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American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (American Splendor #1)
by
Harvey Pekar
The inspiration for the award-winning movie
from HBO Films and Fine Line Features
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar
Two classic comic anthologies in one volume
Stories by Harvey Pekar
Introduction by R. Crumb
Art by Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, and Gerry Shamray
The classic collection of the comics tha...more
from HBO Films and Fine Line Features
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar
Two classic comic anthologies in one volume
Stories by Harvey Pekar
Introduction by R. Crumb
Art by Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, and Gerry Shamray
The classic collection of the comics tha...more
Paperback, 320 pages
Published
July 29th 2003
by Ballantine Books
(first published 1986)
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By the time I reached the story "I'll be Forty-three on Friday" I realized that this book has more deep things to say about life than most *real* novels, and as a biographical work is as comprehensive in scope as anything I've ever read. An amazing collection.
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(earlier impressions while reading:)
I saw the fine film version of "American Splendor." Pekar, the angry everyman iconoclast, used to be one of my favorite talk show guests back in the rou...more
--------
(earlier impressions while reading:)
I saw the fine film version of "American Splendor." Pekar, the angry everyman iconoclast, used to be one of my favorite talk show guests back in the rou...more
view all 3 comments
Paul
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
anyone with a grudge
Shelves:
graphic-novels
This needs a bit of explanation. It's a true story but it sounds strange. Once there was an earnest young jazz fan called Harvey Pekar living in Cleveland, a grim industrial place by the sound of it. He collected records and through that obsession he met Robert Crumb, who you all know to be the most famous "underground comics" artist ever. Crumb was just beginning his journey to the heart of the hippy nightmare. Harvey was and is a guy with strong opinions. He hated his own joyless lif...more
Amazing book! The art in each story is beautiful and poignant, just as the prose and dialogue are. But really, the thing I enjoyed the most about this book was Harvey Pekar's dry, no-nonsense sense of humor and timing. I chuckled almost constantly while reading it.
Russ
rated it
Harvey Pekar was one-of-a-kind. He was who he was, and didn't ever try to be anything else. How could he?
His comics give an unsettling look into the life of a guy who, if he wasn't in a comic book, would be practically unknown. Harvey puts it all out there - his insecurities, paranoias, loneliness, frustrations. These are true "slice of life" comics. Sometimes Harvey tries to put a moral to his story, and other times there is no moral, just a story.
The comi...more
His comics give an unsettling look into the life of a guy who, if he wasn't in a comic book, would be practically unknown. Harvey puts it all out there - his insecurities, paranoias, loneliness, frustrations. These are true "slice of life" comics. Sometimes Harvey tries to put a moral to his story, and other times there is no moral, just a story.
The comi...more
Alan
rated it
Recommends it for:
Anyone with a keen eye for the mundane
Recommended to Alan by:
The unsettling, irascible, yet fascinating man
Harvey Pekar is that guy—you know the one. Irritated, opinionated; he has a dead-end job that he's really pretty good at (although he's educated far beyond what the work requires), but that's almost beside the point, because what's interesting about him isn't what he does, it's what he says. Harvey Pekar's audience includes graphic artists like Robert Crumb and Robert Armstrong, and his work inspired a very good, award-winning film (also called "American Splendor"), starring Paul Giama...more
Harvey Pekar is one of the few ordinary, every day heroes out there that's actually managed to get media attention. His contemplative, relatable stories about every day life give the reader room to reflect on their own ordinary surroundings and friends in a way that gives them great meaning. In a culture that is more and more driven and dominated by celebrities and media hype, it is refreshing to read a book like American Splendor that insists on the beauty and intelligence of regular people.
R.I.P. Mr. Pekar.
The more I read of Harvey Pekar the more I appreciate his gentle wisdom and genius for revealing the magic of mundane life. Inspired by the success of his friend Robert Crumb, Pekar decided to start writing underground comics himself in the 70s, toiling in relative obscurity until the movie based on his comics opened to critical raves. Pekar's own work deserves even more praise, for taking the comics medium seriously. The antithesis of superhero dreck, American Splendor singles out the herois...more
When this collection is good, it's really really good. The best stories here are some of my favorite things I've ever read. I especially love Pekar's stories of obsessively hustling old jazz records and the alienation he feels as a Midwesterner and self-proclaimed "working class intellectual." The story where Pekar meets a bunch of bohemian playwrights and filmmakers from NYC is especially good, right up to the beautiful final image of ugly, dying, industrial Cleveland. Other stori...more
King Dinösaur
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
kafka
Shelves:
comics,
autobiography
Harvey Pekar is a genius. His work has made a big difference in my life and he is a huge influence. Please, check out his stuff. Go out and buy it, if possible, instead of getting it at the library - Harv needs the dough!
