Harvey Pekar: Working Class Intellectual and Everyday Visionary

Ordinary lives can transformed into the extraordinary through the medium of art. That is what Harvey Pekar did with his life and with the people whose lives he documented in his ongoing comic book series American Splendor. He celebrated the ordinary and gave it a lasting form.

The past decades have shown that when art is disconnected from everyday people it becomes a pastime for the elite. When it is embraced by working class intellectuals it can become a medium of shared experience, rather than a rubicon to be navigated through a maze of academic jargon and interpretation. When the artist in question also works a day job they stay in touch with the world of working people. When they also stay in their home town, in the Midwest, in middle America, they can’t be bent to change their form into the dominant styles. In the case of the writer who doesn’t sell out, they can’t be bought and made to write stories that conform to the preferred narrative trends of a culture in any given time. If they make their buck in some other way that doesn’t compromise their values, they can forge a path through life on their own terms with a foundation of a day job.

Such was the case of Cleveland comic book writer Harvey Pekar whose longest running day job gig was as a file clerk for the VA Hospital.

The boundary between work and play need not be so rigid anyway. There can be a flow between them, if artists weren’t always so eager to quit their day jobs and go pro. I don’t think there is anything ethically wrong with making a living out of what a person creates, but the potential to play to the tastes of the market must become a great temptation when paying the bills rides on paychecks derived from art, music, books.

If the work done is in accord with some kind of principle along the lines of what the Buddhists call right livelihood, it not only is rewarding in its own right, but becomes fodder for further creation, and gives an artist the grit needed to push past obstacles, to overcome the drudgery sometimes involved.  The creator who has not done much work, who has gotten to their position from nepotism, who don’t need to work, or didn’t reach the ability of being able to go full time in their chosen vocation, without having to grind onwards through shifts and shifts at the day job, will have a fundamental disconnect from people who don’t know what it is like to live a life of privilege.

As a writer of comics, music and highbrow literary criticism, Pekar sidestepped that issue by never giving up on his day job until the time of his legitimate retirement. He wrote and worked on his off time, and any time he could squirrel away on breaks and when things were slow on the job. In this respect Pekar is a patron saint of slackers everywhere. And like good slackers, he worked his ass off.

He read books and newspapers on his break times. He made phone calls to editors when he was on break. This grounding in the realities of work, made him the quintessential person to document what life was like in twentieth-century century Cleveland, in the twentieth-century rust belt of Midwest America. He was connected to his city and to the people who lived and worked there. Yet in the drive to create, he mastered the use of his free time, and distinguished himself as a comics writer, as a pioneer of the graphic novel memoir, of slice-of-life strips, as a jazz writer and record collector, as a keen collaborator with many of the great illustrators of his day.  

Pekar didn’t have outlandish style in dress. He didn’t need to don a beret to show he was an intellect of caliber. He could pay his own way through his work, and use his day job as a thrust block to generate the material for his comics.

​Thank goodness Harvey Pekar didn’t give a flying fuck about kryptonite. He hated superhero comics, and wasn’t interested in what some person with special powers could do. Who needs those anymore? He gave us the everyday everyman. The person on the street. These are the everyday people who populated his works. People your average non-corporate executive might run into while riding the bus home from work, or talk to in their neighborhood, or bump into at a convenience store. As he wrote about it later, “I don't ever write for entertainment, like no Hollywood stud or nothing. See, all that stuff, it doesn't mean anything! Plots and villains, all that stuff just to sell cereal and underwear.”

Pekar’s parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to America where they ran a grocery store. His father was a Talmudic scholar and his mom knew Hebrew and a good deal about Jewish religion and history. She was also an avowed communist until the USSR sided with Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. As a Zionist she would have rather had them side with Israel. Pekar’s parents worked all the time, and he spent a lot of time with his grandfather speaking in Yiddish.

Pekar grew up in a mostly African American neighborhood of Cleveland and got to see first hand the racial and class striations bifurcating America. He also came of age just as Cleveland had reached its industrial peak. Born on October 8, 1939 he was just entering the workforce when the 1958 recession hit. Having difficulty finding a regular give gave him lifelong respect for gigs.

Listening to the radio, going to used bookstores, and hanging out at the library were lifelines for Pekar and introduced him to a wide range of ideas. He was a bookhound and a record collector, with his main interest being jazz records. He started writing criticism in 1959 when his first piece appeared in The Jazz Review.

In 1962 Robert Crumb moved around the corner from where Crumb lived at 107th street and Euclid in the heart of Cleveland where hipsters hung out and bohemia swung. Crumb stayed their for four years working at the American Greeting Card company and the two became friends over their shared love of jazz. Here was one of Pekar’s entries into the world of underground comix.

He had been thinking about writing comics for awhile, the ideas percolating after conversations with Crumb, but they took awhile to gestate. In 1972 he drew some stick figure panels and showed his work to Crumb and illustrator Robert Armstrong. Both of these artists, already established in the scene, offered to illustrate Pekar’s stories. His first work in the medium ended up being a one-page piece called “Crazy Ed” that found its way onto the back of The People’s Comics a one-off issue by Crumb.

In this R. Crumb illustrated strip by Harvey Pekar, we seem him riding the bus and chatting with fellow American Iconoclast Sun Ra!

