Monday, November 30, 2009
American Splendor's Inimitable Harvey Pekar on The Pekar Project
Harvey Pekar sits in a comfortably worn plush chair in the Brooklyn Lyceum, the start of the second day of the King Con, where he’s a guest, there to promote The Pekar Project, his venture into a territory where he’s completely lost – the Internet. Harvey Pekar — the everyman file clerk from Cleveland who loves old records and write comics about things as mundane as unclogging a toilet, or as serious as dealing with cancer in his comic American Splendor; who was catapulted to cult stardom with the biopic of the same name that garnered attention for lead actor Paul Giamatti, after a short stint as a recurring guest on Letterman. Just minutes prior, Harvey was hamming it up for a camera, clicking away at his casting out exaggerated emotions on his distinctive face; at one point he joked “I can only parody myself at this point.” Because, despite his tendency to ramble off into tangents, Harvey Pekar is not an “angry brooder” or a...
On July 31, 1987, Harvey walked onstage at the Letterman show wearing a t-shirt that read “On Strike Against NBC”. He looked tense, wired, and ready for a fight; his eyes were wide open and he ignored Letterman’s condescending probing of “You more relaxed now?” or "You seem a little more laid back”. When the host asked Harvey how things were in Cleveland, Harvey responded ‘That’s a stupid question…you’re trying to bait me.”
Letterman then sticks his nose into an offer for a TV pilot that Harvey turned down. “It’s a drag to go on night after night doing simple-minded bullshit,” Harvey quipped back. And then, when Harvey’s getting ready to start on his serious issues, David cuts to a commercial; when it comes back, Harvey’s yielding a stack of notecards and trying to get to his point.
In the exchanges, he jokingly tells Letterman the host doesn’t read much, and then Letterman comes back with a “This is a guy writing comic books telling me I don’t read much,” while waving his copy of American Splendor. Harvey goes through his list of G.E.’s shadiness, blowing the smirking David off, to the point that yet another commercial break is called. When they come back, the hyper Harvey, waving his arms angrily, eventually cools off enough to walk off the stage with Letterman as the show closes and the final credits roll.
Even after the blow-up on Letterman, Harvey was called back a few more times.
“When you live in Cleveland, it’s hard to transcend,” Harvey admits of his hometown. Part of the appeal behind his autobio comics are that they do take place in a way where mundane, everyday occurrences are the pinnacle of excitement – and all there is to write about. By reading about Harvey Pekar the everyman file clerk (now retired) and his neuroses, it’s easier for us to relate through the boredom of our own everyday lives.
In the ‘70s, Pekar’s friend, former neighbor, and fellow jazz fanatic, underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, encouraged Harvey to tell his stories in comics form. First given birth in stick figures scrawled out on paper, Harvey’s first story “Crazy Ed” were metamorphosed into a comic book story in Crumb’s The People’s Comics. By 1976, Harvey was writing his life story in stick figures, illustrated by an assortment of artists, for his self-published comic American Splendor.
American Splendor came out sporadically over the years, garnering Harvey an American Book Award in 1987, a year after the Letterman debacle. Harvey started the ‘90s with a near life-ending experience: lymphatic cancer. He and his wife, Joyce Brabner, chronicled Harvey’s bout with cancer in the 1994 American Splendor graphic novel, Our Cancer Year.
Recovering from his illness, Harvey jumped to Dark Horse Comics to publish new American Splendor, and then found his way to DC Comics/Vertigo. Along the way, he picked up more contributors, such as Frank Stack, Josh Neufeld and, in particular, Dean Haspiel. His association with the Brooklyn cartoonist was the catalyst for the American Splendor film in 2003.
American Splendor, the movie, starred Paul Giamatti as Harvey, with Harvey and Joyce even appearing in interview segments throughout the movie. It was life imitating art and art imitating life so well that it garnered several awards and nomination, as well as putting Harvey in the spotlight again.
While making the shift to DC/Vertigo, Harvey teamed up with Haspiel to produce The Quitter, the life story of Harvey Pekar’s formative years, back when he had hair and a chip on his shoulder. Dean’s slick inkline and bold design elements illustrated Harvey’s trials and tribulations as he picked fights, got canned from jobs, and endured the heartbreaks every young person does – but in the inimitable and poignant way that only Harvey Pekar can. While Splendor was Harvey Pekar in the now, The Quitter lifted the curtain to show the drama of his growing into manhood, both held back and pushed even further by his failures to finish college, play on the football team, or stay in the Navy. Dean’s art renders Harvey’s story in possibly the most dynamic manner it’s ever been told, infusing a bit of Jack Kirby into Harvey’s memoirs, whether it’s in Harvey’s lofty position as neighborhood street fighter, or amongst the stacks of files in the V.A. hospital.
