Dean Haspiel

Pekar has been writing about his life for so long that it's hard to read a new piece of his on its own terms - if there's a gap, you fill it in with what you already know. And he's always used a lot of gaps, writing about little moments here and there; he'd talk at length often enough, but it was like a tour guide who might stop at any moment and let you just watch things go by for a while. His one long book, [book: Our Cancer Year], had more or less the same rhythm, and it held together because of the intense experience it described (although Frank Stack's art, scruffy and flowing like one big sketchbook, helped too). The Quitter is a long story that doesn't hold together at all, partly because it tries so hard to be a seamless piece, but you can still pull it apart and enjoy some of the mess.

He rarely wrote about his pre-adult years in American Splendor; here he skips through them and pulls out episodes that fit his theme, with a frame of his present self saying more or less "This is my theme and here are some examples." The theme is his pattern of freaking out and abandoning various challenges, which seems pathological in some cases and pretty normal in others. There are some vivid stories in there, including a brief successful career in beating up other kids and a humiliating panic attack in a Navy laundry room. There are some great depictions of defective internal drama, like not being sure whether someone hit you on purpose but deciding you'd better hit them back just in case. And there's enough undramatic but particular stuff to give a feeling of organic life, all the seemingly random turns and false starts that somehow ended up at where you are now.

But the stories start and stop arbitrarily, dictated by the need to get on to the next example; the pacing within them is spotty too, dwelling for two pages on some trivial scene, then disposing of a major event in one panel or just in a sentence. The frame-narrator intrudes all the time to explain the transitions, so that when the subject occasionally changes without that segue, it seems like an editing error - and in some cases I think it might be, because there are a few captions that seem to assume you know about events he didn't actually mention. This book was published by DC/Vertigo, so you have a writer who's not used to working in a long form and an editor who's not used to working with realistic fiction; this is probably very unfair of me, but I wonder if DC just figured that Pekar's thing was rambling monologues and all they could see was that he was doing his thing.

I like [author: Dean Haspiel]'s art a lot (disclosure: he's a pal) and he's done some good American Splendor stories. His work in The Quitter is slick and he did his homework, but for once I didn't feel the life; the muscular line is too mismatched with the aimless script, except when it's too closely matched and just shows the exact same thing the caption is needlessly saying. (I love the cover unconditionally, though - it's a good joke if you've ever read The Spirit.)

My favorite panel in the book is when, after explaining again how fear and impatience have deflated his efforts, Harvey just looks at you and says, "And there are lots of people like me." At least on that one page, he knows the problem isn't that he's a mutant with magic failure powers in an epic tragedy; it's that we're all playing a game whose rules often result in pointless damage, and this damage makes us into obstacles for each other.… (meer)