Our movie year
Harvey Pekar and family face the film version of American Splendor.

By Miriam Wolf

IT IS NOT an overstatement to say Harvey Pekar almost single-handedly invented the autobiographical comic genre. His comics have been arriving "from off the streets of Cleveland" for nearly 30 years. Along with collaborators like R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, and Gerry Shamray, Pekar has chronicled the minutiae of his life in more than 30 issues of American Splendor. Politics, literature, music, love, anxiety, community, and hanging out on the corner are all topics Pekar explores through his comic, and therefore, in his life.

After reading American Splendor for many years, in the early '90s I got a chance to work with Pekar. He wrote reviews when I was the editor of this publication's book section. For the most part, his passion was for masters of realism, authors who were unsung in their time. Luckily, Pekar's own work hasn't gone unsung. And thanks to a new film, also titled American Splendor, a whole new group of fans might sprout up.

Pekar has always said he'd sell out in a minute if anyone was buying, but the truth is, his work is as uncompromising as you'll find on the comic shelf (and on most of the literature shelves as well). As he and his wife and fellow artist, Joyce Brabner, note below, they've been approached by filmmakers before. But in waiting for just the right team – codirectors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who won awards for American Splendor at this year's Sundance and Cannes film festivals – Pekar has managed once again to remain true to his vision.

I recently got a chance to talk with Pekar, along with Brabner and their daughter, Danielle Batone, when they were in town to do publicity for the movie. Perhaps feeling fatigued from his nonstop schedule, Pekar laid back a bit, letting his wife take the spotlight and giving us a rare direct glimpse into the Pekar-Brabner family dynamic.

Bay Guardian: What do you guys think about the future of self-publishing?

Joyce Brabner: As long as people think that something like a self exists – because we probably are working very much toward a Borg society. We've certainly got Borg HMOs. Kaiser Permanente Cleveland has Borg treatment ... then there will be individual expression, whatever that's going to be taking the form of. It could be ear wax sculpture for all I know. It's when people assume that we all have the same thing to say so we don't need to say it that you're going to be in trouble.

BG: What was different about seeing your story in the film from seeing it in the comic book?

Harvey Pekar: Not really too much. I'd seen myself in plays and in all sorts of different places. I was in a few movies too. I was in a few documentary movies myself.

BG: When you made the comics, every frame was your exact words. How did it feel to not have creative control of the film?

JB: The whole point of doing something like a movie is for the experience of collaboration. When you're a comic book writer – and I'm a comic book writer as well – you turn things over to an illustrator for collaboration, and that's part of the letting go, because you can get back something more than what you sent out. It's the same thing with watching it theatrically. Once we were sure of the intelligence and intentions of the people who were doing this, we were very comfortable. It's when we had less appropriate people proposing different stuff that it was more of a problem.

BG: Is there anything that you revealed in the film that you never revealed in the comics, or stuff you put in the comics that you didn't want on film?

JB: It's emotions. There's a couple of dichotomies. For example, Harvey and I did this book called Our Cancer Year. But we couldn't within this film fit in our relationship with all these refugee kids. When that book came out, we had one George Bush in the White House and one immoral Persian Gulf War, and I was dealing with half a dozen 15-year-olds who had come up rough.

Harvey had cancer again after this film wrapped. So during the second immoral Persian Gulf War and the second immoral George Bush, we had to deal with Harvey's cancer again. And I'm with a 15-year-old who came up the hard way. Some of those things had to be compressed. Even though they are interesting in print, there are some things you can't really do in film.

BG: The emotions in your comics can be so potent. The highs and lows seem a bit more extreme in your comics than they do in the movie. It seems like they took some of the edge off.

JB: If we could figure out how to do that in real life – maybe ratchet it down a little bit – we'd be happier with it, too. So if they can manage that, more power to them.

BG: I had been rereading American Splendor, and I noticed how honest and revealing the comics were.

JB: We did get pretty honest in the film. OK, well, in reality, I backed up Harvey's toilet and it was when he had his pants rolled up above his ankles and he's cleaning it up and offering me all this tea that he'd bought because I was coming that I was getting the answer to the "Oh God, I'm going to get married again – why?" question.

Paul Giamatti [who plays Pekar in the movie] said recently that one of the reasons he wanted the role was because there's a scene of Harvey sitting on the toilet reading a letter from me.

BG: My favorite scene in the movie was when Harvey was lying on the couch reading and Crumb was sitting in a chair sketching.

JB: That [scene] seems to have bugged some people in San Francisco who are not used to seeing the younger, potentially gentler Robert Crumb.

BG: Do you guys have a favorite comic artist to realize your work?

HP: There are several that I really like a lot, including Crumb, Frank Stack, Sue Cavey, Gerry Shamray.

JB: Sue Cavey is a medical illustrator like Phoebe Gloeckner was, and so when she's drawing things like the hair on the back of his neck, there's a lot of ... detail. That's something that Phoebe also brings to her artwork. Harvey picks the artist based on the scripts. He wants to do something with Keith Knight. We think he's hot. I've assigned Danielle to read his books. I'm home-schooling Danielle now, and a big topic is media literacy.

BG: How long have you been home-schooled, Danielle?

Danielle Batone: I just started. It's been, like, a month now. It's hard but you get used to it. At first I was like, "What am I doing?" And actually I made the choice. Most people think the adults make it, but I pushed. I was like, "Look, I have to do it because I'm going to get worse grades than I did last year," and all this other stuff, you know.

BG: Harvey, do you still collect anything?

HP: I'm trying to get rid of stuff. Selling stuff on the Internet.

BG: Once a collector, always a collector.

HP: Well, I don't know. At this stage in my life I just have this tremendous amount of stuff laying around. Finally I don't see a need for all of it.

