The Quitter

Harvey Pekar & Dean Haspiel The Quitter (2005)
This one is Harvey's life from birth up to his first forays into underground comics publishing with particular emphasis on occupational dead ends and failures. Some of the ground has already been covered, but not quite in this context, and there's a lot more of Harvey's childhood as a Polish Jew growing up in Cleveland than I've seen before.

I'm sure there will turn out to be many examples of why Harvey can't be considered the father of the autobiographical comic book should I make such a claim, but he remains father of the autobiographical comic book as we know it so far as I'm concerned, and I still don't believe that anyone has published better than American Splendor. The strange thing is that I still can't work out what Harvey did that made his work so distinctive and so powerful. It may be attention to detail, or the sort of detail he felt needed recording, or simply the way he tells 'em. It could just as well be the tenacity with which Harvey stuck to his own guns, ploughing his own furrow regardless of commercial concerns, because when a writer has this much courage in their own convictions, I guess it shines through, even when it's just some story about a guy buying a pair of shoes.

I must admit to having very little idea of what the autobiographical comic book is doing right now, but in the nineties it was mostly a confessional describing pornography habits, spiced up with how mad the girlfriend became when she'd read the previous issue. Between them, Joe Matt and Rob Liefeld drove me away from the medium for pretty much the next two decades; and yet Harvey's work endures because he kept on going, doing what he did best, being Harvey, and at times I identify with what he's been through so hard that it hurts. I don't know whether this is because I'm more like Harvey than other people - we're both blue collar, more or less self-educated and obsessive - or whether he genuinely tapped into some sort of universal experience of the human condition; but this one is a genuine masterpiece, even by Harvey's standards.

I realise he'd now be 83 were he still with us, which is probably pushing it a bit, but Godammit a world without Harvey Pekar still feels like a fucking stupid idea.

Heart of Aztlan

Rudolfo A. Anaya Heart of Aztlan (1976)
I seem to recall Heart of Aztlan being important to the Chicano movement. The Chicano movement, in case you were wondering, emerged around the same time as other civil rights groups of the late twentieth century, in this instance representing the Mexican and Hispanic working classes principally in the southern United States. In Heart of Aztlan, Anaya reminds his people where they came from, reinforcing a cultural identity which was disrupted when the typical Chicano family found itself ejected from its traditional land and obliged to head north in search of work. For Anaya, this exodus represented an inversion of the Aztec origin legend wherein his people first came from the semi-mythic island of Aztlan in the north following a prophecy which, if historically specific to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, has since become an abstract ideal serving all Chicanos.

That's my understanding anyway. I first read Heart of Aztlan back in the nineties when nary a day went by without my thinking about Huitzilopochtli*. I was trying to work out what happened next, and how Mexico coped with assimilation and syncretism. I liked it, and I got something from it, although it's about a present I barely recognised more than it's about the past. Since then, I've moved, and now live in a city with a 60% Hispanic population, so I'm getting a lot more from it. In fact the Albuquerque barrio of Anaya's book may as well be my own neighbourhood, and I'm sure it helps that I no longer need to look up any of the pachuco slang because I hear most of it daily.

That said, I can see why Anaya's big hit was Bless Me, Ultima rather than this one. Ultima tells a fairly similar story of a Mexican family moving north in search of work, but has a sharper narrative focus from what I recall, and is hence fairly dramatic in its own way. Heart of Aztlan tends to meander like a soap opera, moving from the unemployed father to the frustrated matriarch to the careless offspring hoping to get lucky at the high school, because their stories are different parts of the same thing, and the main character is the barrio itself more than its individual inhabitants. As with a soap, plenty happens - Clemente realises that neither his employer nor his union have his best interests at heart, the family integrates with its new neighbours and so on - but it feels chaotic, just as life tends to be.

The application of mythology to contemporary life is seamlessly done, and I particularly liked how la Llorana - the woman who wails at the crossroads, and Cihuacoatl in Mexica times - has become the siren of a cop car in twentieth century America; but the comparison is revealed only in the novel as a whole, and is less obvious in close up during individual passages. It's a good novel and a fairly powerful restatement of contemporary Chicano identity as the latest expression of a much older tradition, but it seems to lack the urgency of Bless Me, Ultima and at times feels like trying to read an Arboles de la Vida sculpture.

