Comics and Literature #9: Grub Street, USA

Prestige and Literary Realism in American Splendor and Beyond

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Harvey Pekar's attachment to comics-as-literature seems almost inherent in his position as one of the few major names in underground and alternative comics to not draw his own work. Pekar’s most famous work, American Splendor, is autobiographical, but the artwork is provided by an assortment of artists adapting Pekar’s scripts. This process confounds some of the common ways of discussing both alternative comics and autobiography. Critics such as Hilary Chute and Jared Gardner have associated the genre of graphic autobiography with a kind of self-reflexivity that is directly tied to the physical process of drawing, citing artists such as Justin Green, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel – all of whom both write and draw their own work. Gardner, who describes the “autographer’s craft” as “combining words and images,” concludes that “it is the graphic memoir that best allows for this simultaneous claim of autobiography and fiction, and for the simultaneous demand on the reader for both distance and identification” (10, 22). It is at least initially difficult to figure out how Pekar fits into this schema – if he is just a writer, does he really match Gardner’s neological category of “autographer,” and how can he achieve the duality of word and image that Gardner and Chute evangelize about? Gardner does include Pekar in his “origin story” of autography, arguing that the multiplicity of artists and art styles in American Splendor destabilizes the subject position by presenting us with no clear, official image of Harvey Pekar (15-16). This argument is more fully developed by Thomas A. Bredehoft in his article "Style, Voice, and Authorship in Harvey Pekar’s (Auto)(Bio)Graphical Comics.” Bredehoft argues that Pekar’s use of multiple artists and hence multiple representations of the autobiographical subject creates heteroglossia in the normally univocal world of autobiography (99).

This argument may very well be true, but it is not how Pekar conceived of his own work. In both print articles and American Splendor, he identifies himself as a realist and argues for the superiority of literary realism to genre fiction. When Comics Journal critic Leon Hunt praised him for telling stories in a way that subverts or calls into question realism, Pekar objected in an essay a few months later: “What Hunt does is cite stories of mine he likes, stories about experiences and things I’ve seen, and then claim they’re not realistic because of the way they are told. His attitude seems to be, ‘if it’s good, it can’t be realism’” (The Comics Journal No.130 130). One can easily imagine him having a similar response to Gardner or Bredehoft’s assessment of his own work. This is not to say that Pekar is the last word on American Splendor, but it does seem important to me to understand Pekar’s own aesthetic beliefs, especially since he vociferously argued that these aesthetics were necessary for the advancement of the comics medium. Rather than evaluate Pekar’s work through a postmodern critical rubric, I would like to briefly examine Pekar as an actor in the cultural field of alternative comics in the 1980s and 90s, an actor pushing towards a rubric inspired by social realism.