JB: [To Pekar] Well, you saved it up for your retirement. You're supposed to be sitting out back reading all those books now.

We have rooms full of books. But the records have been slowly morphing into CDs because Harvey's a very active, well-regarded music critic.

BG: What are you reading these days?

HP: What I'm reading is just for the most part what I've been reviewing. A really good book that I've read was by Michael Brodsky, called Detour. It's a rewrite of a 1977 novel that he wrote, and I just reviewed it for the Village Voice. It's difficult reading. I kind of feel sorry for Michael, because I don't think most readers want to invest the kind of energy and concentration that it takes to read a novel like that. But it's, to me, very rewarding. His writing is extremely allusive. He makes numerous references to movies, frequently by European directors.

BG: The text sounds dense.

HP: Very dense. Page-long paragraphs are the norm. And you know, there's hardly any white space in there. In fact, I was told that it cost significantly more for his books to get typeset than most. He's a very fine writer, and I hope he gets his reward.

BG: Where are you flying off to next?

JB: We're going to L.A. We've got to go see a movie there.

DB: I hear it's good, though.

JB: It hasn't been really hard for us to do this [promote the movie], because we think they did a pretty good job. You know, it's a little hard to embarrass us at this point. But we're not embarrassed really. There's stuff that my family is going to be on me for the rest of my life. For example, I was busting Harvey's balls about Revenge of the Nerds and being very ironic. And Hope [Davis, who plays Brabner in the film] played it completely straight, so there it is, I'm immortalized as some idiot who thinks Revenge of the Nerds is as important as Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. That's their writing and directorial license going to town. But hey, it's not about me, it's about Harvey.

HP: Yeah, you can't control the outcome unless you think you're going to be able to micromanage stuff, and if you do that, people will just get insane.

JB: And it's like you don't have any faith in their ability at all. And then they can't do their thing. They can't be creative. I'm not saying they approached us with utter respect. You know that thing about Samuel Johnson and the dancing dog – it's remarkable that a working-class man in Cleveland has a library card at all. People like us aren't supposed to have lives. But the filmmakers weren't treating us like we were some kind of odd freaks that some documentary filmmaker went back to his hometown and pulled out to show everybody. We look pretty normal for people like us. Maybe there's not a lot of people like us, but there's some people out there who are like us.

BG: I know you guys still face your share of problems, but does the movie go a little way toward rewarding you for some of your years of hard work?

HP: Yes, yes.

JB: We got some money. Danielle's got a future. We had this kid just dropped out of the sky. She didn't come attached with child support or foster child payments or anything like that. And so that's one thing we can do. It's as though we had been saving all along. But the main reason for doing this is to give Harvey access. It gives him a chance to continue to write.

[To Pekar] Probably you're not going to have to go back to self-publishing – hauling the books in and out of the car and in and out of the basement and going down to the post office every day to do order fulfillment.

If he hasn't asked you if he could get a gig writing for your paper, he probably will.

HP: Actually, I will spare her that because she's now a freelancer.

JB: That's what it's about, just living to get the next work and continue on. It's not particularly glorious being enshrined in celluloid. It's a job like any other.

BG: Danielle, how old were you when you came to live with these two?

DB: Ten.

JB: We met when she was nine, and we made it official a year later.

DB: I want to say this now. If the people watching the movie feel uncomfortable with it, then ... I mean, if they're not even part of the story and they feel uncomfortable with it, then we'd feel uncomfortable with it, but when we saw it, we weren't uncomfortable, so ... nobody's said anything about it.

JB: Danielle has her own "How I Met Harvey Pekar" story [at www.harveypekar.com], because the adults tell it one way, the filmmakers tell it one way, and she's got her version. She'll go on to make her own stories.

BG: Harvey, how long have you been retired?

HP: Since October of 2001.

BG: How's retirement been treating you?

HP: I'm hoping it will be treating me better. I've been kind of sick since –

JB: He went into shock when he retired. He's an obsessive-compulsive guy, and leaving his routine [of] 37 years with the federal government made him very apprehensive. What was he leaving it for? Well, he was going to stop working when filming began for American Splendor in Cleveland, which – for a guy who tries to have a very realistic grasp of what's it going to take to live another day, make another book – seems not like very good planning: "OK, I'll work until they make a movie about my life, and then I'll stop."

We worked on the film, and he went right into having cancer again. And didn't start feeling better until Sundance. I'm not going to say that Sundance was the healing thing, but anybody who goes through that kind of chemo and radiation ought to get a standing ovation from 2,000 people like we got.

BG: So you were sick again for a year?

DB: If anything is surreal, it's, like, knowing someone or living with someone who has cancer. Because you're trying to figure out "What am I doing here? What's going on with this person? Are they going to be OK?" It was one of my most stressful years. Plus being a teenager, too.

HP: But I'm in remission, now.

JB: We've all really stuck together. We've been together for 20 years. Nowadays that's a lot, but in my parents' generation, that's nothing. One of the good things about marrying someone you've just met is that you don't presume you have so much familiarity with them that it's going to be easy. You know you're going to have talk your way through and negotiate. And similarly, raising a kid who is not your birth child, a kid who chose you as much as you chose them for your family, you have no choice but to respect her individuality. There's no way she's going to turn into a little clone of me. And we do have to communicate, because we have a lot of differences. That's what really got us through some of the rough times: talking about some of the craziest things that you normally would never talk about.

HP: I give them so much credit for putting up with me during that period. I was really terrible. I was really messed up.

JB: You were horrible –

HP: Depressed and –

JB: Histrionic and everything. It was like living with Redd Foxx ... but, like it says in the book, you don't have to be a hero to survive, you just have to keep breathing, you have to show up. You don't have to manifest wellness if you don't feel like it that day, you just have to show up and get your chemo.

'American Splendor' opens Fri/19 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.