Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2008
BOOKS
Harvey Pekar: Mensch Author, Mensch Editor... and other Jewish Comic Stars
by Paul Buhle
THE DAY HAS ARRIVED FOR THE art comic, with respectable attention in the review columns of slick magazines and (possibly more important) the appearance of a regular comic page in the New York Times Magazine. More than a handful of "alternative" artists—that is, those working not in Superhero Comics, drawing for the daily newspapers or seen often in the New Yorker—are making a living without a day job. And the day of the Jewish comic artist has arrived as well.
There's a deeply buried irony here, because from its earliest days at the close of the Depression the mainstream comic book industry has always been deeply Jewish, from management to artists, inkers, and scriptwriters. Alternative comics, in their original version Underground Comix, were the exception, probably because they were centered in the Bay Area of the later 1960s-70s, and their ambience flavored the proliferation of styles (and publications) in Seattle and elsewhere. Perhaps it was Art Spiegel-man's Raw magazine (1980-91) that brought Jewishness back, even if there was nothing (beyond his own totemic work and that of Ben Katchor) especially Jewish about Raw. More likely, with the graphic novel picking up steam in the new century, younger artists came from (and gravitated to) New York City. By an old adage never entirely wrong, New York=Jewish. Or at least a lot of people think so, and the publishing contacts are still overwhelmingly there.
When the Masters of American Comics exhibition traveled during 2005-06 and the accompanying prestigious (and gorgeous) volume set a new standard for claims of comic art, few commented on its disproportionately Jewish nature (not even when the show opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and traveled onward to the Jewish Museum in New York); nor has anyone made much of the abundant Jewish talent in the emerging work, for kids and adults alike. But it is scarcely hidden.
Stuck in the Middle is a pained look backward at junior high life (someone must have enjoyed it, certainly not these artists or myself). Like a high proportion of comic art, it is aimed at the younger reader ("Ages 12 and Up"), but it is tough as well as occasionally scatological, and two of the loveliest pieces are by Vanessa Davis and Lauren Weinstein, respectively recalling a thwarted craving for boys, and a perfectly dreadful summer camp. Davis, from West Palm Beach, may be regarded as a product of the latest diaspora into the wilderness of suburban America; Weinstein, a Brooklynite, recalls the familiar dangers of travel to a rural America that is unknown and unknowable, something better suited to the Gentiles.
Go Girl! Robots Gone Wild! is aimed at females of the same age-group, combining the talents (writing) of Trina Robbins, the founding figure of the original feminist comics (It Ain't Me Babe [1970] and later anthologies) with the art work of relative youngster Anne Timmons in an empowering alternative to Archie comics. In Go Girl!, a gamine with superpowers fights off the bad guys, human and robotic. Most notably, her own posse of ordinary teens is made up of runaways and abuse victims, male and female, who become a substitute family. It may be recalled, at least by a few veteran comics fans, that Robbins's father was a prominent left wing Yiddish journalist, and that the "family" has stood for something like egalitarianism/socialism across her long career as artist, editor, and scholar of women's comic and cartoon work.
The story on Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow begins properly with James Sturm, an editorial assistant at Raw back in the day, the founder-director of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, and the artist of one of the astounding newer works of comic art, The Golem's Mighty Swing (about a touring Jewish baseball team of the 1920s, beset by anti-Semites). Sturm, ageneration younger than Robbins, is another mighty force for comic art at large, and Striking Out Jim Crow (in the Hyperion Books for Children series) offers up a deeply empathetic tale of the racial outsider in 1943 Alabama—the proud pitching giant who won't give an inch, even when his life is at stake. Sturm knows his baseball as well as his social history, and I sure wish that a book like this had been around for me a half century ago, when the photos of Willie Mays making an astounding center field catch in the 1954 World Series were plastered on my bedroom wall. I know what this little volume would have meant to me.
Sturm's fellow instructor at the Center for Cartoon Studies is Jason Lutes, whose continuing series, on Berlin as Hitler is about to come to power, has been among the grand artistic achievements of younger comics generations. Houdini, done in collaboration with Nick Bertozzi, tells the story of the Wisconsin-born Jewish escape artist who adamantly denied his Jewishness through much of his life. Splendid art is followed by five pages of historical notes on the subject of the volume and a very funny page on the Center, arguably the chief fount of future American comic talent.
The latest of Houghton Mifflin's Best American Comics, arguably the totemic anthology of today's artists, might be described as having a Jewish comic section, because three strips appear in a row. Each is amazing in its own way.
