Planner history

From Jillian Hess’s Noted, “A Short History of the Daily Planner”:

Today we tend to think of daily planners as records of what will happen. But most of its early users saw daily blank space in their notebooks as a way to record what had happened. It was a way to account for one’s time and how it was spent (as George Washington noted).

It’s not until the 20th century that we see pocket diaries regularly used for recording future events.

The 20th century! That’s exactly when I started using a planner to record future events (and each day’s things to do).

My planner history took a strange turn in this century when I discovered that my 2024 Moleskine pocket daily planner was missing sixteen days. (Yes, really.) So I bought a Leuchtturm pocket weekly with notebook and found myself trying hard to like it. But the faux-leather cover, ultra-faint print, and tiny Saturday/Sunday spaces are just not for me. Using this planner for just a few days made me realize how much I like the idea of every day having its own page. Or as Harvey Pekar says in the OCA sidebar, “Every day is a new deal.”

So why didn’t I buy a Leuchtturm pocket daily? It’s not offered on the company’s U.S. site, and Amazon has it only as an import from Japan, taking weeks to ship, with this cryptic warning: “Imports from Japan may differ from local products.” Would I be getting a planner with Japanese text? Also: “Manufacturer warranty may not apply.”

Twelve days ago I wrote that my defective Moleskine would be my last. But last weekend I ordered another 2024 Moleskine from Amazon. It arrived with all the days of the year included, even February 29. I ordered it after being told via e-mail that Moleskine would not replace the defective planner (their former practice) and that I’d be issued a refund. Okay.

But then, oops, they said they made a mistake. Since I hadn’t ordered from their website, I could receive only a credit. I had of course sent them a screenshot of my Amazon order at the start of our correspondence. I’ve now written to the company asking for a refund and am awaiting a response.

Does it go without saying that I noted in my planner the date on which I sent my letter?

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The story of my effort to get a refund for my defective Moleskine continues here.

[Hess notes that the OED first has planner as a thing (not a person) in the 1970s: “Something used to facilitate planning, as a chart or table containing planning information, a calendar recording future appointments, etc.”]

Words from Ralph Ellison

Words from Ralph Ellison that I’ve long carried in my head started knocking around in there yesterday, so I added them to the Words to Live By in the sidebar.

If you’re reading via RSS, click through and you can see them, along with words from Heraclitus, Harvey Pekar, Marcel Proust, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger, and Simone Weil.

Days

Betty Horak (Beverly Michaels) is being sarcastic. From Pickup (dir. Hugo Haas, 1951):

“Oh boy, another one of those exciting days.”

I’d counter with words from the OCA sidebar, from Harvey Pekar’s story “Alice Quinn”:

Every day is a new deal.

Bill Murray looks at a painting

Asked to talk about a moment when art has mattered to him, Bill Murray describes an encounter with Jules Adolphe Breton’s The Song of the Lark after a disastrous first experience on stage in Chicago:

“I was so bad I just walked out on the street and headed — and started walking. And I walked for a couple of hours, and I realized I’d walked the wrong direction — not just the wrong direction in terms of where I lived but the wrong direction in terms of a desire to stay alive. And so I — this may be a little bit not completely true, but it’s pretty true — that I walked and then thought, ‘Well, if I’m gonna die where I am, I may as well just go over towards the lake, and maybe I’ll float for a while after I’m dead.’”

He ended up in the Art Institute, walking right through without paying because he was “ready to die and pretty much dead”:

“And there’s a painting there, and I don’t even know who painted it, but I think it’s called The Song of the Lark. And it’s a woman working in a field, and there’s a sunrise behind her. And I’ve always loved this painting, and I saw it that day, and I just thought, ‘Well, look, there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun’s coming up anyway, and she’s got another chance at it.’ So I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I too am a person and get another chance every day the sun comes up.“

See also words from Harvey Pekar (in the OCA sidebar): “Every day is a new deal.”

[Murray was speaking at a press conference marking the UK premiere of The Monuments Men. The Art Institute has a highly condensed version of Murray’s remarks on a placard next to the painting.]

Harvey Pekar on record collecting

“At first, and for a long time, it was a healthy thing to do”: Harvey Pekar on record collecting (YouTube). Art by R. Crumb.

