Originally posted at https://www.graphixia.ca/2013/03/106-american-splendor-whats-in-a-name/ 5 March 2013.
My fellow Graphixians have focused mainly on adaptation into (or between) the medium of comics. For my first ‘proper’ post I will be looking at American Splendor as an example of a comics adaptation into film. I recently reread ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’ from the collection Bob & Harv’s Comics. ‘Bob & Harv’ are artist Robert Crumb and writer Harvey Pekar, and the story originally appeared in the second issue of American Splendor in 1977. Each of the four pages in the strip consists of a strict twelve-panel grid and in each panel Crumb has drawn a man ‘talking’ to the reader. Between each panel there are only minor alterations in the man’s body movements and facial expression. The strip is a masterclass in comics pacing, with subtle changes in the drawings and ellipses in the speech bubbles giving a sense of the movement of time. Several panels do not contain dialogue but just show the man staring out of the page. These act as punctuation in the text, adding pauses and visual information to the story.
What struck me on this particular reading was that the person depicted in the panels, in Crumb’s typical closely hatched style, is not Harvey Pekar. The word balloons contain information about the ‘speaker’ that lead us to believe that he is Harvey Pekar, the writer of American Splendor, such as the biographical information that his middle name is Lawrence and the fact he married at a young age and then later divorced, but the images are quite different to how Crumb draws Pekar in other stories.
In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature Charles Hatfield noted that the man named ‘Harvey Pekar’ was ‘not to be confused with the author’ (2005: 45). Harvey is usually depicted as being quite dishevelled but the character in this strip is clean-shaven and wearing a suit and tie. I cannot recall any other strip where Pekar is dressed like this. Even taking into account that dozens of artists have drawn Pekar over the years, the caricatures usually have a reasonable consistency in how Harvey looks. However, as Hatfield states ‘’The Harvey Pekar Name Story’ puts paid to the notion of a singular self’ (2005: 126). The differences in various artist’s drawings of Pekar allowed enough ambiguity for Harvey’s future wife Joyce Brabner to be worried about which version of all the Harvey’s she had seen in the comics was going to be waiting for her at the bus station when she arrived in Cleveland.
In ‘Hustlin’ Sides’, the other strip drawn by Crumb in issue two, Harvey looks more like other drawn versions of Pekar, with his hunched over walking style, scruffy T-shirt and swept forward hair. However, Crumb and Pekar further complicate matters by calling this version of Harvey ‘Jack the Bellboy’. It may be that, in only the second issue of American Splendor, Crumb had not yet settled on depicting Harvey as a ‘realistic’ caricature of Pekar, and Pekar himself is not yet completely comfortable in divulging the details of his job without the use of a pseudonym for his autobiographical avatar. In the third issue the different artists seem settled on the Pekar’s physical appearance but he is still not named in the strips, often referred to as ‘our man’ or ‘our hero’ and once again as ‘Jack the Bellboy’.
In 2003, several strips from American Splendor were adapted into a film, which also contained scenes from the stand-alone graphic memoir Our Cancer Year written by Pekar and Brabner and drawn by Frank Stack. The movie was directed by documentary filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini and starred Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as Brabner. The film plays with the idea of there being no singular self by having the real-life Pekar and Brabner appear in the film alongside, and interacting with, the actors. Both Pekar and Giamatti narrate the film’s voice-over at different times. In one scene the actors are shown attending a theatre adaptation of the American Splendor comics. On stage the actors are playing actors playing Giamatti and Davis playing Pekar and Brabner. The levels of commentary on versions of the self become dizzying.
Near the end of the film, while undergoing treatment for cancer, Pekar has a breakdown and becomes confused as to whether he is a real person ‘tell me the truth, am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book?’. He passes out and this scene leads to a version of ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’. In the film Paul Giamatti talks to the camera but, unlike the comic, this version looks like Harvey Pekar. At first he is a figure in the mid-distance and as he walks towards the camera the room appears around him drawn in a hatched style similar to Crumb’s. In contrast to the comic Harvey moves around in the frame, the background changes and he walks outside. The first two pages of the strip are omitted, there is no need to introduce a character we have spent the last 90 minutes watching, and we jump straight to Giamatti as Pekar discussing other Harvey Pekars in the telephone directory.
The dialogue is almost exactly as in the strip and as Pekar says ‘These were the other Harvey Pekars’ we see a ghostly vision of the actual Harvey Pekar walk across the screen behind him. As in the strip we question the various versions of Pekar presented to us. Both the scene and the strip end the same way with ‘Harvey Pekar’ in the middle of the frame asking ‘What’s in a name? Who is Harvey Pekar?’and then staring out at the viewer/reader. The truth being that, as the many years of American Splendor comics show, there are countless Harvey Pekars.
While thinking about this piece I was inspired to create my own ‘cover version’ of ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’. You can see ‘The Damon Herd Name Story’ at last week’s Graphixia Thursday post here.
Works cited
American Splendor, 2003 [Film]. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. USA: Good Machine and HBO Films.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Pekar, Harvey, Brabner, Joyce & Stack, Frank. Our Cancer Year. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994.
Pekar, Harvey & Crumb, Robert. Bob & Harv’s Comics. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.