Harvey Pekar is a writer. He writes comic stories of his life through stick figure thumbnails.
Harvey Pekar is not a technological maven.
“I don’t like to mess with technical stuff, I’m just a total wash-out that way,” Harvey admits. "I wish I wasn’t because it’s given me a lot of problems in my life.” It’s ironic that Harvey’s current project, appropriately titled The Pekar Project, is an online comic on SMITH Magazine. SMITH has been in the forefront of producing webstrips with a success rate to print: past strips include Shooting War, AD: New Orleans After the Deluge, and the anthology strip Next-Door Neighbor. “They have a pretty good record of selling their projects after they’re shown on the Internet,” Harvey points out. “I’m hoping that when we get them all done we can sell them as a book.” Approached by SMITH Mag editor Jeff Newelt through comics networker extraordinaire Haspiel, Pekar writes his autobio strips for a group of four artists to alternate drawing – Rick Parker, Tara Seibel, Joseph Remnant, and Sean Pryor – each with a different style and visual approach towards Harvey’s work.
Seibel’s style evokes a child channeling later period Picasso, through use of crayon and with a loose line, with vibrant patches of color; Pryor’s subtle stippling gives a grit to his subtle contour line; Remnant uses a dead-weight outer line on all of his forms that, with his mastery of forced perspective, gives an eye-popping experience; finally, Parker’s classic style slips in bits of modern collage and coloring, but still feels like it belongs in a baby carriage in Haight-Asbury. Harvey admits that The Pekar Project is no different from American Splendor, but it is – at the most, Project is bite-sized pieces of Harvey’s unique narrative idiom, bought at an online restaurant rather than a print one. Feeling like Splendor is a strength, though, giving it the familiarity of a phone conversation with our old pal, Harvey Pekar, catching up on Oscar the Amazing Baby, free stale potato chips, or what a pain in the ass sweeping cat litter into a dustpan is.
And busy Pekar has been. Unfortunately, he hasn’t reaped all the benefits of his hours of work yet. “I did something that was real American Splendor style. I finished it. It was a book that had four biographies in it and was about some interesting and unusual people that I know. I sent it in and it was accepted by Random House and it was supposed to come out in September. I followed up and asked the guy just before it was going to come out – ‘Is this coming out or what?’ – and found out that they had pushed it back two years. I would be the vehicle for getting the story over, narrating it, and friends of mine would be the main characters. It was a graphic novel, each story about thirty-five pages.
“It’s called Huntington, West Virginia on the Fly. They pushed the publication back because they were having problems like a lot of publishers, and maybe they weren’t having good advance sales. It might have been because of the title because people couldn’t tell what the book was about. I kind of like the title, but I could see where it couldn’t sell any books; people could be confused by it until they could pick it up.” Huntington isn’t the only project on hold for Harvey Pekar. His list includes his much-desired biography of Lenny Bruce.
See Harvey's most recent work at SMITH Magazine's The Pekar Project.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Graphic NYC & SMITH Magazine present Harvey Pekar Week
How to Draw Harvey Pekar by Rick Parker
Dean Haspiel's Anatomy of an American Splendor Cover
Graphically Speaking: The Pekar Project
The Pekar Project: Gettin' the Band Together
Origin of the Harvey Heads
Q and A: Harvey Pekar in 2000
How Harvey Pekar Got Me Laid by Seth Kushner
Read more: The Pekar Project at SMITH Mag.
Dean Haspiel's Anatomy Of An American Splendor Cover
In the summer of 2008, I was hired by a collections editor at DC Comics to draw the cover to Harvey Pekar's second American Splendor collection, originally published by Vertigo as a mini-series, which featured stories drawn by me and various other artists. The first collection was titled "Another Day," and the second one was going to be called "Another Dollar." I laughed, accepted the gig, and then struggled with a concept for the cover. I initially drew four ideas for consideration.
Inspired by the "another day, another dollar" analogy, my first idea was to show Harvey bartering his original comic script for food at a grocery store. Insinuating that his wares were, at the very least, worth the same price as a bag of groceries. My second sketch shows Harvey thinking about something that happened to him, ergo, the light bulb going off atop his forehead, and writing a new comic about it, which is his livelihood and procures him the proverbial dollar.
