Or, “cranky young man wonders what the hell is wrong with everyone else.”

This odd little autobiographical book appeared during an odd little time in U.S. comics. The Art Spiegelman modernist gang was vying for respectability, and had good reviews and production values, but hadn’t yet crossbred with the last wave of undergrounds to form today’s small-press scene. Superhero publishers were coasting on the buzz from a few innovative books and timidly venturing into other genres. And then down in the weeds where no one looks but total geeks, there were a bunch of unconnected weirdos each with a black-and-white series in traditional flimsy comic format, each with a different idea of what alternative comics were. Many of these, even more than today, decided to write about themselves; Spiegelman’s Maus was part of the reason, but American Splendor was lurking in the weeds before that, and Justin Green pioneered the “incredibly embarrassing confessional” version even earlier. Anyway, you could take this kind of thing in all different directions, rude or neurotic or hard-boiled, it all seemed like fair game. Some stayed in for the long haul and became important artists, like Julie Doucet and Chester Brown; some produced a brief run of memorable work, like Dennis Eichhorn; some just did one interesting thing and then more or less stopped. This is one of those.

The book is about young David, aspiring illustrator in Manhattan from Portland in the ‘80s, pretentious and needy and horny, age 20 going on 45. (Autobio-review note: I first saw this book when I was 20 and in Manhattan, but after one look, I couldn’t stand to read it; I identified too much, except he knew how to get laid a lot.) The “love” in the title is pretty much sex and arguments, with a series of careless and/or damaged women - almost everyone David knows is as selfish as he is, though some of them have a better grasp of the world. He bounces around between cities and beds and is constantly surprised by betrayals the reader sees coming a mile away, including his own. Once he gets into something like a feasible relationship, the book slows down and then leaves off in a hurry, with a postscript to let you know he’s now wiser and married.

This is all nearly as awful as it sounds, except that it’s extremely well written and drawn, and funny - basically a compassionate-but-merciless satire of a particular floating world, a little like Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers and nearly as good, lacking only a plot. Chelsea has a great ear for dialogue, using it to sketch out the characters right away, and as obnoxious as they are, he gives you enough of their point of view to make it more than just “David vs. the Crazy Girls.” And even without a plot, there’s a good sense of time going by as other people in his crowd move on with their lives. It’s all well supported by the art, which looked unusual then and still does: realistic and precise with a great individuality to the faces and bodies and environments, and skillfully laid out, but just unpolished enough to make it look like something made in an obsessive spree by a young guy not sure of what tools to use.

In one funny scene that might or might not have been intended as self-satire, David tries to sell an early version of his comic to a magazine that’s clearly supposed to be Spiegelman’s Raw, and he can’t understand why those snotty elitists won’t publish his work. He doesn’t get that they’re just doing a totally different thing—his story would’ve looked ridiculously out of place in Raw. But there was a lot of that mistake going around then, the idea that “good comics” was just one big genre that would all fit together somehow. I’m glad it’s not like that, and if misfit critters may hop out of the weeds with just one story to tell, I say bring them on.

The Quitter
Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel
2006 (read 2007)

Or, “cranky old man wonders what the hell is wrong with him.”

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, 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 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.