Well, I never did find Jim Romenesko ice fishing, but I found the flu. So last night abed, I had two friendly companions—the DVD player and a magazine. I’ve had a copy of the movie “American Splendor” gathering dust on top of the TV for months, and I grabbed the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was an interesting coincidence.
To refresh your memory and mine, “American Splendor” is about Harvey Pekar, the Ohio working stiff who authored a famous comic book series of the same title. During one of those times when comics and graphic novels become fashionable, Random House published an anthology of the first numbers in 1986—ten years after American Splendor No.1 was pulped. In the normal course of publicity glad-handing and ass-grabbing, and glad-handed ass-grabbing, Pekar was invited to be a guest on David Letterman’s popular television show. Letterman found Pekar a raw, entertaining, and combative guest, and kept inviting him back.
Pekar never had much patience for anyone, and it didn’t take long for him to rebel against “the American Dream” which Letterman believed he was offering Pekar—in other words, anomic midwestern working stiff gets rare opportunity to become world-famous TV star, not unlike the Ball State graduate himself. It ended badly between the two of them, in part because Pekar just doesn’t like people that much, and because a few TV appearances with the cynical, mocking David Letterman shows just how devalued the Warholian “fifteen minutes” of fame has become. Also, Pekar seems to prefer his life of relative obscurity and subterranean credibility. It’s both his muse and his material. He couldn’t stop being himself just to be a celebrity.
Here in my sickbed, I say it was a coincidence, because now I am looking at last week’s New Yorker, and in it there is a nice little comic feature by R. Crumb and his wife Aline. Pekar and Crumb were old friends from Cleveland, and it was Crumb who originally encouraged Pekar to write comics, though Pekar had (and has) no facility as an artist.
As “American Splendor” makes clear, Crumb was an underground sensation as early as the mid sixties, making a decent living, hanging out with bohemians, moving to San Francisco, and generally being himself a substantial, life-supporting satellite of that whole Merry Prankster, Summer of Love, hippy-dippy cultural moment.
And now, forty years later, he makes the pages of the world’s greatest magazine.
Am I the only one who finds that a little depressing? I realize Crumb has been in previous issues, and I realize that the New Yorker has hardly been sitting on its thumbs–having within the past twelve months published full spreads by, for example, Chris Ware. (Credit Bob Mankoff with being a true hero of the revolution, though we’re not sure anyone has noticed, even when it is a National Book Award winner. I mean, you know, like who really cares about the “graphic novel” category anyway?) So it certainly is not the New Yorker’s fault–nor even David Letterman’s fault. But there is a persistent, aggravated tension between mainstream media and comic artists, and I wonder if it can ever be fully overcome.
Is there something inherently anti-social about serious, adult-oriented comics, something that causes an inevitable backlash and fall-out and back-slide into obscurity? That prevents the final big breakthrough into mass culture that seems to be the forever just-out-of-reach apotheosis? (And what would that look like, anyway? A Dan Clowes page in every newspaper and magazine in the land?) It’s a wonderful and unique art form, but can it be a billion-dollar industry like film or video games? We’re tempted to say that its greatest naturalist pioneers—Crumb and Pekar—were too steeped in hippy paranoia and politics to ever allow themselves to be embraced by “Big Media.” Or maybe they just have not translated to other mechanical requirements as gracefully as others.
Well, the fact that I am watching a major motion picture about a filing clerk from Cleveland should tell you something. That I am reading a three-page feature drawn by R. Crumb in the world’s most prestigious magazine is also another clue. We call it the First Corollary to the Thermodynamic Law of Pastry Acquisition and Consumption (alternate, informal name: Letterman’s Razor): In rare cases, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too—but you may have to do it without anyone else noticing or caring.
On the other hand, y’know, comics are still basically for kids, right?—The Editor in Cheese
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