Twenty-eight year old Sammy Harkham, born in L.A., educated in Australia, and living back in L.A., is himself an anthologist in the art-for-arts-sake section of today's comics world, his Kramer's Ergot a show-place for comic modernism. But "Lubavitch, Ukraine, 1876" is deeply and precisely historical: the best recreation of shtetl life in comic form thus far, with a curiously Harkham-like protagonist whose tedious work is to produce mezuzahs on demand for the village rabbi. He smokes, he etches, he argues with his wife about his in-laws coming to dinner, and so on. It's lovely and it feels like shtetl reality as secularism creeps in and the old bonds of authority, the merchant and the rabbi, are viewed with more skepticism.
The ironies of Ben Katchor's work will be familiar to many Tikkun readers, but his perpetual deconstruction of commodity fetishism has never been more lovely than here, in "Shoehorn Technique." Katchor, who once brilliantly substituted sexual secrets for the secrets of Marxism discussed by his Yiddishist father, here has a candied apple baron ashamed of his products and a psychologist who offers the shoehorn as religious icon. Katchor is always familiar yet always new, and as Art Spiegelman once suggested, the "most Yiddish" comic artist imaginable working in English.
Miriam Katin is the wonder above wonders, because with We Are On Our Own, a volume excerpted here, the Holocaust survivor (in later years an Israeli animator and a children's book illustrator in New York) has created a unique and realistic memory in comic art form. The title should be taken literally: this is a story of Jews abandoning every scrap of identity in order to flee death, and adopting disguises as Gentiles, even while the Gentiles around them reveal hatreds that would have seemed unreal or at least exaggerated only a few years earlier. Katin offers no political lessons, but her illustrationist style captures private agonies of a mother and child that must have been dragged from her own memory.
There is, however, not really a "Jewish section" of the volume because that adolescence-reveling pair, Vanessa Dais and Lauren Weinstein, are also on the job here. They present more tantalizing banalities of daily life that we wish we could forget for them, but can't help wondering if they contain some truth about life-long Jewish (perhaps also female, perhaps also Gentile) angst. And then there are the old timers.
Kim Deitch is one of the founders of Underground Comix, the half-Jewish son of Gene Deitch, director of Mighty Mouse adventures on television a half-century ago. His imaginary world has often encompassed his days working in an upstate New York mental institution, and has otherwise crossed paths with the carnivalesque sides of American popular culture. In No Midgets in Midgetville, an aged Kim stumbles across a forgotten urban landscape where a colony of little people once operated a combination bakery and tourist attraction, influencing an (imaginary, we think) ardent young boy-artist who would grow into Kim. It's weird, it's wonderfully drawn, it's Deitch.
Then there's the Crumb family, or at least Robert and Aline, visiting their artist daughter Sophie, by now a real-live comic talent herself, in crash-pad Manhattan. And Sophie herself, by now a notable comic talent, with a one-pager, the next strip. Also included is Art Spiegelman's take on James Joyce, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#," and how he accidentally discovered horror comics. And Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home was declared by Time magazine to be the book (not just comic book) of the year 2006. According to persistent rumor, Bechdel's mother was Jewish, but (she writes me) this is only a reflection of the anti-Semitism of those who attack her feminism, lesbianism, etc. But perhaps "only" is the wrong word, for something about her work, her immense humanism and her sense of having been trapped in middle America with artistic-minded parents, feels Jewish to me. Of course, I was a Gentile similarly trapped, without the artistic-minded parents, so my radar on this point is probably not to be trusted. I was awfully lucky to be driven toward Jewishness.
Ample other examples come to mind of Jewish comic artists of various but especially of younger ages. Some of them (Mad staff artist Peter Kuper, militantly revolutionary artist Seth Tobocman, and their steady collaborator on World War 3 Illustrated, Nicole Schulman) are in continual dialogue about Jewishness—their own, or Israelis'—or related familiar issues; others would rather not talk about it in their art, and those others included perhaps the most personally religious of them, Sammy Harkham, until his recent work on life in the Pale. So, typologies are doubtful and it's better to look at artists as individuals.
Which bring us to Harvey Pekar. Hardly a reader in these pages will find the name of Pekar entirely unfamiliar. Late night viewers of the Late Show with David Letterman remember Harvey's appearances during the 1990s and the tough political jabs at corporate power that got him kicked off the air. Movie-goers are likely to be more familiar with the 2003 award-winning film American Splendor with Paul Giamatti playing Harvey, in an unprecedented combination of the originals, the actors playing them and the animation of them all on the big (and for the rental crowd, the small) screen. Old time comics fans have, of course, been following Harvey since the first series of American Splendor appeared in 1976, embracing both the gritty reality of Cleveland and the sublime drawings of Robert Crumb among others.