Stories based on the life of a Cleveland file-clerk - what could be more exciting? :)
Stories based on the life of a Cleveland file-clerk - what could be more exciting? :)
I feel ill equipped to review this. Basically, it's fantastic. Pekar takes the medium of the comic book and invests it with supreme novelistic energy. But just calling it a novel in the form of a comic would be taking away from Pekar's achievement. It's neither and it's both, just as the novel borrowed from the Romances and Epics of old, Pekar's American Splendor is its own entity, standing completely on its own. For stories with such a narrow setting and cast of characters (essentially cle...more
Pekar's stories of his everyday life are not especially meaningful or insightful. He doesn't make any attempt at a point or purpose. But he wrote two books (compiled in this volume) that I found very compelling. Pekar's perspective as an everyday guy with strong artistic convictions made even his most mundane strips very interesting. And that is one aspect of the book I liked most, it takes some of the most monotonous stories in a man's life and turns them into the focus of the reader's att...more
Wow, what am amazing piece of work American Splendor is. I came into this book with high expectations, and they were met. I grew up on superhero comics and as I got older read some more serious efforts, but didn't know about Harvey Pekar until the film version of American Splendor came out. I'm deepy grateful to have been alerted to this beautiful collection of stories of everyday struggles.
Pekar is a file clerk for the VA: a job he often chronicles in AS, but a job he does not lov...more
Pekar is a file clerk for the VA: a job he often chronicles in AS, but a job he does not lov...more
Wow, it turns out I dig Pekar in much the same way that I dig Bukowski -- he validates all my teen male urges, and just carries them on into his forties and fifties. This isn't to say he's a brilliant genius, or even someone we should have always paid attention to. And I do wonder whether he would've just died alone had he never encountered Robert Crumb during his youth... ANYWAY, this here collection offers up the basics of his persona -- an obsessive, amoral, cranky, sticky-fingered jazz recor...more
Having seen the movie, and having read The Quitter, I'm interested to dig into this one and see what it's like.
Just finished it--a good read. Really made me wonder how much of my life passes me by--I'm not a writer, but besides that, my life is no less interesting, I suppose, than Harvey's in a lot of ways. He's written so many stories about all of these little encounters he's had with people, and it just makes me wonder how many interactions I've had that might be notable in some ...more
Just finished it--a good read. Really made me wonder how much of my life passes me by--I'm not a writer, but besides that, my life is no less interesting, I suppose, than Harvey's in a lot of ways. He's written so many stories about all of these little encounters he's had with people, and it just makes me wonder how many interactions I've had that might be notable in some ...more
I hate the marketing of this, tying it into the film. Although I'm sure his audience grew exponentially by the marketing and awards, so I can understand why the publisher took this route, but I would have vastly preferred a new cover art by Crumb, Cavey or Shamray.
It's worth checking out his work, but his bibliography is fairly limited given that most of what he writes about are stories from his own life. I certainly recommend this far more than "Our Movie Year" or "The Quitter"...more
It's worth checking out his work, but his bibliography is fairly limited given that most of what he writes about are stories from his own life. I certainly recommend this far more than "Our Movie Year" or "The Quitter"...more
(10/10) The thing about American Splendor is that, with a few exceptions, any individual story would seem ordinary and even a little dull on its own, but together they create a panoramic and unique view of human life. Pekar ressurected the corpse of literary realism and brought it to comics, but this isn't the end-oriented realism of the bildungsroman. What American Splendor captures is how much of life is made up of minutia and repetition, errands and pointless discussions. Taken as a whole,...more
Comics, or graphic novels if you insist, have come a long way since Harvey Pekar came into the picture, but that doesn't mean anything has come close to what he does.
R. Crumb is right on the money in his introduction, he says that Pekar's comics are, paraphrasing, so mundane they border on the fantastic. Because Pekar was just writing about his life scribbling stick figures and word bubbles onto paper and getting others to illustrate them.
Of course I've seen the movie, I'd ne...more
R. Crumb is right on the money in his introduction, he says that Pekar's comics are, paraphrasing, so mundane they border on the fantastic. Because Pekar was just writing about his life scribbling stick figures and word bubbles onto paper and getting others to illustrate them.
