In praise of moping Two new books from Harvey Pekar BY ALEX IRVINE

Let’s say you’ve got this friend. We’ll call him Harvey. You know him fairly well, but not intimately, so that during the course of any given conversation you might learn something new about him. Harvey likes to tell stories, and he has a small repertoire of favorites that tend to pop up whenever he meets someone new: his boring government job, his foster daughter, his cancer, jazz, his writing. As his friend, you’ve heard these stories before, but each time Harvey tells them they’re a little bit different. Phrases and sentiments reoccur — Harvey isn’t trying to embellish anything — but as everybody knows, a tale grows in the telling.

This is the experience of reading the two American Splendor collections recently released by Ballantine Books. The first (as far as the dates of the comics collected therein), Best of American Splendor, collects comics mostly from the ’90s, when Harvey Pekar was first achieving a national profile due to appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. One of the best comics in the book recounts a 1993 trip to New York for Pekar’s first Letterman appearance in six years, he and Dave having had a falling out after Pekar went off on NBC corporate parent General Electric during a late-’80s appearance. The trip brings Pekar’s two worlds — the Cleveland file clerk and the nascent media star — into an uneasy juxtaposition, and he spends a lot of time thinking about this while soaking up the various New York experiences (talking to agents, getting freebie CDs to review, etc.) that help him identify himself as an artist.

"Man, it’s great to see people like that, who make me feel like an artist," Pekar muses on the way back to the hotel from Polygram Records. "But when I get back to Cleveland, I’ll be a file clerk again. Y’live in the past, present, and future, at the same time. But why is it that I don’t take any pleasure from my past achievements — only feel pain about my failures?"

Making matters worse, Pekar gets bumped from Letterman after Barry Manilow’s appearance runs long. But, as is so often the case in American Splendor, Pekar’s misery is the reader’s delight, because Pekar launches into a hilarious imagined Letterman appearance that consists mostly of him raging about what a lousy talk-show guest he is. The next day, he and his wife Joyce bicker with the owner of a bookstore where he’s signing, and then they go home.

"I know what I gotta do," Pekar thinks over the closing panel. "I’ll try again — I know I will. Then, no matter what, I won’t reproach myself."

Of course he will. This is Harvey Pekar we’re talking about. But the doggedness of his desire to do better — as a parent, a husband, a writer — counterbalances his spiky behavior and makes him interesting because he is that rarest of men who has self-awareness to match his self-centeredness. The rest of Best of American Splendor recounts — among other things — his hip replacement, his long friendship with Robert Crumb (Pekar is the only comics writer Crumb has ever illustrated), and his slow climb toward the national acclaim that arrived with the movie version of American Splendor. In this latter vein, Pekar contributes a series of stories about a mid-’90s trip to the San Diego Comic-Con, which this reviewer — a veteran of that event — can tell you are dead-on perfect.

The second American Splendor book to hit shelves in recent months is Our Movie Year, a followup in spirit if not topic to 1994’s Our Cancer Year. As we all know by now, American Splendor was made into an award-winning movie in 2003, and in a stroke of good luck most writers will never experience, Pekar’s multifarious comic — drawn by different artists in different styles because Pekar himself can’t draw — became a narratively innovative (for Hollywood, anyway) movie in which Pekar, his wife Joyce, and foster daughter Danielle both portray themselves and are portrayed by actors. The movie took prizes at Sundance and Cannes, was the darling of festivals everywhere, and was nominated for a best-screenplay Oscar.

Pekar was finally on the map.

This artistic and financial jackpot, though, didn’t prevent Pekar from worrying, and once in a while he even has good reason — for example, when the premiere of American Splendor just happened to coincide with the huge blackout of August, 2003. Even after the movie comes off successfully, though, and Pekar’s immediate financial worries are taken care of, much of Our Movie Year is preoccupied with impending doom. What happens when the wave of hype recedes and he’s back to doing freelance jazz reviews and radio commentaries? In his sixties, his health precarious, retired from the Cleveland VA hospital, where he put in more than 30 years as a file clerk, Pekar finds himself on the hustle again. He goes to France, Australia, Japan, Ireland, and everywhere else on publicity junkets, simultaneously hating the travel and reveling in the attention. Only Harvey Pekar could mope about getting flown around the world for free.

Or maybe we should say "Harvey Pekar," since Pekar’s Cleveland-shlub persona isn’t so much a put-on as — like Joyce’s Stephen Hero or Kerouac’s Sal Paradise — a carefully textured rendering. Sure, he’s been poor, and he’s worked at a dead-end job, and he’s suffered through lymphoma, a hip replacement, and panic attacks. That’s enough to keep anyone worried. But he’s also a guy who has worked with Robert Crumb for more than 30 years, known Leonardo DiCaprio’s comic-artist father George for almost as long, and been illustrated by luminaries of the comics business such as Alan Moore — all long before the movie of American Splendor was anything more than a fantasy.

But who would read the comic to see "Harvey Pekar" being, even occasionally, self-assured and competent?

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com