With this second set of sketches, I decided to veer from the obvious. In the third sketch I drew Harvey drawing his signature stick figure on a calendar book hip-checking Pekar's previous American Splendor: Another Day collection. This idea was more abstract and would've encouraged Harvey to write new dialogue for the cover, possibly commenting on the economy or the state of the industry or something like that. With the fourth sketch, I went completely off-topic and was inspired by a famous photo of scientist, Percival Lowell, observing Mars. Only, I replaced Lowell with Pekar, our man about town looking through a gigantic microscope and staring at his own mug with paper and pencil at the ready to record whatever was going to happen next. This was my personal poke at the naval gazing aspect of semi-autobio comix and memoir, which I often dabble in to fair success.
The editor dug my second sketch and asked me to expand on it. I'd heard legend that the painter, Pablo Picasso, would go to restaurants and order expensive food and wine and, when the bill came, would ask if he could pay with a check and, almost always, the checks would never get cashed because Picasso's signature was worth more money than most anything he ever bought. So, Picasso's fame could let him eat for free for the rest of his life. Working with that concept, I added an extra panel to the bottom of the cover idea to express, in close-up, the notion that one's art and/or fame can pay the bills.
The editor and I went back-and-forth on the reworked concept and I started to get neurotic. I felt like I was failing the project and, in a fit of frustration, I designed a completely different idea with a new title and proposed it to the editor. Suffice it to say, he never responded to that idea and, instead, we decided to blend the two-panel cover concept into one single image and show Harvey sparking the brilliant idea to pay his bills with his signature art. It was a subtle solution and kept within the nature of Pekar's quotidian sensibilities.
I penciled the 10"x15" cover art on two-ply bristol board with a rough vellum finish. I've been drawing with erasable blue pencils for many years now and often convert my scans into grayscale so they look like traditional lead pencils.
Once approved, I inked my pencils with an expensive Japanese brush pen that uses disposable ink cartridges.
Coloring isn't my forte and I was running late on a concurrent job drawing a six-page Giant-Sized X-Men First Class story for Marvel. So, I asked my good pal/cartoonist/author, Bob Fingerman, to help me out and color the cover for me, which he did a great job on. I still owe Bob a dinner at Peter Luger's Steakhouse in Brooklyn, NY.
And, finally, here's the print version with added production logos and text copy, etc., that sold in stores worldwide.
Dean Haspiel is a native New Yorker and the creator of BILLY DOGMA, STREET CODE, and ACT-I-VATE. Dino has drawn comix for the New York Times, Marvel, DC/Vertigo, Dark Horse, Scholastic, Toon Books, and other publishers but is best known for his semi-autobio collaborations with Harvey Pekar on THE QUITTER and AMERICAN SPLENDOR, and with Jonathan Ames on THE ALCOHOLIC, and HBO's "Bored to Death." Dino is a founding member of DEEP6 Studios in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
How to Draw Harvey Pekar by Rick Parker
As preparation, I did a Google Image Search for the subject, (Harvey Pekar) looking at and downloading a reasonable number of photographic and artistic renderings of him and tried and get a “feel” for the guy.I took special note of the relationships between various features of his face, such as the distance between his nose and mouth, for example, or the shape of his upper lip including all the fleshy parts between his nose and the actual opening of his mouth.
1. Rough Sketch. On a sheet of paper I began by lightly sketching in a rough oval to represent the basic shape of his head. Next, I roughed in two lines, the first follows the “form” of the head and divides it into a right and left half, and the other is for placement of his eyes on the face.
2. Refine Sketch. Using the eye-line as a guide, I roughed in the various features, nose, mouth, chin, ears, bone structure of eye, plus a prominent wrinkle defining a fleshy cheek. I noticed from my photo reference that his jaw line leads into his neck.
3. Refine Features. At this point I began to refine the various features of his face adding things like the convolutions of his ear and the angle of his brow. Perhaps a few more lines were added to get a feel for the form of the nose and neck.
4. Further Refine Features. This seemed like a good time to rough in the hair and add a few more lines to define the brow, lines under the eyes and shape of the mouth.
5. Finish Pencil Drawing. Here I have strengthened some lines for the “form” of the nose, indicated shading on planes of the face, and added a shadow on the side of his face. Plus a few more hairs to the top of his head.
6. Ink Hair. For this particular drawing, I decided to use a #0.7 Pigment Liner pen made by STAEDTLER for the black lines and began to indicate the hair, lines in the neck and T-shirt. I also often like using a “brushpen.”