Related reading
All Harvey Pekar posts (Pinboard)

[Found via Mosaic Records.]

Words from Theodore Roosevelt, sort of

On the September 28 page of my New Yorker cartoon calendar, words attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Every day, man, every day. But the words aren’t Roosevelt’s, though something close to them appears in his 1913 autobiography:


[“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”]

I like the informality of the contraction even better. This advice makes me think of Harvey Pekar’s “Keep on pushin’,” also good advice.

Here’s a page with the results of an effort to track down Squire Bill Widener.

Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland

Harvey Pekar and Joseph Remnant. Cleveland. Introduction by Alan Moore. Scarsdale, NY, and Marietta, GA: Zip Comics and Top Shelf Productions, 2012. 128 pages. $21.99 (hardcover), $9.99 (digital).

                                The Best Location in the Nation.
                                Metropolis of the Western Reserve.
                                The Mistake on the Lake.

                                Three nicknames for Cleveland, Ohio

“From off the streets of Cleveland”: Harvey Pekar (1939–2010) is a writer whose work is stamped with the name of a city. There is nothing glamorous or sinister about Pekar’s Cleveland; it is not Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Nor is there anything mythic about the Cleveland landscape; it is not the Paterson of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem. But to borrow a phrase from Williams: Cleveland is “the local conditions,” the city of Pekar’s birth, a place in which to work, worry, and observe.


[Click for a larger view.]

Cleveland is two books really: a brief history of a city and the story of Pekar’s life there, through three marriages and thirty-odd years in a “flunky job” as a file clerk in a Veterans Affairs hospital. Pekar’s story of the city begins and ends on notes of hope: the Cleveland Indians’ 1948 World Series win over the Boston Braves (the Indians’ second and last Series win to date) and the development of a medical mart and convention center (scheduled to open in 2013). But the story of twentieth-century Cleveland is largely a story of decline, with years of industrial might (iron and steel, manufacturing, railroads) followed by unemployment, poverty, crime, and suburban flight. This story, alas, has become a quintessential American story, told again and again in empty storefronts and abandoned properties.

Pekar enters the story in 1939. He recounts a relatively pleasant childhood and adolescence: a far less violent picture of his early years than the one he gives in The Quitter (2005). Here we see young Harvey playing baseball, mastering public transit, discovering the joys of used-book stores, and savoring the “frosty malt” at Higbee’s (a locally-owned department store, now gone). In adulthood, Pekar finds security in a Civil Service job (one requiring little or no intellectual effort, which he reserves for his reading and writing). Pekar regulars Mr. Boats and Toby Radloff appear in scenes at work. Pekar’s first two marriages fail (he is less than generous in his depiction of his partners), but a third marriage, to Joyce Brabner, sticks. And thus the world familiar to readers of American Splendor comes into view. Chronology and continuity are sometimes off, as when Pekar recounts his second wife’s life after marriage and asks, one page later, “What happened to her?” before beginning to tell the story again. At other times, digressions are masterful, as when Pekar’s account of his daily routine makes room for commentaries on Cleveland radio personality Diane Rehm and bookseller John T. Zubal.

Pekar’s world comes into view through the labor of Joseph Remnant, who has become one of my favorite illustrators of Pekar’s stories. His style is reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s, with considerable crosshatching and much loving attention to the sometimes invisible clutter of city streets (chimney pipes, streetlights, telephone poles). For those who know Cleveland well, panel after panel will evoke familiar elements of the city: the Arcade, the Detroit-Superior Bridge, the Public Library, the Terminal Tower. The research that went into Remnant’s work must have been considerable. Here is one detail that for this non-Clevelander was decisive, a panel from Pekar’s account of the life of John T. Zubal:



I don’t know Cleveland, but I know the Bronx, and I know Fordham. Behind John and Marilyn stands the clocktower of Keating Hall, the centerpiece of Fordham’s Bronx campus. That Remnant would take the time to include this detail, one that just a handful of readers might recognize, says much about his approach to making art.

Remnant’s work also delights me in that it gets Harvey Pekar right — not that there is one proper way to draw him, but that there are many ways to go wrong. Remnant’s Pekar is cranky but not crazed, frayed but not frazzled. He wanders the streets of Cleveland in this volume at all ages and in all moods, bent forward in his later years, a man for all seasons and just one city.