 *: Admittedly he's never far from my thoughts, even now.

Infinite Requiem

Daniel Blythe Infinite Requiem (1995)
Regular readers may be dimly aware of my general dislike of Doctor Who and the possibly record breaking levels of bile to which it and its devotees have occasionally driven me; but, as is probably obvious to any passing psychologist, I was once quite the fan, and my anger is therefore driven by what fucking idiots have done to the thing I once loved. I'm not saying it was ever the most brilliantest brilliant thing of all time as its contemporary cultists would claim, but it was fun and it had something, and it was mostly half decent as science-fiction. Perhaps significantly, my favourite era of the show ended up being those years when it wasn't actually on the telly due to having been cancelled, but carried on as a series of monthly novels selling to a presumably dwindling hardcore of readers.

Virgin Books had bought the rights and took to publishing these New Adventures as a continuation of what we'd seen on the screen, but without the fucking terrible music. The idea was that they might stand as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, perhaps even launching the careers of promising new science-fiction authors in the process. Fandom being what it is, what careers were launched were mostly in the direction of yet more Who novels, and the discovery of the next Asimov never really happened; but on the other hand, most of the New Adventures actually worked as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, or were at least of a standard allowing one to regard them as spiritual successor to at least Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan and Sexton Blake rather than just yet more product on the shelf adjacent to the one sagging under the weight of all that Star Wars tat.

That being said, my first impression upon seeing one of these in a book store was oh for fuck's sake, let it die. Then a couple of months later I noticed a few of them cropping up in my local WHSmith, and Paul Cornell's No Future - which sends Sylvester McCoy's Doctor to London in 1977 to defeat an alien invasion which intrudes upon the formative years of punk rock - was apparently just stupid enough to warrant my buying the thing. Then I read Jim Mortimore's Blood Heat because there was a Silurian on the cover, and I decided that was it. I was nearly thirty. I had a girlfriend and we were having it off and everything. I didn't need to collect yet another series of anything, not least because there were already thirty or forty of the fuckers at a fiver a throw and it was just too much. I think The Left Handed Hummingbird was next because it sounded like an unreleased Nurse With Wound album, followed by this.

I bought it because it was the only one they had in Chener Books, my local book shop on Lordship Lane, and in buying it I knew I was doomed to collect the fucking set.

Curiosity is therefore why I'm reading it again in 2022. Infinite Requiem made an impression at the time, although not much of one, but enough to inspire my shelling out for the other four million in the series over the years which followed. I read it back before I could really consider myself a regular reader of anything, back when it might take me up to six months to get through a book, and I rarely strayed from my lane, thematically speaking. I wanted to see how well this had aged, and whether it turned out to be better than I remembered.

Thankfully, it actually is reasonably well written, and my own generally increased literacy hasn't left it beached as time travelling Harry Potter or equivalent. It features the man from the telly having an adventure and is about as deep as you need it to be, but Blythe avoids the sort of clichés and shortcuts which often blight ventures of this kind. The only real problem is that, as the title possibly indicates, it pits our man against one of those all-powerful and omnipotent greatest threats to everything ever - or three of them if we're counting - attempting the kind of horrifying scale which never seems to work in print and isn't massively interesting here. This is a shame because the peripheral detail and supporting characters are great, and thus significantly more engaging than the menacing psychic tosspots who want to destroy everything because that's the sort of thing that menacing psychic tosspots go in for. Being the fruit of 1995, we get a futuristic space library where everything is stored on disc, but on the other hand we get the Phracton Swarm which could have been one of the more interesting alien species to run riot across Who continuity, but I guess it wasn't to be.

Internet research reveals that Daniel Blythe went on to write a shitload of other things as distinct from the same thing over and over again, and as such achieved a sort of escape velocity from the cult ghetto which developed once Who made it back onto the telly. So that's good, and if Infinite Requiem probably isn't a masterpiece, it nevertheless had enough going for it to translate into a generally decent read three decades later.