the Chudnovsky Mathematician.”
In the film based upon Harvey’s life and work, there’s a scene where the actor Paul Giamatti portrays Harvey in 1994, during his struggle with lymphoma. Delirious with chemotherapy, Giamatti-as-Pekar wonders whether he exists as a person or simply as a character in a comic.
“If I die,” he says, “will the character keep going? Or will he just fade away?”
Harvey is dead, leaving a hole in the world that will never be filled.
But his collaborators - all the other components of the Pekar Artist - are still alive.
Perhaps there are more Pekar stories to be told.
“The one thing you can’t write, when you write your autobiography, is your death,” Haspiel said. “At a Jewish funeral, they say the kindest thing a person can do for you is to lift a shovel and help cover your grave, and put you to bed, put you to sleep.
“Maybe the artists and everyone who worked with him can kind of put him to sleep now with their stories.”
S.I Rosenbaum is a journalist and cartoonist based in Boston.
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S.I. Rosenbaum is a freelance writer based in Boston.
From their pens emerged a multitude of Pekars: crabbed and goatish, cocky and sardonic, crosshatched or ink-washed or stubbled by Zipatone dots, young and old and all ages in between. Over the course of four decades, more than 70 different cartoonists drew Harvey Pekar’s stories.I was lucky enough to be one of them.
In 2008, cartoonist David Lasky and I were commissioned to provide art for a two-page Pekar piece, to run in Jewish Currents. I was to draw the story, and David would produce the finished artwork.
When the script arrived in the mail, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Harvey’s script was a single sheet of typing paper, divided into a rough grid with a ballpoint pen and covered with sloping, semi-legible handwriting. I deciphered it with growing horror: This was eight pages’ worth of material, not two. It was an outpouring, a proliferation.
I made a panicky phone call to one of Pekar’s regular artists, Dean Haspiel. What do I do? I asked. I can’t possibly draw all this.
Relax, Dean told me. This is normal.
“You have to take his story and make it yours,” he said. “You add something of you into the mix, and try to serve the intent of Harvey’s script, try to find a point of access so that strangers can relate to it.”
Josh Neufeld, another regular American Splendor artist, told me about the first Pekar script he received: “It had stick figures, but they looked more like chairs to me,” he said. “A chair with a balloon on top. It was scrawled on one piece of paper, sort of vaguely laid out. He would draw like seven boxes on the page.”
For a while, he said, he struggled to interpret the scripts as faithfully as possible. But as he got used to Harvey and Harvey got used to him, their collaboration became more fluid.
“It took me a while to get the courage up to start riffing on the scripts,” he said. “I’d break a panel he had done into two or three, or add a beat of silence ... he was very supportive of that. He didn’t complain about it.”
So I did the same, carving a two-pager out of Harvey’s raw script. On the phone, talking to me in his famous squeaky rasp, he was gracious and good-natured. He took my suggestions seriously. He insisted on some things, let others go. The resulting comic could not have been made by either of us alone.
I drew the pages and mailed them off to David in Seattle, and he inked them beautifully. Looking at his finished art was a strange experience – I’d always inked my own art before, and now I could see my own art style transformed by David’s. It was like seeing something I had drawn in a dream. I wonder if that was how Harvey felt, seeing the final product: at once his own work and someone else’s, someone wholly different from him.
Comics is a multi-channel medium, like film; words and art can convey separate, even contradictory information at the same time. It’s an art form that lends itself to collaboration. And it may have been the only form of art Harvey could use to express himself.
Harvey wasn’t an artist, wasn’t a musician. A worse singing voice has never been heard. He read voraciously, but his raw writing would have been unpublishable as memoir. He was a file clerk at a VA hospital in Cleveland.“He was another guy on the street no one paid attention to, living an unremarkable life,” Neufeld said. “It was important to him, vital to him, for people to pay attention to him.”
Harvey’s comics were all about paying attention. He paid attention to jazz, to literature, to overheard conversations, to cracks in the pavement. By working with artists - from his friend Robert Crumb to his own wife, Joyce - all those details could emerge in the pages of his comics.
“He found a way to give himself a voice,” Neufeld said.
Who is the creator of the comic Harvey, David and I made? It wasn’t any one of us alone.
When the poets Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop write collaboratively, they say the resulting poems belong to “a third poet, whose name and gender and origin and language we do not know.” The mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky attribute their collaborative work to “the Chudnovsky Mathematician.”
In the film based upon Harvey’s life and work, there’s a scene where the actor Paul Giamatti portrays Harvey in 1994, during his struggle with lymphoma. Delirious with chemotherapy, Giamatti-as-Pekar wonders whether he exists as a person or simply as a character in a comic.
“If I die,” he says, “will the character keep going? Or will he just fade away?”
Harvey is dead, leaving a hole in the world that will never be filled.
But his collaborators - all the other components of the Pekar Artist - are still alive.
Perhaps there are more Pekar stories to be told.
“The one thing you can’t write, when you write your autobiography, is your death,” Haspiel said. “At a Jewish funeral, they say the kindest thing a person can do for you is to lift a shovel and help cover your grave, and put you to bed, put you to sleep.
“Maybe the artists and everyone who worked with him can kind of put him to sleep now with their stories.”
S.I Rosenbaum is a journalist and cartoonist based in Boston.
S.I. Rosenbaum is a freelance writer based in Boston.
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