What I find most moving in this book in Pekar’s idea of a good city: concerts, libraries, museums, parks, bookstores, and record stores. That’s very much my idea of a good city, and it’s an idea that grows more fragile by the day.

[Harvey Pekar by Joseph Remnant. From the title page.]

Thanks to the publishers for a review copy of the book.

Related reading
Cleveland (Top Shelf Productions)
All Harvey Pekar posts (via Pinboard)

More Pekar and Remnant collaborations
“Autodidact” : “Back in the Day” : “Legendary Vienna” : “Muncie, Indiana” : “Reciprocity” : “Sweeping Problem”

Things I learned on my summer vacation (2012)

Q: Why did King Kong climb the Empire State Building?

A: He was too big to fit in the elevator.

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It is possible to get a Hi and Lois panel (or any online image) into Blogger using an iPad, like so: Take screenshot. Download TouchUp Lite (free image-editor) and crop screenshot. Upload resulting picture to Picasa. Add appropriate URL to draft.

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In Pittsburgh, Leena’s Food is a tiny restaurant that serves great Middle Eastern food. Mohammed Issa’s claim to have the best falafel in the city — and perhaps anywhere — is easy to believe.

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In Manhattan, Maharaja Palace has an excellent lunch buffet. But the restaurant is small and needs to turn its tables: if you linger over lunch and then decide to stay on for tea, you’ll be warned that the preparation will take a very long time. Or at least we were so warned. (Is it sun tea they’re making?)

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For those on the road, Whole Foods is a good choice for a quick lunch or dinner. Go to the Prepared Foods sector and grab a cardboard receptacle and some cutlery.

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William Buehler Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), a study of Haitian Vodou, has illustrations by Alexander King. Seabrook seems to have been a scary man. Our friend Margie King Barab was married to Alex.

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By the way, Elaine has written several posts about the composer Seymour Barab (Margie’s husband). Elaine knew Seymour for several years (via correspondence and phone calls) before we all met face to face. (But I knew that already.)

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Dorothy Wegman Raphaelson was one of the last two surviving Ziegfeld Girls. She was married to playwright and screenwriter Samuel Raphaelson (who appears in this 2009 post). A photograph of DWR on her hundredth birthday shows her elegant and joyful in Central Park.

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At the theater, Al Hirschfeld sketched without looking, using a pad and pencil in his pocket.

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Hirschfeld’s pink townhouse (122 East 95th Street) is for sale: $5,295,000. No, it’s sold.

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The exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” has two paintings I’ve long wanted to see: Juan Gris’s Flowers (1914) and Marie Laurencin’s Apollinaire and His Friends (1909). Gris’s painting (from a private collection) plays a part in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923). (But I knew that already.)

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Seeing Flowers itself makes clear what reproductions barely suggest: the work is largely a collage; its flowers are cut and pasted. Now I better understand what Joseph Cornell might have seen in Gris’s work.

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“The Steins Collect” is a reminder of the ugly, often despicable cultural and political attitudes of early-twentieth-century modernists. How did Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas manage to remain in France and get through the Second War? Here is a dossier on the matter, with various points of view. My two cents: calling Stein’s relationship to Vichy “complex” and “complicated” (words that appear and reappear in the work of Stein’s defenders) is not persuasive. That Stein was sympathetic to fascism and enjoyed the friendship and protection of the collaborator Bernard Faÿ seems to me to make it relatively easy to think things through.

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“The Steins Collect” is also a reminder of the role money plays in art: Americans abroad, income from rental properties, things to buy. Money, money, money.

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Roy Peter Clark’s The Glamour of Grammar (2011) looks like it might be a helpful book in teaching writing.

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The bookstore where Harvey Pekar takes Anthony Bourdain in the Cleveland episode of No Reservations? Zubal Books.

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Manhattan’s “secret bookstore,” Brazenhead Books, the subject of a short 2011 film, is a great used-book store, a store in which every book is a good one (or better than good). Our greatest finds: two books by Alex King, and a third that he illustrated. Talk about luck.

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The arranger and composer Nelson Riddle attended Ridgefield Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. (Jonathan Schwartz got it wrong.)

