Harvey Pekar was een Amerikaanse schrijver van underground stripverhalen, vooral bekend van zijn autobiografische serie 'American Splendor'. Zijn werk duikt in het dagelijks leven van gewone mensen, waarbij een rauwe en eerlijke stijl behouden blijft. Pekar verkent thema's als werk, relaties en maatschappelijke problemen met scherp inzicht en humor. Zijn onderscheidende benadering van stripverhalen heeft generaties makers beïnvloed en een blijvende indruk achtergelaten in de literatuur.
American Splendor is the series that sparked a revolution in comics and brought graphic novels to the attention of post-adolescent readers everywhere. Here is the best of American Splendor and other comics by Harvey Pekar, including never-before-seen material.
It was they year of Desert Storm that Harvey Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, discovered Harvey had cancer. Pekar, a man who has made a profession of chronicling the Kafkaesque absurdities of an ordinary life - if any life is ordinary - suddenly found himself incapacitated. But he had a better-than-average chance to beat cancer and he took it - kicking, screaming and complaining all the way. The Pekar/Brabner coalition draws upon this and other trials to paint a portrait of a man beset with fears real and imagined - who survives.
In Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, one of the final graphic memoirs from the man who defined the genre, Harvey Pekar explores what it means to be Jewish and what Israel means to the Jews. Pekar’s mother was a Zionist by way of politics, his father by way of faith, and he inevitably grew up a staunch supporter of Israel. But as he became attuned to the wider world, Pekar began to question his parents’ most fundamental beliefs. This book is the full account of that questioning. Over the course of a single day in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Pekar and the illustrator JT Waldman wrestle with the mythologies passed down to them, weaving a personal and historical odyssey of uncommon wit and power. With an epilogue written by Joyce Brabner, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is an es- sential book for fans of Harvey Pekar and anyone interested in the past and future of the Jewish state.
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs would write their own masterpieces but taken together, as the Beats, they would also become a focal point for a literary explosion and a generation of revolution.
Es otro día más en la vida de Harvey Pekar... Pero, para Pekar, ningún día es solo "otro día más".
In The Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live come back to life through artwork as pulsatingly vibrant as the movement itself. Told by Harvey Pekar and his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and by a range of artists and writers, including feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper, The Beats takes us on a wild tour. From the Benzedrine-fueled antics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to the painting sessions of Jay DeFeo’s disheveled studio, from the jazz hipsters to beatnik chicks, from Chicago’s beatnik bistro to San Francisco’s famed City Lights bookstore, we see the storied era in all its incarnations.