Customer Reviews

American Splendor: Unsung Hero

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Harvey Pekar has done it again. He tells the story of Robert McNeill, who was a black teenaged Marine in Vietnam. Harvey uses McNeill's own words to convey the frequent horrors, and infrequent pleasures, of being in the Vietnam War. The story is ably illustrated by David Collier in stark black and white. Robert McNeill may have been just another marine, but Harvey Pekar has a gift for making ordinary life seem extraordinary, and he succeeds again here.

Pekar's early work was outstanding -- and it is good to see that with writing like this, and "Ego and Hubris", he is seeking new ways of expressing his central ideas.

One of his central ideas is intense focus on the everyday, in a kind of Naturalist style, and now he is moving away from recording the inner/outer battles of HIS OWN day to day life -- and looking closer at those around him, other "ordinary" people with stories to tell, in a full length book format.

This is nothing new: Pekar always gave us short, anecdotal one page stories about his workmates -- This book and "Ego and Hubris" differ , however, in that the entire book is devoted to the insights, mistakes,wisdom, saintliness, "devilishness" and foolishness of others, not focussing on Pekar himself at all.

The everyday may be too humdrum, too mundane, too banal for many authors to even consider writing about -- but not for Pekar.

The struggles of every day life, its tragedies, wonders, great characters, annoying characters,high points and low points, are all the very stuff Pekar considers central to a kind of "enlightenment" about the human condition -- In Pekar's literary "universe", bearing with the banal acts as a kind of "opening of doors" to a deeper knowledge of self.

This book concentrates on the life of one of Harvey's workmates, who survived the Vietnam experience. Like many other "ordinary people", society has apparently, considered his experiences to be of little importance,to have little value to speak of.

These are the very people Pekar considers to have something important to say, and the book records the central character's struggles through high school years, onto his mistakes in love, and onto his experiences on the battle field.

A great book in the Chekovian tradition, with a little Raymond Carver influence too, perhaps.

Crumb and Pekar still rule the graphic novel field, as this book shows -- essential reading for readers of short stories and comics everywhere.

Comics have been in decline now for about a decade,recycling old ideas and packaging them as the new, often relying on poor,shallow stories, hiding behind attractive packaging and design.

In the face of such a decline,Harvey just gets better.

In my view, for the LONG TERM readers of Pekar this is a better purchase than "The Quitter", which recycles older ideas from his earlier works.