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New Jersey is benighted. In an effort to save money, the state has turned off many of its highway lights. It feels strange and at least slightly dangerous to be parsing overhead signage in the dark. I feel sorry for the unfortunate traveler who does not already know the way.

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Elaine’s great-grandfather was a forest assayer in Russia and a presser in a tailor’s shop in Philadelphia.

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The instruments in the Frederick Historic Piano Collection might change one’s sense of “the piano”: these instruments differ greatly in tone from the modern piano and from one another. The collection is the work of Elaine’s elementary-school music teacher and her husband. One piano’s sound reminded us of the massive Beckwith upright in our collection. (That piano is our collection.)

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A corkscrew is also known as a “wine key.”

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The Vinturi is a small device that aerates wine, making a marked difference in taste and aroma.

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Winemakers use isinglass to clarify, uhh, wine.

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb, 2011) is a beautifully filmed meditation on work and happiness. In this film, they are one. Jiro Ono: “I feel ecstatic all day. I love making sushi.”

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Gloria Swanson’s thirty-two-room Englewood, New Jersey villa was called Gloria Crest. The house was named not for Swanson but for the wife of the Polish noble who built it in 1926. My dad did tile work there, after Swanson’s time.

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Prescient may be pronounced in surprising ways. The American Heritage Dictionary gives four pronunciations:

prĕsh′ ənt, -ē-ənt, prē′ shənt, -shē-ənt

I appreciate knowing (finally) that there’s a sh sound in prescient.

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Did you know that you can listen to episodes of the radio serial Dragnet in podcast form?

Episodes — you mean whole ones?

That’s right, complete episodes.

Start to finish?

That’s right.

And you say they’re available as a podcast?

Yeah, that’s right, a podcast. Free too.

Well then, it seems that there’s only one thing to do.

What’s that?

Listen.

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It is a great gift to have friends from other generations. (But I knew that already.)

[Our friends Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab, waiting for the light to change. New York, May 2012.]

More things I learned on my summer vacation
2011 : 2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006

[Summer: the time between the spring and fall semesters, regardless of season.]

Harvey Pekar on WKSU

Who Is Harvey Pekar?: thirty-six Pekar commentaries, from WKSU-FM, Kent, Ohio. A sample:

“Once Good Morning America came to Cleveland, and they invited me to be on their show until they saw my comics. Then they said, ‘These stories are so dark; they’re disturbing.’ What do they want? Hugh Downs?”

Other Harvey Pekar posts
Good advice from Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar (1939–2010)
Joyce Brabner, writing, recognition
Harvey Pekar on life and death
Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter
Review: Leave Me Alone!

Harvey Pekar (1939–2010)

Harvey Pekar was — is — one of the great chroniclers of dailiness in these United States.

I felt like cryin’; life seemed so sweet an’ so sad an’ so hard t’let go of in the end. But this is Monday. I went t’work, hustled some records, came home an’ wrote this. T’night I’ll finish A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Life goes on. Every day is a new deal. Keep workin’ an’ maybe sump’n’ll turn up.

From the story “Alice Quinn,” words by Harvey Pekar, art by Sue Cavey (1982).

Cleveland comic-book legend Harvey Pekar dead at age 70 (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Other Harvey Pekar posts
Good advice from Harvey Pekar
Joyce Brabner, writing, recognition
Harvey Pekar on life and death
Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter
Review: Leave Me Alone!

[Photograph uncredited, found at the Dallas Observer.]

Joyce Brabner, writing, recognition

Joyce Brabner is a writer of comics. She occasionally collaborates with her husband Harvey Pekar, most notably in Our Cancer Year, with art by Frank Stack (New York: Four Wall Eight Windows, 1994). In a 1997 interview, Brabner comments on writing and recognition:

We’ve been on tour and the further away we are from Cleveland, the bigger the audience is, more or less. In Minneapolis we met more than a hundred people. In Oberlin, Ohio, maybe forty-five. At Bookseller’s in Shaker Square, which is next to Cleveland Heights, where we live: twenty. By the time we get up to our own door and inide the house, even we’ve forgotten that we’re writers.

Harvey Pekar: Conversations, ed. Michael G. Rhode ((Jackson: University Press of Misssissippi, 2008), 77.

Good advice from Harvey Pekar

"If you don't correct stuff right when it happens, you can get into serious trouble. Stay on it."

