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By Harvey Pekar & various (Titan Books)
ISBN: 1-84023-787-2
Before finding relative fame in the 21st century, Harvey Pekar occupied that ghastly niche so good at trapping the truly creative individual: Lots and lots of critical acclaim, the occasional heart-breakingly close brush with super-stardom, but never actually getting enough ahead to feel secure or appreciated.
One of those aforementioned brushes came in 1980s with the release of a couple of compilations of selected strips by mainstream publisher Doubleday that even to this day are some of his most powerful, honest and rewarding. With art by some of his most individualistic collaborators including Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm and Gerry Shamray, and selected from a most adventurous decade, these tales of working life, self-esteem, achievement and failure, religion, the media, Nazi atrocity and survivor’s guilt, the value of friends and colleagues, getting on with women, not to mention his constant re-examination of his own creative worth and self are even now a superb insight into the mind and heart of a truly original comics creator.
With these two books reprinted in one splendid package the reader has another chance to see the humour, confusion and frustration of being an American thinker in a world that simply doesn’t value brains and spirit anymore.
Compulsive, brilliant stuff, and if there’s any justice, incurably infectious and addictive too.
© 1976-1986, 2004 Harvey Pekar, LLC. All Rights Reserved.