O Harv, why are you gazing upward? Has something of yours ascended to the heavens? (He replies) “O King, can you not see that my Helium Balloon of Happiness has floated away?”
Just as well, for more often he is seen gazing downward, a pair of binoculars in his sweaty hands, peeping into the windows of the attractive and uninhibited neighbor lady, she of the clothing-optional household and the open blinds.
Yesterday he dropped the binoculars and they smashed into pieces on the sidewalk, hence his sorrow. Or is it perhaps something else that perturbs him? Stay tuned …
It’s been a bad week for Cleveland. It started when Lebron James left the Cavs to go play ball in Miami. Speaking as someone who has survived the lake-effect snow of a Cleveland winter, I can hardly blame the guy, though the beauty of the city’s autumn more than makes up for a few months of having to desperately de-ice the lock on your car door so you can make it to your Art History class on time. Nevertheless, the media managed to cover every second of the whole James affair, painting it as a rousing story of loyalty versus greed, old-fashioned values versus the modern American Scheme. But the story they have neglected, which is infinitely more interesting to me, is the passing of a Cleveland file clerk named Harvey Pekar.
In addition to his clerical work in a veteran’s hospital, Pekar was the author of American Splendor, a series of slice-of-life vignettes in comic form, which proved (once again) that comics could tackle adult themes and subject matter, and achieve literary relevance. Harvey was a writer with an ear keenly attuned to the voice of the people, a down-to-earth Walt Whitman, celebrating the daily lives of ordinary joes and finding the jazzy rhythms hidden in the mundane workaday world, taking Cleveland Heights to poetic heights. Though he was usually the star of his own stories, he had a gift for capturing the off-beat dialects and vernacular peculiarities of his supporting cast, exploiting their eccentricities while allowing them to retain their dignity.
An early fan of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine, and turned on to underground comix by Robert Crumb, who was newly-emigrated to Cleveland in ’62, Pekar realized that the mainstream comics of the day were formulaic profit-earners, unconcerned with realism or variety. He sought something new and in so doing, revolutionized the comics world, and invented a genre.
“So anyway, I started thinking about ways that comix could expand and one thing I thought about was more realism … ‘Cause comix never had a realist movement like just about all other art forms had. So I figured if I could do some realistic comix, even if people don’t like ‘em , then maybe I would’ve gained a footnote in history … and so then I thought about doing stuff about the quotidien life … you know, “every day” life … because, for one thing, that’s all I knew … I always had a flunky job and lived in these little cramped apartments and was unrelieved at that life. Day after day … But you know, I got excited about things like other people and stuff … you know, maybe I got worked up over a hundred dollars where someone else would get worked up for about a million, it’s the same thing … It’s all relative … It’s still a lot of money … it’s just a question of scale … ”
From 1976 to 2008, Harvey produced thirty-nine issues of American Splendor, illustrated by various cartoonists of varying levels of talent, including Crumb, Drew Friedman, and Chester Brown (who famously drew himself as a cartoon bunny, much to Pekar’s displeasure). The books were mostly self-published, and Pekar continued the enterprise even when he was reportedly losing thousands of dollars a year by keeping issues in print, such was his dedication. In addition to American Splendor, which spawned several anthologies and a critically-acclaimed film adaptation, he created a number of other graphic novels such as Our Cancer Year, a document of his struggle with lymphoma, co-written with his wife Joyce Brabner and illustrated by Frank Stack. He died on Monday, at the age of 70, after battling prostate cancer.
Despite his insitence that he was just an average guy schlepping his way through life, Pekar was a true original – loveable but curmudgeonly, quick-witted but acid-tongued, and any cartoonist who has ever written an autobiographical comic is in his debt. A number of us are further saddened that we will never get our chance to illustrate one of his stories. And though life in Cleveland will continue – the Cavaliers will play on, Coventry Road shoppers will still happen upon Pekar’s quizzical everyman musings on bookstore shelves – for those of us who admired the man and his work, things will never be quite the same.
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Enjoy watching Harvey make Dave Letterman squirm:
And a fummetti of Harvey discussing his foray into webcomics here.
You may have noticed that the Archives page has become a bit fuller lately, as the Waldo & Harv strips have returned to the main site. I have closed the Humdrum Addendum, a noble but failed experiment in revenue-generation, though I may or may not do something with it in the future. Thanks to those of you who supported the idea. At present, I think this site is better served by having all the strips free to everyone, and I hate to have them just languishing away on a semi-private subdomain. Comics need to be read, dammit! So back they go to the main site, for your snickering pleasure. But be warned that this site may soon feature advertising as a means of support. *Horrors!*
As for the returning Waldo & Harv comics, I have included the majority of the strips from 2008 and 2009, which we all remember so well. They have been revised and relettered, and I have even gone so far as to add little touches of color to a few of them. There are still others from this period that need touching up yet, many of which have never been seen, so hopefully I’ll get around to that shortly. The new strips from 2010 and the pre-2008 early strips, which the blessed few of you paid to see, shall remain hidden away, until such time as I see fit to post them, if ever. I intend to add some all-new Waldo & Harv strips on a haphazard basis in the future, so stay tuned for that as well as an exciting new feature or two.
