Harvey Pekar Memorial Desk

The boy completed his fall soccer season 5-2-1, and after the final game at Denison Field, I whisked him to the CH-UH Main Public Library just in time to catch the unveiling of the Harvey Pekar Memorial Desk Sculpture.  All of Cleveland Heights, it seemed, was on hand to celebrate the man, and this fitting tribute; an interactive art installation on the second floor of this library, which was one of Harvey's favorite places to be. 

 Joyce explains the piece.

It has been about a year since Harvey's wife, Joyce Brabner, originally announced her intentions for the sculpture. Shortly after his death, she has wistfully remarked that she wanted his grave at Lakeview Cemetery to be marked with something you could color or write on, with chalk. When Lakeview politely informed her that they have a policy of not letting anyone mark the monuments, she contacted the library. Between a successful Kickstarter campaign and positive support from, well, everybody, the piece became a reality.

Local artist Justin Coulter created the statue, which sits atop the desk. Anyone is welcome to peruse the drawers, and use the items inside, which include pens, pencils and paper, as well as copies of some of Harvey's favorite books.

You may touch the artwork.

The back of the statue features a chalk board divided into comic book panels for anyone to write or draw upon. I was about to do a little cartoon of Harvey but the boy for some reason talked me out of it. That's all right, it is there to stay and I will compose something on some ordinary day. Maybe take up the whole thing, tell a whole story!

Doughnut.

The Harvey Pekar Tribute (Yes on 6)

From Harvey Pekar's Cleveland
Art by Joseph Remnant
Zip Comics, (Publication Date: March 2012)
Used with permission.
The Harvey Pekar Tribute was held at the Cleveland Heights Main Library on Tuesday night. There was a great turnout, and many had the opportunity to share stories about the impact Harvey had on their life. Steve Presser was the master of ceremonies, but really, so was Joyce Brabner, as she offered her own insight into several of the reminiscences. Al Branstein told that awesome American Splendor piece about the sea mammal strapped to the roof of this guy's car, poems were read, there was laughter and tears, Toby was there, Ernie Krivda played Blues for Pekar.

Read about the Harvey Pekar Memorial Statue and how to contribute.

Joyce asked me to read from the as-yet-unpublished Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, which should be required reading everywhere. You may soon be able to acquire an illustrated history of Cleveland, dating back to the real Indians to the present, as well as Harvey's place in it all. I was struck by and delighted to read that he chose to include full-throated support for the CH-UH school system in this work.

These are my reasons for supporting this CH-UH School Levy, Issue 6:

I am a twenty-year resident of Cleveland Heights. This is the city my children will call their hometown. My daughter is eight, my son is six. They attend Noble Elementary, I am a member of the Noble PTA. My children are very happy at their school, and they are very proud of their school. And so am I.

For ten years I have worked with the education department at Great Lakes Theater, and through the residency program I have had the opportunity to visit private and public schools across Northern Ohio. Through this experience and my time as a member of our PTA I have learned that keeping our American schools strong requires constant attention, care and communication. That is true whether your school is a parochial school, a Montessori school or one of our public institutions, the public schools which make education available to every child, that give every child a chance.

The CH-UH School Board have shown that attention, and have put forth tremendous effort to craft a reorganization plan to improve our schools, schools that are already strong to begin with. This is a very exciting time for our schools, and it comes at a critical moment. And we need support from the community to make it successful.

Voting Yes on Issue 6 will improve your CH-UH schools. Improving the schools will add value to your neighborhood. It will increase the value of your home. Do I know these things to be true? Yes. Yes, I do. Because I have faith; faith in our school board, faith in the parents and teachers and administrators of Cleveland Heights schools, faith in my community. And my children have faith in all of us to do the right thing.

From a Cleveland Heights parent: Please vote Yes on Issue 6.

ELECTION DAY 2011 UPDATE: We won, and by a lot. So relieved, such a good feeling. Thank you, Heights, for stepping up for our children and our community.

American Splendor

Sitting on the stoop in front of Tommy's Restaurant,
now the location of Mac's Backs Paperbacks.
Harvey Lawrence Pekar (October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010) was born in Cleveland, to Polish immigrant parents. He graduated from Shaker Heights High in 1957 and after a stint in the U.S. Navy settled in Cleveland Heights eventually gaining regular employment as a file clerk at the V.A. Hospital. His legend, however, is as a writer, of jazz criticism and as the creator of his autobiographic comic book American Splendor.

In 1962 Pekar met Robert Crumb, who at that time was an illustrator for American Greetings. They had a mutual admiration for all things jazz, and Crumb introduced Harvey to "underground" comics. Pekar had abandoned superhero comic books as a teenager, but Crumb opened his mind to all of the different stories could be told through the medium. When he decided to reach out and attempt his own work, Pekar first contacted Crumb to be an illustrator.

