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.