What we might have missed had Prozac been around back then…

Those of you who haven’t taken the plunge into graphic storytelling might find access through Harvey Pekar and American Splendor, the award-winning film about his life that made the rounds on the art house circuit in 2003. And as any fan of the genre of graphic novels can tell you, the artwork tells as much of the story as the text. But there’s an exception to every rule, however, and Pekar’s The Quitter (Vertigo Comics) is the case in point.

The Incredible Hulk or Jughead this ain’t, but that shouldn’t mean anything - particularly to Pekar’s legion of fans, who may see The Quitter as the holy grail of comic art. It’s here we finally learn the history of the poor schlub who for years has written (while others, such as well-known artist R. Crumb, drew) Pekar’s oft-pathetic autobiographical non-adventures.

The Quitter ends where American Splendor the comic book series began, and swiftly summarizes Pekar’s childhood in the post-War 1940s as the son of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Young Harvey was a quiet kid, the son of a shopkeeper father who refused to understand the ways of his adopted country and a mother who forced her son to pass out communist leaflets in their lower-middle class Cleveland neighborhood.

As the only white Jewish kid on the block - white flight had carried the rest of the Jewish families to the outer rings of the city and the suburbs - little Harvey took his lumps from the neighborhood kids, none of whom would even speak to him otherwise. When the family moved to a new neighborhood, he started to find it easier to make friends. His grades went up. He even became good at sports.

Yet as Harvey’s talents grew, so did his insecurities. His mother thought his high grades weren’t high enough. His father found sports to be a waste of time. A football coach who didn’t like Harvey’s attitude kept him benched though he was the best player on the team. He couldn’t hit a baseball as far as his other teammates. So he quit.

“I got discouraged about stuff so fast and would walk away from a challenge rather than confront it,” he writes. With his hands drawn over his ears and eyes closed tight, trying to shut out the world, he thinks to himself that he’ll be a basket case once he gets out of high school.

Then he finds a pastime where he can be unrivaled: street fighting. It gets him respect. “Wow, I’m like a hero,” he thinks after beating up a kid whose father has mob connections, and the other kids on his block look up to him, but ultimately even that doesn’t satisfy him.

In the meantime, Harvey starts finding that high school isn’t as easy as junior high, so he quits the hard classes and finds easier ones where he can get by using memorization.

Interestingly enough, however, as he’s leaving behind the academics, he finds pursuits most 16 year olds wouldn’t dream about - an obsessive interest in boxing, an even more obsessive interest in jazz music - to the point that just after he finishes high school, he’s working crummy jobs while becoming a regular writer for major jazz magazines, writing about musicians that nobody else has heard of.

From here, the story becomes Pekar’s psychological nightmare. He joins the Navy; he cracks up and quits the Navy. He goes to college; he gets a bad grade and drops out of college. He gets a lousy job; he goofs around and gets fired from the lousy job. And on and on.

The story ends in resignation: Harvey needs to hold onto the government job he finally does land, because it’s pretty much all he’s got going for him (and, as American Splendor fans know, he does stay until his retirement).

As the story draws to a close, we’re faced with something of a conundrum: while Dean Haspiel’s art is beautifully drawn, there are only a few points where I didn’t feel like my own mind couldn’t make its own pictures. The best example? Midway through the story, when the young Harvey, having just sustained a couple of cuts in a fight, shows off his pride in victory. It’s a face full of hope and happiness.

The facing page, however, shows Harvey today, unmistakably the same person, but the hope has been replaced with anxiety and experience. The elder Harvey is unsure about his future, and whether he was too young to be worrying so much even back then. The pictures say so much more than words ever could.

On the other hand, however, there’s no way Pekar could have gotten this (or any) story published without the steady hand of a comic artist. The story is too short, too mundane - I’m also reading Salman Rushdie’s new novel Shalimar the Clown, and it takes as long to get to the point of any given scene in that story as it did to read The Quitter through its entirety - but it’s also what makes Pekar’s work so enticing. What The Quitter lacks in verbosity, it makes up for in its power of confession.

Pekar’s story is dark, it’s heavy, and seeing it drawn any other way would probably not have done it justice. If it’s your first foray into the graphic novel genre, you might find yourself wanting for the lush description of Rushdie or for the depth into the period like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, but that shouldn’t matter: this is a different beast, and a solidly ferocious one at that.

Joel Magalnick