Harvey Pekar, "You Get Old You Can Fall Apart (We're a Winner)," in American Splendor: Another Dollar (New York: DC Comics, 2009), 45.

In this story, illustrated by Ty Templeton, Pekar schedules physical therapy for a mending elbow, has a false tooth reglued, and gets a missing screw for his glasses replaced. "Keep on pushin'," he thinks, as the story closes. "Keep on pushin'."

Other Harvey Pekar posts
A few words from Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar on life and death
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter
Review: Leave Me Alone!

Review: Leave Me Alone!

[Harvey Pekar and Harvey Pekar.]

Leave Me Alone! A Jazz Opera in Two Acts
Streamed live from Oberlin College, January 31, 2009

Leave Me Alone! seems to me to add up to less than the sum of its parts, the parts being Harvey Pekar's libretto and Dan Plonsey's music (with additional words by the principals' spouses, Mantra Ben-ya'akova Plonsey and Joyce Brabner, and additional music by Josh Smith). Pekar's stated intention, to create an opera about the fate of the avant-garde and "the problems faced by turn of the 21st century artists in general," feels unrealized in performance: what I saw and heard on my laptop (in what appears to have been the opera's sole planned performance) is less an inquiry into artistic production and reception and more an examination of problems in the lives of Harvey Pekar and Dan Plonsey: day jobs, domestic quarrels over chores, opossums in the basement. The opera's final moments enact a squabble between the Plonseys over ibuprofen dosage. Earlier, a recorded telephone conversation between Pekar and Robert Crumb lets us hear Crumb's skepticism about whether the opera-in-progress is going to work. "A buck is a buck, man," says Pekar, who spends most of his time on stage sitting on a couch reading.

The four-singer cast works gamely, with movement and masks adding interest here and there. But the libretto — e.g., "Music is against system, even when employing systematic elements" — often leaves little room for expressive singing.

Bright moments: Dan Plonsey's music, with deep influences from Charles Mingus and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; Joyce Brabner's monologue, offering another perspective on the Pekar-Brabner household; and the work of the instrumentalists, particularly the tenor saxophonist, who contributed a volcanic, voluminous opening solo. (Was it Josh Smith? The credits are vague.)

[Corrections: Co-Musical Director Daniel Michalak notes that Dan Plonsey played the opening solo. (I wish I'd been able to see that!) And there were five singers in all.]

Leave Me Alone! (Real Time Opera)
Dan Plonsey (composer's site)

Related reading
All Harvey Pekar posts

A few words from Harvey Pekar

One of my favorite moments in the film American Splendor (dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) comes from Harvey Pekar's story "Alice Quinn" (words by Pekar, art by Sue Cavey). Pekar has been thinking about a college classmate and "all the decades of people" he has known:

The more I thought, the more I felt like crying. Life seemed so sweet and so sad, and so hard to let go of in the end. But hey, man, every day is a brand-new deal, right? Just keep on working and something's bound to turn up.

Leave Me Alone!, a jazz opera by Pekar and Dan Plonsey, streams from Oberlin College tomorrow night, 8:00 EST.

Related reading
All Harvey Pekar posts

Harvey Pekar, opera collaborator

Harvey Pekar is writing a libretto:

Pekar and former Cleveland Heights jazz saxophonist Dan Plonsey will premiere Leave Me Alone! on Jan. 31 at Oberlin College's Finney Chapel. The performance will be webcast. . . .

Pekar has a simple reason for accepting the job with the Real Time Opera Company, a New Hampshire-based performing-arts organization formed in 2002 to promote new opera.

"The Real Time Opera Company offered me money to write the libretto for an opera, so I figured 'Why not?'" Pekar said. "These days, I hate to turn money down."

Harvey Pekar teams with saxophonist to stage jazz opera (The Plain Dealer)

Read more:

Leave Me Alone! (Real Time Opera)

Related posts
Harvey Pekar on life and death
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

[Note to the Real Time Opera webmaster: "Streamed Live 1/31/2009 8 PM" will leave many people wondering when to watch. Please, add the time zone. Thanks!]

[Update: It's 8 EST.]

Harvey Pekar on life and death

Harvey Pekar, on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations last night:

"When you're dead, it robs life of many pleasures."

