Broken Frontier

In his first comic book work for a major publisher, Harvey Pekar opens up and tells the story of his youth.

For someone who has spent their career in comics opening up and telling personal tales, it would seem surprising that the one topic not yet discussed would be Pekar’s childhood. Yet throughout his many American Splendor stories, Pekar has never traveled back to the tales of his youth until now. The Quitter is that tale. In it, the audience learns of Pekar’s growing up on the streets of Cleveland with two immigrant Jewish parents. We follow him through his days fighting on the streets for safety and reputation, throughout his high school, where he first starts to develop his great love of jazz music. And Pekar shows very early and often just why he considers himself a quitter.

All over the cover of this book are quotes of acclaim for this particular work of Harvey Pekar. These quotes talk about how the book is a "confessional masterpiece" and how it’s a "crumpled message from a man’s soul." And while both of these may be true, it doesn’t make this a good bit of writing. In telling the story of his youth, Pekar just seems to be an old man rambling on. The story starts off slowly with him telling his early childhood and you think it’s building up to something. But it doesn’t. The pace never seems to grow. It starts slow and methodical and ends that way. Even worse, it’s not even as if we get real fleshed out scenes of his youth. The Quitter almost seems like an autobiography your English teacher made you write in 8th grade, with a flow that never seems to catch on. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Everything is so matter of fact that halfway through reading the book you’ll cease to see Pekar as any type of sympathetic character. And sadly, you won’t even care as to what happens next. I know that part of the Harvey Pekar charm is that he presents life in a different light, that he shows a more pessimistic, yet somehow loveable look at life, but this book totally misses all of that. It’s instead an incredibly slow moving, tedious read.

For his part, Dean Haspiel does create some wonderful artwork for this book. His drawings are wonderfully rendered and capture the expression of each panel. His figure of Pekar grows through the pages and years realistically, and even starts to look iconic. Haspiel’s fight scenes are incredibly vibrant and every character emotion comes through as clear as day. Even more impressive is the work that Haspiel does with his inks and Lee Loughridge adds with his gray tones, with which they set a tremendous mood. Something that is even more impressive when considering the book has no more than 3 panels of consecutive, interconnected dialogue, effectively turning it into one long montage sequence.

Amazingly, in a book where he talks about how he wanted to push comics to their limits, Harvey Pekar tells a story in such a simple way. Just like Pekar in his youth, I should have quit on The Quitter when I realized he wasn’t going to be any good at it.