I write scripts in storyboard fashion using stick figures, and thought balloons and word balloons and captions. Then I'll write descriptions of what scenes should look like and turn it over to the artist.
Harvey Pekar
Israel's creation was politically amazing and caused by a number of unusual events. And I understand. For centuries, Jews endured horrible suffering, and like other people, deserve the right to self-determination, but the way Israel is going now frightens me. Jews make awkward colonial overlords.
I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.
People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.
You can find heroism everyday, like guys working terrible jobs because they've got to support their families. Or as far as humor, the things I see on the job, on the street, are far funnier than anything you'll ever see on TV.
I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.
I have to be a freelance writer for the rest of my life, unless I get some kind of real lucky break. But other than that, I'll always have to work. I always worry about whether my stuff is going to get over. Will they like this, will they like that?
I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.
Everybody's like everybody else, and everybody's different from everybody else.
It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you.
The film's success so far involves winning a couple of prizes at Cannes and Sundance, and getting some very nice reviews in newspapers and magazines. That hasn't had a big impact on my life yet.
People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.
I'd like to see the comics' style expanded. I'd like to see artists synthesize traditional comics arts style with fine-arts styles or whatever. I like to see innovation. I don't like it when an art form becomes stagnant.
I don't mind if I show myself being cheap or unreasonable sometimes.
I guess I wanted to show people, among other things, that you don't have to be a hero to get through cancer. You can be a craven coward and get through. You have to stay on your medication and take your treatments, that's all.
I don't write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I'd get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.
The way I write is, I listen to things in my head, and then I copy them down. I memorize conversations and things like that; I seem to be able to do that pretty well. I suppose in that respect there's some improvisation, although I work over the stuff after I've got it down on paper.
I want to keep doing as much work as I can, and I want to keep the level high. I'm wondering if something is going to happen to me to screw it up.
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
I wake up every morning in a cold sweat, regardless of how well things went the day before. And put that I said that in a somewhat but not completely tongue-in-cheek way.
I concentrate, more than I think virtually any comic book artist has in the past, on the so-called mundane details of every day life - quotidian life. What happens to a person during a working day, marital relations, and stuff like that.
Misery loves company. There's a lot to that.
Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s.
Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.
I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.
I'm kind of concerned about 'Ego & Hubris' because I'm thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they'll wonder, 'Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?'
I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.
American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.
I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.
I continue to be disappointed that people don't try and diversify the kind of work they are doing in comics.
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 met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.
I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.
I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.
I thought I had a great opportunity when I started doing my comic book in 1972. I thought there was so much territory to work in.
I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes.
I'd been familiar with comics, and I'd collected 'em when I was a kid, but after I got into junior high school, there wasn't much I was interested in.
I'm a guy that likes to sit in one place.
I've probably had my day in the sun. I think I've influenced a lot of comic book writers.
It didn't take long to establish myself, as far as people thinking my work was good. They liked it from the start.
It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.
It's extremely seldom that anybody wants me to change what I've written about them. Generally I portray them in a good light, if they're friends.
Letterman... he got his problems. We don't get along too well.
My work looks like a comic book in form, but it's not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.
Plays have been made of my comics.
There hasn't been enough change in comics to suit me. I don't know why exactly.
I'm always shook up and nervous and I've got the hospital record to prove it.
As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.
I like to go back over history and check out what people have written and whether I agree with it or not.
Some of the most valuable stuff I do has to do with my dissenting from the general opinion about people in movements.