7. Refine Inks. With my 0.7 pen, I begin to draw over the pencil lines perhaps thickening the lines on the far side of the face and filling in the plane of his upper lip as a solid black.
8. Ink Face Planes. Pen in hand, I move around the face quickly thickening some lines and adding more hair and drawing thin strokes with the pen to indicate the various places of the face and wrinkles on the T-shirt. I decided to have the eyes looking more directly at the viewer for a more “intense” look.
9. Tweak and Erase. I added a few more lines to the planes of the face, a few more to the hair and shirt and then I erase my pencil drawing, trying not to crease, damage or wrinkle the original artwork. I’m reasonably satisfied with what I see, and I am not a “perfectionist”, so I sign and date it. Then it’s scanned at 300 dpi. as a bitmap image, saved-- and converted to Grayscale and saved again.
10. Re-Tweak. (Working digitally at this point.) Not much changes here, but perhaps joining the jaw line with the neck or lightening some heavy-handed inking here or there.
11. Stretch and touch-up. Comparing the drawing at this stage with a photograph of the subject from the same angle it seems that my drawing could benefit from being stretched horizontally, so I do so. You gotta’ love computers!! I digitally re-connect the black lines in the neck between the stretched head and un-stretched neck. I’m Finished.
12. Digitally Color Image using Adobe Photoshop.
13. Digitally Combine Image with existing previously drawn and colored background image based on actual photograph of Cleveland street corner in an interesting way. Feel good about the world for a few brief, enjoyable seconds then start to think of what to do next.
To see how Rick Parker applies his techniques to a finished Harvey Pekar story, check out his work at SMITH Magazine's The Pekar Project.
Rick Parker is best known as the artist of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head comics from Marvel. Rick was on staff at Marvel Comics in the ’70s and ’80s doing lettering and production work. He currently draws the intro pages featuring the Old Witch, The Vault Keeper and the Crypt Keeper for the new Tales From the Crypt comics. Parker is currently working on an upcoming graphic novel Tales From The Crypt: The Diary of A Stinky Dead Kid and his own ongoing webcomics, Parker’s Comics & Stories. Parker recently drew a Next-Door Neighbor story for SMITH, Night of the Black Chrysanthemum.
For Those Who Came Late...
As some of you savvier types might have noticed, we just moved Graphic NYC over to a new Blogger page: graphicnycblog; the reason is so that we can enable comments and present a more stream-lined view of Graphic NYC. The past articles and reviews are all accessible view our snazzy new nav bar up top. However, if you still need to get caught up on last week's comics goodness, links are below:
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Q/A From the Graphic NYC Vaults
Christopher Irving opens his vast archive of Q and A interviews from his start in the 1990s for Q/A. Every interview captures a moment in time for each cartoonist and their career.
Influencing Comics
Edited by Seth Kushner, Influencing Comics gives a look at the influences of several cartoonists...and all in their own words.
For the Love of Comics
Seth and Christopher trade off Fridays to talk about the comics they love, as well as the people who made them happen, in these personal entries.
Christopher’s Love:
1: Tales from the Crypt Amidst a Twister I can tell you the exact date I first picked up Tales from the Crypt: May 5, 1990. In a very dramatic way, it was minutes before a twister came through my hometown.
2: Remembering Joe Gill Joe Gill was the most unique and outstanding anonymous author I knew. He's also my "fuckin' hero".
Seth’s Love:
01: My Youth in Comics Between the ages of three and seven, my comics were picked up sporadically from newsstands and I got collected editions, treasuries and digests from various used bookstores. When my addiction started hitting it’s stride around the time I was eight
02: How Harvey Pekar Got Me Laid I met her in front of the Sunshine Theater on East Houston Street. I waited beside the poster of Paul Giamatti channeling Harvey Pekar when she arrived and it took me a moment to recognize her.
03: Jeff Newelt ACT-I-VATEs the Hype I arranged to talk to Jeff Newelt on the rooftop of the building that houses Deep 6 studios, in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It’s the type of location where one would almost expect to meet a superhero, or a superhero’s publicist, in this case.
04: My Lifetime of Collecting Star Wars Figures Actually, it wasn’t all that far away; it was Brooklyn, at the Toys R’ Us on Flatbush Avenue. It was 1977 and I was four-years old. I walked next to my father down the aisles of toys and they seemed to extend up so high that to me they could have reached the stars...Just then we turned a corner and there they were, right on the endcap—the Star Wars toys. My face must have lit, as though I were looking at the blinding explosion of the Death Star itself.