He self-published American Splendor #1 in 1976. And the cover is correct, Crumb only did a two-pager.

For those familiar with his later work, which concentrates almost exclusively on his day-to-day life with wife Joyce Brabner and their child Danielle, the premiere issue is a little dizzying. Longer pieces like How I Spent My Summer Vacation: 1972 and Love Story (Summer 1946) tell the story of Harvey surrogates "Marv" and "Herbie" and their entirely unedited sexual exploits. One image might even be punishable as child pornography. Only one story (not including the cover) where Pekar explains how he roped Crumb into assisting him on this adventure depicts Harvey by name as himself.

Depictions of Black people and women (lots of naked tits) would also raise a few eyebrows ... but not if you were already familiar with the work of Crumb and his contemporaries. It was par for the course in the 1970s. Looking at his later work, I would almost guess that Harvey felt he was supposed to "go there" to be part of the underground comics scene, but I would hesitate to give any closer analysis than that, other to say it's a bold first issue, and it must have taken a heap of courage for someone like Pekar to take some many of his personal thoughts and shove them out there as if to say, "This is what I think, this is who I am, take it or leave it."

And that, after all, is what everyone who loves him loves about him.

The most poignant story is Remembering Be-Ins which takes place in the not-too-distant future. Two teenagers approach the balding, 70 year-old "Mr. Shapiro" and ask him what life was like way back in the far-out 1960s.

That's right. It says, Summer, 2010. Crazy.

Source:
American Splendor
cleveland.com

Howard the Duck (comic book)

Howard the Duck changed my life, but I never realized in what way nor how much until I began to re-read them this week. My entire childhood was colored by my exposure to this Marvel comic book, the way I spoke, the way I wrote. This was not necessarily a good thing, I do not recommend letting anyone under high school age read this comic book. I began when I was only nine.

Back up ... Howard the Duck is known to most as a terrible film produced by George Lucas from the mid-1980s. I won't bother going into that. The character debuted in 1973 in Marvel's pulp title Adventure Into Fear, a minor character originally written by Steve Gerber and drawn by Clevelander Val Mayerik. He resurfaced in a few issues of Man-Thing before landing in his own title in 1976.

Prior to Giant Size Man-Thing #4 (an annual) this duck, from a world Gerber never gave a name (though later writers formally named it Duckworld, which is irritating because we don't call Earth People Planet) where ducks are the dominant life-form is summoned with others to a nexus in the cosmos to fight some evil entity, whatever. Trying to get home, he is accidentally dropped on Earth, in the city of Cleveland.

Why did I become attached to this comic at such an early age? My brother was reading Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four (we were strictly a Marvel home — always the underdogs, we Hansens) I was trying to find a storyline that I could own. A talking, sarcastic duck? In Cleveland? Sweet! The fact is, I didn't understand half of it, and therein lies the problem.

As conceived by Gerber, this book was pure satire, or parody. Depended on the issue. The villains were a mash-up of pathetic professional types empowered with bizarre and punny abilities. A lot of them are artists. The night watchman who can't get a book published is possessed by a turnip from space — the man, locked in his head wants an outlet for his imagination, the root vegetable from outer space (just writing that makes me smile) wants to know the pleasures of the flesh. Every issue, Howard encounters a character like that, and has to deal with it, often rising to heroism he did not know he had.

Because Howard is a curmudgeon. A cigar-chomping misanthrope who just wants to go home, and is stuck in 1970s Cleveland, the only city at that time worse off than New York City. But even Cleveland is not Cleveland. I cannot find any evidence that Gerber ever lived here, or even spent any time here (he died in 2008) — but original HTD artist Val Mayerik did, even once creating work for Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. But an advertisement for a martial arts course in issue #3 prominently lists the address as the corner of "Oak" and "Elm." Either Gerber was crossing his fingers, hoping Cleveland, like most cities, has streets bearing these names that intersect (we do not) or he didn't care. Cleveland, like everything in this comic, is a symbol for something else. Howard had to end up somewhere unsexy. Cleveland it is.

The main problem with my reading it at such a young age was that I did not understand what was being commented upon. An evil wizard accountant? Becoming a candidate for President for the All Night Party? I acquired a language for sarcasm and acidity without having anything to direct it at. Howard disdains hypocrisy, fads and fashion, rude people ... but his constant barrage of attitude against these mundane evils just struck this child as being disgruntled, and that, to me, equaled funny. I missed Howard's compassion, his acts of kindness — he's a good guy, he's just sick of everybody's shit.

The first issue of Howard the Duck debuted in 1976. So did the first issue of American Splendor. Discuss.