Over the next four years he wrote a number of other stories that were illustrated by a variety of artists and in appeared in various publications. Following the success and confidence building experiences of getting his stories illustrated and in print he started to focus on writing his own full issue series. It was 1976, two hundred years into the American experiment of independence, and the DIY spirit was everywhere inside the counterculture. His efforts with American Splendor fit right in with this mindset, as seen in the undergound comix movement, the underground press, and zine culture. His stories showed his life with frank realism and profound psychological depth. Ten years of effort paid off in 1986 when Doubleday released American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar collecting the first ten issues.

From his work, it didn’t seem like Pekar was pretentious. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a difficult grouch. His second wife had ambitions to become a career academic, and this was what eventually drove them apart. He didn’t want to leave Cleveland or the gig he had at the VA. She was determined to teach at an Ivy League school -though she never made it quite that far, but did get a gig of her own at a school in New England. Close enough for academic work, one can suppose. Her literary acumen was what got him into reading contemporary literary literature. I guess that’s called lit fic, and it turned out he really liked the stuff. But just to get back at her for leaving him, he started writing reviews for highbrow journal Review of Contemporary Fiction, where she would likely read his reviews. Yet in the way that he lived, he showed that a life of the mind isn’t limited to life of people in an ivory tower. Becoming a cultural critic requires no fancy degree.

His success at this point was in no small way related to his third wife and love of his life Joyce Brabner, who he had married two years before. Brabner was a caring soul who worked with people in prison and kids who were in trouble. She taught them how to write as a way of dealing with the monotony and drudgery of prison life. She wanted them to have an imaginative interior life. Something to help them cope. But she needed to cope herself. Noting the heavy emotional toll the kind of work she was doing took, she got involved in comics and fandom, something she’d loved since her childhood spent reading Mad Magazine. This eventually led her to become a co-owner of a comic book shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The shop stocked American Splendor, but one time, she didn’t get to read the latest issue before it was sold. So she dropped a note to Pekar in the mail asking if he could send them another copy. After this the two started corresponding, then talking on the phone together. Later she had some business to do in Cleveland and decided to visit Pekar while she was there. The two hit it off and got married the very next day. (Brabner is an American iconoclast herself and will eventually have an article dedicated to her own distinct life, work, and contribution to comics and culture.)

​The story of their courtship and early time together was told in “American Splendor No. 10” that he gave the title “Harvey's Latest Crapshoot: His Third Marriage to a Sweetie from Delaware and How His Substandard Dishwashing Strains Their Relationship.”

Because Pekar wrote about the people in his life and the world immediately around him, she knew what she was getting into with him. Part of her attraction to him was his radical honesty, and this led to a degree of openness that served them both well, and they only parted at death. Brabner became a regular feature in his comics over the years, and later, when they took in a foster kid and made her their own (that right there should tell you what kind of people they were), Danielle Batone became a part of the stories. So did Pekar’s bout with cancer, and his struggles with depression.

Pekar said that his work was about “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It's the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

​After his death in 2010 one of his coworkers wrote “His writings in “American Splendor” reflected the way he was with us: a direct and unpretentious Everyman with an engaging, original slant on the issues of everyday life. Although tactful discretion was not one of Harvey's strong suits, he was on speaking terms with everyone from the lowest to the highest, and he kept his common touch despite literary fame from his comic books and movie. He added a unique, bright, off-beat note to the daily routine of our medical center.”

On Pekar’s gravestone his epitaph reads “Life is about women, gigs, and bein’ creative.”

As a life philosophy it is hard to beat. Let’s take a look at the three main components.

Life is about women. Married three times, and with girlfriends and hookups in between, its safe to say Pekar liked women. He is certainly not alone in this assessment. On his tombstone it all says he was a beloved husband and guardian. He was married to Brabner for twenty-six years before he passed away. He was Batone’s guardian from the time she was nine, seeing her into adulthood. She would have been around 21 when he died. These were the women in his life, along with coworkers and friends. Pekar had said in his comics that he is pro-feminist, even though his works sometimes showing him arguing with women. He was a passionate man, and perhaps a bit neurotic, but from reading his work, it seemed that Brabner and Batone helped keep this high-strung man grounded.

Then he said life is about gigs. Pekar came of age in 1959 when work was really hard to come by. This gave him a healthy respect for work. Pekar was a practical man, and he knew that to get by in a city that had started its economic decline when he was just starting to come up inside it, meant he had to find the gigs, the jobs. He went through a bunch of them before landing his perfect gig, a job as a civil servant file clerk for the VA. He did his work, he collected his jazz records, and wrote jazz criticism, he collected his books, and wrote literary criticism, he put together and self-published his comics, all in any spare scrap of time he could eke out of his existence. There was little money in the comics for him, and even after the film about his life was made in 2003, he struggled to pay the bills. But he schlepped on with the gigs and made his way. It would have been easy to not read, listen to music, and write, got to work, come home and watch TV. Instead, he took the subject matter of his ordinary relatable life, with all its grouchiness and grumbling, dialed it in to make it extraordinary and epic.

​The third prong of his epitaph is Bein’ Creative. The first two provide the glue that created the foundation for his further achievements. Through his efforts he wanted “to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing,” To get people to see the beauty in their everyday lives. People often think that in order to have a life, you need to have some money, or some kind of silver spoon handed to you so you can do what you want. Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes what you need is a job, a 9 to 5 that forces you stick to a certain routine, a marriage that keeps you focused on the happiness of another person, and someone younger to care for and help bring up in the world. Beyond that, a bit of creative gumption to come home and keep working, work on the weekends, work early in the morning. That’s the kind of shit that turns a person into a working-class hero. That’s some real American splendor.

Read the other entries in my American Iconoclast's & Eccentrics series:

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt

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