06: How Harvey Pekar Got Me Laid (Encore Edition)
I met her in front of the Sunshine Theater on East Houston Street. I waited beside the poster of Paul Giamatti channeling Harvey Pekar when she arrived and it took me a moment to recognize her.
07: Cosplay - A Photo Essay
Cosplay (コスプレkosupure), short for "costume play", is type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea.
It's no secret that I'm a comics fan. If you're reading this, then odds are you are, too. I've been a fan since before I was able to read and have collected weekly for over twenty-six years. But, I havenever worn a costume to a comic con.
Graphic NYC Creator Profiles
Photographed by Seth Kushner, and interviewed and documented by Christopher Irving, the Graphic NYC Creator Profiles give a unique insight to the inner workings of the creators behind a broad mix of comic books and graphic novels.
The graphic novelists currently covered are:
Nick Abadzis
Neal Adams
Mike Allred
Brian Michael Bendis
Howard Chaykin
Becky Cloonan
Mike Cavallaro
Gene Colan
Kevin Colden
Molly Crabapple
Mike Dawson
Kim Deitch
Will Eisner
Jules Feiffer
Michel Fiffe
Bob Fingerman
Simon Fraser
Dick Giordano
Dan Goldman
Larry Hama
Tim Hamilton
Tom Hart
Irwin HasenEdit Posts
Dean Haspiel
Dean Haspiel and Seth on Caught in the Act (video)
Carmine Infantino
Joe Infurnari
Al Jaffee
Jack Kirby
Joe Kubert
Peter Kuper
Jason Little
David Mack
Matt Madden
Scott McCloud
Christine Norrie
Josh Neufeld
George O'Connor
Denny O'Neil
Jimmy Palmiotti
Harvey Pekar
Paul Pope
Paul Pope (video)
Leland Purvis
Joe Quesada
Kat Roberts
Jerry Robinson
Nathan Schreiber
Dash Shaw
Joe Simon
Walter Simonson
Jim Shooter
Raina Telgemeier
Ben Templesmith
Gahan Wilson
Brian Wood
Graphic NYC Reviews
Graphic NYC Extras
Periodically, Graphic NYC breaks format to present themed weeks, announce big news, or to just write a little something out of the ordinary.
ACT-I-VATE Week We take a look at the premiere web collective for online comics, in celebration of the release of the hardcoverACT-I-VATE Primer.
Coffee to wake the dead? Christopher geeks out over the Green Lantern story Blackest Night for a minute to share his special coffee recipe.
Harvey Pekar Week Graphic NYC looks at the life and work of the man who made the everyday exceptional in comics.
Fletcher Hanks Destroys New York! Christopher gives a look at the life and career or Fletcher Hanks and Fox Comics in this historical essay.
G.I. Joe Week Graphic NYC celebrates the influential fighting force from the 1980s on.
Jack Kirby Week With a little help from our friends, we celebrate the life and work of Jack "The King" Kirby!
About Graphic NYC
Graphic NYC was formed in early 2009 by photographer Seth Kushner (The Brooklynites) and writer Christopher Irving (Comic Book Artist Magazine, Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge) to document the evolution of the comic book and graphic novel through the experiences of New York City's creators. Seth and Christopher were first paired by cartoonist Dean Haspiel, creator of Billy Dogma, Street Code, and artist on the HBO show Bored to Death.
Christopher Irving got his start interviewing comic book professionals in 1997, and has since written for magazines New York Magazine, Comics Buyer’s Guide, Comic Book Artist (where he served as Associate Editor), Back Issue, and Alter Ego. Irving’s books include The Blue Beetle: His Many Lives from 1939 to Today, Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge, and the upcoming From Four Color to Silver Screen: The First Movie Superheroes. Christopher has also worked for Marvel Comics and DC Comics as a Creative Services freelancer. He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his girlfriend and their three cats.
Other reviewers include Andra Passen and Ben Granoff.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Consulting
Both Christopher and Seth are available for consulting, including:
- Discussing the history of comic books and graphic novels
- Comic book editorial expertise
- Media interviews
- Presentations
- Freelance copywriting and photography
Contact Graphic NYC
Seth Kushner and Christopher Irving can be reached at nycgraphicnovelists@gmail.com, and welcome any inquiries regarding:
- Consulting
- Speaking engagements and presentations
- Panel participation
- Reviews
- Or just to talk comics.