My last Harvey Pekar story

Two years ago, Joyce Brabner and I collaborated on an event at the Unitarian Church, which featured a staged reading of a play I was working on about HUAC, and a talk from Harvey about a book he was working on about Joe McCarthy. Joyce was working overtime to keep Harvey’s spirits up, as he had recently fallen into a deep funk.

We ran into each other at Tommy’s around that time, Joyce with Harvey, and me with my two kids. We decided to get a table together and Joyce and I discussed logistics of the event, while Harvey could not stop talking to the boy.  My son was about three and a half at the time. Harvey just kept checking in with him, asking him questions.

I wasn’t used to seeing Harvey smile so much. His voice was very soft, and sweet, especially for him. I understand now he’s like that around children. I had no idea.

The second-to-last time I spoke with him, Harvey was at the library (of course) and I asked him about my project. Could he recommend any 1930s era labor rights books I might be unaware of? On that day, he looked at me like I was a stranger, like I wanted something from him. Maybe he was in thought and just didn’t want to be bothered, who knows. He said it wasn’t really his era and I thought that was that. As I walked away, he called me back and recommended the works of Ruth McKenney. It just so happened my wife already had a copy of Industrial Valley, and I started making my way through that two weeks ago (distracted by certain period playscripts.)

Last Thursday, my wife had water aerobics at the pool and the whole family went to splash around while she got her exercise in. It was only as the pool was closing that we walked past Joyce and Harvey, also headed out. Joyce stopped to chat and Harvey went to the gate to sit. She explained that Harvey had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. This would be his third go-round with cancer. Then she got a call, and told me see you later.

I could have just waved to Harvey, but I wanted to speak to him. The boy was with me. I went over and thanked him for the Ruth McKenney recommendation, and that put a smile on his face, but not as much as the boy did, standing shyly behind my right leg. I asked if Harvey remembered him, and if he remembered Harvey. They had a brief exchange. And we went.

I got word about the death of Harvey Pekar yesterday as I was checking Facebook while I was at the library downtown. So, it wasn’t entirely out of the blue, but still stunning. We weren’t friends or co-workers or peers. I always found it awkward having any kind of conversation with Harvey. But his work has had a strong impact on me. I could not have written my two solo plays without the early influence of American Splendor. In fact, reaching back there were an awful lot of pieces I wrote for Guerrilla Theater Co. and other productions which were due to his philosophy of storytelling.

And he has been one of the many reasons I have been proud to call Cleveland Heights my home.

I had to take the kids to the pool yesterday afternoon for swimming lessons. I asked the boy if he remembered the nice old man we saw the last time we were there, just because I wanted to say something out loud about Harvey. The boy said he did, and I didn’t think anything else about it. At dinner that night my wife and I were talking about the news and the kids wanted an explanation, so I began telling them why he was important to me.

“He wrote comic books about his own life,” I explained, “about his ordinary life, and what he thought about things, and his relationships with other people.”

“But that’s not a comic book,” the boy said.

Critic.

When I went on to say that he was very sick, and that he had died, the boy was surprised. And then he was overwhelmed. And then he blurted out, “I wanted to see him again!” And then he cried for about ten minutes.

My kids know about death. They know about the death of their brother. We have had incidents with certain animals. But this was the first time he was struck by the finality of death. My boy likes repetition, he likes to play games he has played before, and watch shows he has seen before, and to see people he has seen before. And earlier I had reminded him of that nice old man, and that made him want to see him again.

Harvey Pekar has been an inspiration to me. And he is a man with whom I never had a satisfying conversation. But my strongest memory of Harvey will always be as that nice old man whose face lit up when he looked at my son, and that my son wishes he could see him again.

Ruth McKenney

Saw Harvey Pekar at the library this morning, he was perusing the for-sale racks. Went over, said "hi," he had that look again which either means, "who are you?" or "are you going to bother me?" I asked if he knew anything about labor unrest in the 30s and he said that's really not his area.

But then he told me about Ruth McKenney, who is probably best-known today for her book My Sister Eileen, which was adapted into the musical Wonderful Town. What fewer people know today is that she was a reporter for the Akron Beacon-Journal and wrote the book Industrial Valley about the Akron rubber strike of 1932-36.

In 1939 Industrial Valley came out to an outcry from Akron community leaders. Akron evangelist Bill Denton urged the Chamber of Commerce to file suit in the federal court, saying the book was full of "profanity, slander and communistic tendencies." That same year, the book won an honorable mention in the non-fiction category at the American Writer's Congress. - Akron Women's History

I imagine the book did have communistic tendencies, as she was a Communist.

LATER: "Industrial Valley" is sitting on one of our bookshelves. Just sitting there. I love this house.