I’ve been toying with the idea of putting virtual stamps up on a weekly basis. These would be little digital pictures for you to download and collect, put in a folder on your computer, use ‘em in emails or whatever. Copy ‘em, paste ‘em, trade ‘em with your friends – there are almost assuredly a million uses. (We just haven’t figured out what they are yet!) Scoff if you like, but if you people can find promise in the trading of imaginary pigs on facebook, then how could this be of any less interest? Remember those little Marvel Value Stamps of the ’70s, the bane of every bronze age collector’s existence, which featured various super-heroes and bad guys in inky newsprint? You could clip out and completely devalue a potentially-collectible comic while at the same time rendering a worthwhile story unreadable. I’m proposing stamps which will be something along those lines, only you will want to avoid trying to cut them out of your computer screen! I’ve already designed enough of the li’l beauties to last through next year, and they look sweet enough to make a philatelist rip up his Inverted Jenny! (Sounds dirty, but isn’t!) Does this sound like a cool idea or has Rebeldog Comics gone barking mad? Let me know what you think in the comments section.
My dog Brutus and I were having a conversation today, much like how Harvey used to speak with Berkowitz, the difference being that he didn’t advise me to kill young lovers indiscriminately and I wasn’t packing a .44 Caliber Charter Arms Bulldog in my pocket. Brutus is very opinionated for a two-year-old dachshund, and often digresses into lengthy diatribes about the evils of those who would spay or neuter their pets, prime places for hiding half-chewed frozen waffles, and the benefits of dating hairless chihuahuas. But, if you are patient, he will occasionally enlighten you with a real “treat” of doggy insight. For instance, last year, we were having a little gab fest when, in between bites on his genitals, he prudently advised me to sell my shares of General Motors just before the company’s collapse. I listened, thankfully, though I ignored his talk of putting money into Kodak.
Today, we were discussing web sites and webcomics in general, and Rebeldog Comics and Humdrum Heights in particular. I asked him, “Why do some mediocre sites flourish while other spectacular ones fail? What is the key to driving traffic to one’s site?”
Brutus muttered something about Google algorithms and search engine optimization and keyword trending, and blah blah blah. Truth be told, he lost me completely. And then he said, “Don’t get discouraged, King AdBeck. Your site be cookin’. You are the secret sauce, the best kept secret of the Internets. Do it for yourself and the ten cool kids hip enough to check it out, and everybody else can go screw.”
“Perhaps I should advertise,” I opined, stroking my grizzled goatee.
“Nah, piss on ‘em,” said Brutus, and to illustrate his point, he proceeded to urinate under the dining room table.
“Damn, dude!” I shouted, reaching for the nearest roll of paper towels. “Why you gotta do that every time?”
“Keep doin’ what’cher doin’,” he said, as a great golden stream continued to pour out of him, soaking the legs of the old American Colonial table and the carpet tiles beneath. “Post regularly, give people some quality content, and they’ll find you. Even if you have to write about implausible conversations with your not-quite-housebroken wiener dog.”
I hope you all enjoyed Tuesday’s panel, since I had a paint bucket full of fun creating it. It’s the first time I’ve touched watercolors in about ten years or so, and using the el-cheap-o kiddie variety no less. Just shows what you can do if you’re willing to work with the materials at hand, I suppose. That’s right, college boy, you can keep your fancy Grumbacher tube paints! I make my art with plastic pan paints so generic they don’t even have a name. You can keep your Cadmium Red and your Cerulean Blue, your Burnt Sienna and your Yellow Ochre. My paints come in Black, Blue, Turquoise, Magenta, Orange, Yellow, and, for some reason, More Yellow. (Oh, wait, maybe that used to be White?!) You work in watercolour, I work in watercolor. (The lack of a ‘u’ is an important class distinction, Richie Rich.) You have a dainty nibble of your watercress sandwich before returning to your acid-free well-stretched cold-pressed paper. I devour a crumbling wing of the Colonel’s secret recipe chicken right over my technique-limiting Bristol board. However, I do use a lovely Winsor-Newton Sceptre Gold #0 for my brush, which I hold with pinky finger aloft, so la-de-da. But, of course, that bit of sophistication is easily invalidated by dipping said brush into a Welch’s Horton-Hears-A-Who jelly jar.
Lest anyone doubt these words, I’ve included a little behind-the-scenes photo of the various elements that went into creating this panel. Remember, genius is rarely tidy.
In case anyone is wondering where this comic is heading, rest assured, there is a plan in place. The current storyline already underway will unfold over the course of the year and, at its present posting rate of two panels per week, will resolve itself by next year around May. (Wow, that’s slow-going, huh? Sorry, but at the moment it’s the best I can do.) This story is already written in its entirety, but is not yet fully illustrated. Immediately following its conclusion will be a second, much shorter story, which has already been completed, art and everything, excepting color and some minor revisions. All told, there are six or seven stories of varying lengths mapped out, which should keep us going for a while. The stories will each focus on different characters, but are loosely connected, and close scrutiny and rereads will hopefully be rewarded.
So basically, barring any unforeseen setbacks, you can expect that Humdrum Heights will continue uninterrupted through 2012. At which time, I will reevaluate the site, the stories, and the posting schedule and make changes as I see fit. Glad to have you along for the ride!