It's no secret, then. If there were an Oxford Yiddish Dictionary and every noun had a picture, Harvey's picture would be there, under "Mensch." He is the humanist of profoundly ordinary Jewish American life. The son of the owners of a little grocery store, his mother determinedly left wing despite the growing dangers of the streets around them, he was not yet a teenager when the Cold War wiped out dreams of an expanded New Deal in a peaceful world, and not yet twenty when the disillusionment with Russia and Stalin swept the Jewish American Left. (The same mother greeted the formation of Israel as a miracle of the times, but never managed to fulfill her ideal of moving there.) As a college dropout and a file clerk in a Veterans Administration hospital for decades, as a dweller in a deteriorating Cleveland that somehow missed all gentrification (except a Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame), Harvey kept a steady eye on his surroundings.
Unlike the Jewish realist novelists and short story writers of the previous generation, examining the social life of the Lower East Side, Brooklyn or a dozen other "yiddishe gassen" (Jewish streets) around the country or world, he chose to put his narrative into pictures. And not the fine art of Jewish realists (or surrealists), but a visual vernacular that had been used in this way, for these purposes, more by painters than anyone else.
American Splendor in its original format made waves in the comic world and endeared many of us to him. But it never sold all that much. The late-blooming graphic novel genre, snippets now seen in the New York Times Magazine among other places, served him fairly well, in a series of nonfictional paperbacks. But the real comic book form, 24-36 pages of pulp wrapped in a four-color cover, seemed to have been left behind. The new American Splendor, published by a division of DC (the old publisher of Superman, Batman, etc) puts his work on comics shelves as never before, and after only a thirty-year wait. American Splendor: Another Day is highlighted by a tale of his parents' background in Europe, one more slice of the Pekar saga, as tasty, one imagines, as the kosher pickles at his parents' corner grocery of the 1940s. It may just, possibly, give the comic format itself, after sixty-some years of existence and many rises and falls, a new life as truth-teller.
What are those truths? They belong to Harvey and his assorted artists. They are about his parents, his home life, increasingly about his foster-daughter, a teenager with her own agenda, about Cleveland neighborhoods and traffic, about people he meets on his book-promotion tours, and whatever else strikes him as a tellable tale. Pekar is a past master at drawing the reader in. Now, at sixty-seven, he is arguably at his peak, a Dostoyevsky of daily life.
A decade or more before the original American Splendor emerged, he was already an acute reviewer of records and books for mostly small-scale, specialist publications. He puts on the Critic hat to explain, in the introduction to the 2006 premier edition of The Best American Comics, that while comics failed realism (or vice versa) in the past, the genre is potentially limitless. "I have always maintained that there were more gripping dramas and hilarious occurrences in every day life than you see coming from high-budget films and sitcoms," an observation that should be understood as a Pekar Aphorism.
Series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore, a staffer of the now defuunked Chicago-based Punk Planet, has given him the space to pick out his favorites, and his taste is at once eclectic and impeccable. Yiddishist Ben Katchor, lesbian artist Alison Bechdel, Seth Tobocman (with a searing tale of Nigerian women bearing their nakedness to shame the brutal army serving the oil companies), R. Crumb, Joe Sacco, Kim Deitch and a crew of others deliver, and how. Houghton-Mifflin's Best American series of volumes began in 1915. Ninety years later and counting, it has finally reached comics as an art form. One is tempted to say "Jewish Art," but that prognostication, however firmly based on three generations of Jewish comic book artists and writers, will be made clearer in the further emergence of the mature form.
Paul Buhle's latest comic works include SDS: A Graphic History (Hill and Wang), A People's History of American Empire (Holt-Metropolitan, an adaptation of Howard Zinn's People's History) and Jews and American Comics (New Press).
Comics Reviewed in this Article:
The Best American Comics, 2006. Edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore, guest-edited by Harvey Pekar. Houghton-Mifflin.
The Best American Comics, 2007. Edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore, guest-edited by Chris Ware. Houghton Mifflin.
Harvey Pekar's American Splendor: Another Day. Vertigo.
Go Girl! Robots Gone Wild! By Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons. Dark Horse Books.
Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow. By James Sturm and Rich Tomasso, Hyperion.
Houdini, The Handcuff King. By Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi. Hyperion.
Stuck in the Middle, Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age. Edited by Ariel Schrag. Viking Books.
Source Citation
Buhle, Paul. 2008. Harvey Pekar: Mensch author, Mensch editor...and other Jewish comic stars. Tikkun 23(2):66-69.
