The Quitter

by Harvey Pekar, Dean Haspiel (Illustrator), Dean Haspiel (Artist)

Overview

""Pekar's most poignant and satisfying effort to date."—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW"Dean Haspiel. . . .performs with virtuoso flair in THE QUITTER"—THE NEW YORKER"Brutally honest."—ROLLING STONE★"A searingly honest memoir. . . . Pekar's work dignifies the struggle of the average man."—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred In this virtuoso graphic novel, Harvey Pekar — whose American Book Award-winning series American Splendor was the basis for the celebrated film of the same name — tells the story of his troubled teen years for the first time, when he would beat up any kid who looked at him wrong just to win the praise of his peers. And when he failed to impress, whether on the football team, in math class, in the Navy or on the job, he simply gave up. A true tour-de-force, THE QUITTER is the universal tale of a young man's search for himself through the frustrations, redemptions and complexities of ordinary life.With gritty, atmospheric artwork by indie-comics luminary Dean Haspiel (American Splendor, Opposable Thumbs), THE QUITTER is both Pekar's funniest and most heart-wrenching work yet, an unforgettable graphic novel for all those, like Pekar, who have tried, failed and lived to quit another day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401203993
Publisher:	DC Comics
Publication date:	11/01/2005
Edition description:	Not appropriate for children
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	7.25(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Cleveland, Ohio native Harvey Pekar is best known for his autobiographical slice-of-life comic book series American Splendor, a first-person account of Pekar’s downtrodden life. The series has been published on an approximately annual basis since 1976. In 1987, Pekar was honored with the American Book Award for the series. The series was the inspiration for the film starring Paul Giamatti.

Dean Haspiel is the creator of the Eisner Award-nominated Billy Dogma and the webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE. He has drawn comics for The New York Times, DC/Vertigo, Marvel Comics, Dark Horse, Scholastic, and Toon Books among others. He is best known for his collaborations with Harvey Pekar on The Quitter and with Jonathan Ames on The Alcoholic and the HBO series Bored to Death. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

Graphic novel fans need no longer speculate about "the missing years of Harvey Pekar." In The Quitter, the author of the American Book Award-winning series American Splendor tells the story of his troubled teenage years. This book-length autobiographical comic presents the enigmatic, sometimes self-destructive Pekar as a self-doubting work-in-progress.

Pekar’s downbeat chronicle of his life, “American Splendor,” has achieved classic status, but this memoir of his early years is less consistently effective. Pekar is a master of moments captured in a few frames, and his talent seems less suited to a longer narrative. Still, he retains his ability to make the reader sympathize and wince, as when his Communist mother doesn’t understand his need for emotional support after some black kids beat him up. He writes about becoming resigned to boring jobs, wiping out of the Navy, worrying about money. “I still wonder today how I’m going to get by the next several years,” he says, and the book is really an acknowledgment that sometimes all a person can do, his whole life, is get by.

The New Yorker

Pekar's work, memorialized in the movie American Splendor, is an ongoing chronicle of his life in all its quotidian glory. Until now, he's only written nonfiction vignettes of his life as a jazz-loving slacker. The strength of Pekar's work is in his depiction of moments, but you have to read a great deal of it to understand the overall arc. This autobiographical full-length comic amends that problem, providing the missing overview: a searingly honest memoir of a smart but troubled boy who depends on quitting any time he might fail-a strategy that eventually leads to a near-nervous breakdown after he joins the navy. But Pekar doesn't dwell on his anxiety with the look-at-me tantrums of Philip Roth or Woody Allen-he's not that indulgent. Pekar's frequent artistic collaborator Haspiel provides the square-jawed, nebbishy characters, drawn with a fat, '60s line, giving a sharp-edged sense of the frustration and tension of an immigrant midcentury boyhood. This book is full of the deeply flawed but sympathetic characters that populate Pekar's work: his hard-working but oblivious parents, an overrated tough guy Pekar beats up, the jazz writer who gives him an outlet away from being a street tough. Pekar's work dignifies the struggle of the average man, and this book shows how that dignity is earned. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Pekar digs deep into his childhood to find the roots of his desperate fear of failure. Anyone who's read even a few pages of Pekar's voluminous ongoing graphic biography, American Splendor, knows that they're not dealing with a happy man. What they might be a little taken aback to learn, after reading this book, is just how exceptionally angry he is. This is a guy who grew up using his fists almost as often as his tirade-prone mouth. Given a bright, dramatic graphic treatment by Haspiel, this depicts Pekar growing up after World War II in Mount Pleasant, a Jewish and Italian Cleveland neighborhood that was becoming predominantly African-American. Pekar, just about the only white kid on the street, routinely gets into street fights. By the time he gets to high school, far from developing a sensitive artistic temperament, all he wants is to be a fighter, and he goes out of his way looking for guys to wallop. At the same time, his crippling insecurities start to take hold, and he begins to sabotage himself time and again, all to avoid failure. Once out in the working world, he keeps screwing around and acting the clown, behavior that could come as a surprise to those familiar only with his more dour later work (Pekar, it seems, wasn't always a grumpy old man). Eventually, the more familiar elements of his life are brought together: the brief flirtation with beatnik hipsterdom, the series of dead-end jobs, the continual, torturous worry about money and respect. It's all handled with Pekar's usual self-mocking, breezy forthrightness, as though he's got no time to mess around by playing nice. One frame shows him peering anxiously into his mailbox, wondering, "Boy, I'd a thought someone would'vewritten me a letter about my new book by now."A lean and angry work, anchored by a mellowing sense of self-discovery.

Kirkus Reviews