Of course I've seen the movie, I'd ne...more
Harvey Pekar works as a file clerk in the VA hospital, and spends his abundant free time musing on everything from the great questions down to the most pedestrian details of his life - mostly the latter. This book gives you a front row seat to his inner monologue, so listen up if you're interested in hearing whatever it is that's got Harvey's goat. Most of it is stuff like the squabble among carpoolers over who should pay a parking ticket, or Harvey's impression of the rookie City Bus driver, bu...more
Wow. I swore I had read this book before, but I pulled it out a couple nights ago when I found out that Pekar had passed away. I don't remember having such a strong connection to his writing last time, but not only did he help invent the autobiographical comic, he's definitely one of the best writers in that genre. Maybe its because he concentrated on the writing side and let other do the drawing, but its just really potent stuff - kind of like the Sandman series I just finished re-reading.
I have to say that meeting Pekar at the 1985 Chicago Comics Convention when his batshit crazy wife was making Harvey dolls out of scraps of his old clothing was one of the highlights of my life. Pekar was a neurotic mess of a human being, had a strong intellect and virtually no social skills outside the narrow purview of his strange and eclectic interests, but he put his life on paper for all to see and is to be applauded for that. RIP Harvey, you've earned it."
This particular edition collects both "American Splendor" and "More American Splendor" and I'll say this: get "American Splendor" but maybe don't get "More...". By the time I got to the second half of the book, I was like "I get it, already." Still, to see Crumb's work with Pekar's writing is just amazing: I rank them as one of the great teams like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, or Claremont/Silvestri. Amazing work, but I wish I'd have gotten just "...more
Debbie Hoskins
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
it-takes-one-to-know-one,
words-and-pictures
I discovered Harvey Pekar from his obituary. Shame on me. It was fun looking at his old David Letterman interview. I'm old enough that I'm just amazed at all the stuff you can find on the computer.
I can relate to wanting to be an artist, but making a living as a bureaucrat. I actually made love to a girl on Coventry. Harvey's writing took me back to the early 80's in Cleveland.
I can relate to wanting to be an artist, but making a living as a bureaucrat. I actually made love to a girl on Coventry. Harvey's writing took me back to the early 80's in Cleveland.
What can I say, I felt the book. It was hard for me to get the depressive mood out after reading it.
The dialog was natural. I could picture some friends in the scene, myself in others. It had a true ring to it, being true enough in a universal scope, I could easily picture it happening a half a world away.
Oddly enough, Harvey gave me hope of a better future in anyone.
The dialog was natural. I could picture some friends in the scene, myself in others. It had a true ring to it, being true enough in a universal scope, I could easily picture it happening a half a world away.
Oddly enough, Harvey gave me hope of a better future in anyone.
Lindsay
rated it
I am not an avid graphic novel reader by any stretch of the imagination, so I found out about HP when I saw the movie (and it's one of my all-time faves)...I've only read a few of the comics in my life, but I'm hungry for much more. So far, Crumb's introduction is pretty great...
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There should be 6 stars, like amps that go to 11. I can't think of any hero I've had in my life, but if I had to choose one, it would be Harvey Pekar. This is it, folks. I need...more
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There should be 6 stars, like amps that go to 11. I can't think of any hero I've had in my life, but if I had to choose one, it would be Harvey Pekar. This is it, folks. I need...more
American Splendor has no over the top attempts to be more then what it is and that is what makes it great. The messages and meaning naturally emerge because in one way or another I think we can all relate to Harvey. The amazing part is how he can tell his story with such honesty no matter how it might look to everyone. I get sick of writer's that try to look or sound a certain way or try to explain their assumed enlightened philosophy on life as if they get it and have something to teach. Americ...more
Depressing as all hell with repetative content. Yeah, I know that this is a landmark work that invented a genre, but I had to force myself to finish it. The stories become more fleshed out near the end of the book, but good luck wading through the painfully boring segments.
through stream of consciousness and commentary ranging from the mundane grocery store trip to occasionally dappling in existential issues, one can't help seeing pekar drawing parallels to both larry david and dostoevsky. patronizingly genius and hysterical.
An excellent collection. The R. Crumb artwork gets the most attention, but I was really impressed by all of the different artists represented. Sue Cavey especially caught my eye. Her work was well suited to the themes of Pekar's writing.
It's like a stale Starburst: a little tough to get going at first, but all the juiciness is still there, and then a fresh pack of Starburst seems like you're cheating yourself out of a worthwhile experience.
Ok, so maybe not everyone eats stale candy, but everyone should read Pekar. Especially with R. Crumb's illustrations, you get a man who presents himself to the world with absolutely zero pretensions, which doesn't always leave you with the same kind of aftertaste when you're done...more
Ok, so maybe not everyone eats stale candy, but everyone should read Pekar. Especially with R. Crumb's illustrations, you get a man who presents himself to the world with absolutely zero pretensions, which doesn't always leave you with the same kind of aftertaste when you're done...more
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Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer best known for his autobiographical American Splendor series.
In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.
More about Harvey Pekar...
In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.
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