Bourdain's trip to Cleveland led to two online illustrated narratives:

Meet the Pekars, Part One, Part Two (Anthony Bourdain and Gary Daum)
The Shoot of No Reservations (Harvey Pekar and Gary Daum)

Related post
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Dear Harvey Pekar,

I'm writing to tell you how much I liked reading The Quitter. I've read the two American Splendor anthologies, Our Cancer Year, Our Movie Year, and Unsung Hero, and I've always found your observations about everyday life funny, rueful, and moving. I think though that The Quitter moves into more difficult territory. It's a courageous move to write the story of your early life as frankly as you have — your teenaged effort to establish your toughness, and the various failed attempts at work and schooling that followed. The overall story reminds me of Proust's In Search of Lost Time: the mistakes and missteps turn out to be the materials of your vocation as a writer.

Your collaborations with R. Crumb are my favorites, but Dean Haspiel's art is beautiful and complementary, especially in the way it suggests shadowy brooding, in both the past and present.

Will an enlightened publisher someday put out a collection of your writing on jazz, supplemented perhaps by interviews? I'd welcome a Harvey Pekar Reader.

I hope these words find you in domestic, financial, and creative happiness.

All best wishes,

Michael Leddy

The Quitter (Amazon)

About Harvey Pekar (harveypekar.com)
Harvey Pekar (Wikipedia)
American Splendor (Wikipedia)
Archive of Harvey Pekar's reviews (Austin Chronicle)
Archive of Harvey Pekar's reviews (Weekly Wire)

Related post
On Unsung Hero

Covering v. uncovering

Some dedicated decluttering of my workspace (inspired by Merlin Mann's example) yielded two nice finds today: Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, which I bought last fall and then placed upon a stack of books (which continued to grow), and, sitting in a file tray, a page with some thoughts on the idea of "covering" a century or half-century of literature in a college semester:

When I think about what the word cover is supposed to mean, I think of the joke scenario of tourists rushing from one landmark or museum to another, determined to "see" (or better, "have seen") each one so that they can cross it off their list and get on to something else. But the desire to "cover" or "get things done" is antithetical to genuine appreciation of places or works of the imagination. (And I'm reminded that one of the meanings of cover is "to hide from sight or knowledge.") The real work of seeing might be thought of as a matter of uncovering, which takes time and extended attention. That's the mindset of the museum-goer who looks at just a handful of works and leaves the museum having had an authentic experience of looking at art. And who then keeps looking, again and again.

Another decluttering post
Notary Public

Teunously related post
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Graphic novels in Booth

Booth Library recently purchased a great many graphic novels and comics-related books. “Graphic novel” is a strange term, as graphic novels are often nowhere near novels in their length and narrative complexity. I like the term “picture book,” because it’s straightforward and accurate, but “picture book” usually refers to children’s books, especially those for younger kids who don’t yet read “chapter books.”

Anyway, here are three books that are now back in the library and that I’d enthusiastically recommend. You can find the library’s stash of graphic novels in the New Books area near the Periodicals desk.

Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest: A True Story: You might know Raymond Briggs as the author-artist of the well-known children’s book The Snowman. This book is the story of his parents’ lives, from the 1920s to their deaths in the 1970s. Beautiful art, great honesty, and the happiness and sadness with which life goes on, generation after generation.
GraFX CT788.B7742 B75 1999

Harvey Pekar and David Collier, Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill: I love Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical American Splendor series and the movie it inspired. This installment of American Splendor is different, documenting not Pekar’s life but that of Robert McNeill, a Vietnam veteran and co-worker. McNeill’s story is one of bravery, fear, and luck, both good and bad. I’m moved by Pekar’s determination to “sing” the story of this unsung hero—the same impulse to memorialize that runs through Homer’s poetry of war. Several panels show Pekar listening to his friend and writing it all down.
GraFX PN6727.P44 467 2003x

Bryan Talbot, The Tale of One Bad Rat: Helen, a young woman in contemporary England, flees her father’s sexual abuse for life on the streets and, later, in the country. All along, her life-story eerily intersects with that of Beatrix Potter, author of Helen’s favorite books. The Tale of One Bad Rat is the most imaginatively plotted graphic novel that I’ve seen.
GraFX PN6727 .T34 1995x