The Quitter

Pekar, Harvey, Dean Haspiel, Lee Loughridge, and Pat Brosseau. The Quitter. Vertigo, 2005.


At least he's honest

Justly billed as a "confessional," Harvey Pekar's memoir-comic is certainly honest. But it begs the question: if a less-than-extraordinary man recounts all the reasons he did not live up to his potential, can that confession be a form of art?

Just an average neurotic

Much of Pekar's story is unremarkable. He was fairly intelligent as a child, but plagued with vague, undiagnosed emotional problems. Probably his Polish immigrant parents were partly to blame, but getting bullied by black kids as racial tension rose was no doubt a factor as well. Harvey lived his whole life in Cleveland, a city that apparently embodies the American sense of "average," "normal," or "mediocre." In "The Quitter," we watch as a bright, smiling child turns into both a bully and a coward at the same time. We watch him discover his own talents, even as he confesses he buried, repressed the sides of himself he feared, leading a stunted life: quitting football, quitting math class, quitting school. Quitting the navy because he was afraid to wash his clothes. Quitting a job. Quitting another, to go back to school again. Quitting school again.

Self medicating with art

And on and on it goes. Along the way, Pekar evolves his own particular artistic sensibility -- "theories," he calls them, connecting his experiences with sports statistics, jazz criticism, and comics as ways of escaping the oppressive self-absorption and various social anxiety disorders that are then available for view as the flip-side of his profession. Are other artists like that? Weirdos, I mean, misfits whose beef is not with the world, but their own inability to be comfortable in their own skin, too afraid to fess up to what they cannot do. Artists like Harvey Pekar are eminently unlikeable people -- so much so that somebody thought there was an audience in the world of graphic novels for them.

Slackers unite

I don't know how successful this graphic novel was, but I feel it probably did not connect with many readers, though if Comic Book Guy is any indication, it might be like looking in a mirror. Perhaps uncomfortably so.