Harvey Pekar Quotes

The comic page is dying; I didn't want to go with it.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.

I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, loving comic books, and they were much cartoonier. And then everything became super dark and muscular and airbrushed, and I stopped collecting comics.

Though to the average person that you'll meet on an airplane, if you tell them you draw comics, they'll still have sort of the same response - not like that's seeped into the culture at large, that comics are not just for kids.

Once we got going on the Fantagraphics version of Love and Rockets, our encouragement was constant. People wanted us to do more, do more. Thirty years later, here we are.

Comics were going down for the second time and here, all of a sudden, came this thing and for the next fifteen years, romance comics were about the top sellers in the field; they outsold everything.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

Comics are given serious attention now and I'm quite surprised. You see them reviewed in major newspapers and exhibited in serious museums. I wouldn't have predicted it.

I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.

I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.

It used to be that comic strips were the big thing, and comic books were toilet paper.

When I started in the comic book business, 'Art Of' books were strictly the provenance of the greats, like Rembrandt and Da Vinci. But times change, and so do attitudes. Now the comic is considered an art form, and I hope 'A Life in Words and Pictures' contributes a little to that art form's history.

Being able to work in comics at all - I know I came into it from a different medium, but I'd like to stay here. It's not like a weird touristy thing for me.

Comic books have gone mainstream. The audience is there.

Look, there's no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years, and for someone like me who's always tried to make a living at it, it's been great, I'm very grateful for it. But at the same time, it's not a subculture-y thing anymore; it's something that's in the New York Times and the New Yorker.

The people who worked in comics were terrific guys. I had a good association with them, and I enjoyed comics for that very reason.

Some people are worried about the future of comics and some people are busy building it. That latter group are my heroes.

The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.

I was fortunate that I was born in an era where comic books kind of grew up with me.

Most people don't realize that when we were producing 'Black Panther,' 'Quantum & Woody,' and 'Steel,' fairly few people were reading those titles. We were constantly threatened with cancellation.

It's a mystery to me why comics have been so despised for so long. Obviously, it has to do with the history of the medium - arising out of cheaply-reprinted booklets of newspaper strips, just out to make a quick buck, followed by mostly-crappy original work. It took a while for really talented artists to move into the comic-book world from the newspapers. It really is strange that even TV commercials got respect before comics did. I have never been able to figure it out.

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

As I see it, mainstream comics now speak only to the hardcore few who stayed; conversing in a weird, garbled, visual pig latin only they can understand - rendering the term 'mainstream' a hollow joke - while the true mainstream, the other 99.9% of the populace, find enjoyment elsewhere.