this is a thread for snippets from comic books by Harvey Pekar and or Robert Crumb
A fun exercise would be to imagine what Harvey Pekar would be doing if he was writing today rather than in the 70s. Would he have more success being published? Less? All I can say on the subject is if depicting human relations earnestly was at risk of being deemed unpopular or “chauvinistic” in the 70s, then today it is outright unacceptable. You don’t see Pekars published by the Big 5 today, or by any mainstream outlet, for [reasons which everyone is now well aware of]( https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/paperback-vibrators-and-the-pragmatic). You find them on the internet in forums and unsavoury nooks – nooks decidedly incellish. You find them on Frogtwitter and 4chan’s /lit/ board. Or maybe they stay off the internet all together and write nothing at all. I don’t want to devolve this piece into a juvenile “If he were alive TODAY, he’d be on MY side” screed, but I can’t help think, reading American Splendor, of Harvey as one of those dissidents whose opinions are calculated to outrage the largest amount of people, the most amount of apparatchiks you can while you’re still alive. Maybe when you’ve been ostracised for long enough, any ticket to acceptance will seem like a personal betrayal, and you dig your heels only deeper into contrarianism. I’m reminded of an exchange that happened on air: “You wanna know what my politics are, Dave? I’m a strident leftist!” “Well, Harvey, I coulda guessed half of that.”
>Men from the 70s think like men from the 70s Now let's do men from the 30s.
>>1498 I think it's fairly obvious they'd be gooners and the modern R. Crumb / Harvey Pekar are on the VR headset in the goon cave. The only reason why these guys were making comics in the first place is because (a) it made them a bit of money and (b) they didn't have the means to live out their sexual ambitions IRL. In 2025, (a) there's less money than ever in alt-comics, and (b) the easier and more intense way to experience a fantasy life is through techno hyperreality.
They only still get passed around because people are deeply nostalgic over physical media and art and this is the alternative to 2000s webcomic and anime-derived digital art
>>1518 The experience of expressing fantasy through an artistic outlet is very different from experiencing fantasy in a passive, observational way; personalities otherwise destined for the former can get sidetracked in the latter, but the two are different in kind. Plus, Crumb was a certified gooner already. In the Zwigoff documentary an ex says he was busting 4 times a day, 365.
Harvey Pekar did not live in a fantasy world. He wrote realist fiction that was quite literally derived word for word from his daily interactions. Did you even read the excerpts? By the time he printed his first comic in 1976 he wasn't really a gooner, if ever. He was on his second wife and anyway his comics apart from issue one which is insecure in its need to provide industry standard fan service every few panels, is not particularly sexual. I think you're wrong about Crumb too. But I won't get into that. Yes he jerked off to his own comix, but anyone who knows artists knows that the drive for creation which he had cannot be satisfied by watching porn. They had porn and porn gooners back then too. Read The Sun Dog by Stephen King. The pawn shop keeper in that has collections of porno tapes. Also the point about nostalgia is nonsense - I discoverd Crumb maybe 5 years ago and Harvey a few months ago. I'm in my twenties.
>he wasn't really a gooner, if ever. He was on his second wife Incredible, you actually typed those two sentences right next to each other lmao You could see the spot where you wanted to type "only" as in "He was only on his second wife". Why exactly do you have such an investment in white knighting for these thankfully long irrelevant proto-gooners?
I love it when men write this way and just how much they betray without even thinking. Only on his second wife, like she's a motorbike or something. Good god.