Many wonderful words have been written about Harvey Pekar in the last few days. Today, I’d like to lead with a quote from ITCH’s chief crazy person, Craig Yoe:

I was near the front of the line to get into an antique book sale in Cleveland, in the very early 1970s. I heard the guy behind me mention to his companion that he was going to be working on a comic book venture with Robert Crumb. Crumb was/is my hero. I whirled around and introduced myself-to Harvey Pekar. Introduced myself to the guy who soon foisted American Splendor onto the world, and, in doing so, went to the front of the line of literary comics, hell, he invented them. Everyone else got in line behind him.

In yesterday’s installment of our interview with Paul Buhle, he reflected briefly on what comics meant to Harvey Pekar. Today, Paul gives us a glimpse into Harvey’s politics.

Noting that his father was a Talmudic scholar, do you think that provides a way to frame his perspective?

I don’t think so, except that his parents admired education and were pained when he dropped out of college. I think it’s more true to say that his mother was a reader of The Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper, and was a political intellectual in her own way. He said his father was so busy with the store and with praying that he was just never around, whereas his mother was a deep influence on him. And his mother would have been very much at home with Harvey Kurtzman’s mother, who was also a devoted reader of The Daily Worker.

How did Harvey keep his political leftism intact and inspired in the America of the last 20-30 years?

Well, you know, in both cases, the Kurtzmans and the Pekars, they were really FDR. They were to the left of FDR, but they were big believers in the New Deal. It wasn’t like they thought the workers were going to take power, or any of that kind of thing. And The Daily Worker was faithful to that position at the time, from 1934-1950. So we don’t look at it quite as you might from the viewpoint of a radical New Leftist or SDS-ers like me. But apart from that, he was never an activist in anything. So that when the 60s came, he was observing things and thinking about things, but he wasn’t going to anything. And as many left-leaning Jewish Americans, he had a pretty low opinion of public awareness. In the Students For A Democratic Society comic he has himself say, “Average is dumb.” [Interviewer laughs out loud.] So you know, Reaganism horrified him, but it didn’t surprise him.

Do you see a strain of despair in his work?

Oh, very definitely. I’m just trying to write now in The Forward about urbanism being at the core experience of Tuli Kupferberg, who lived his life in the Lower East Side, and Harvey. Because they believed, like Jane Jacobs and others, that city life was real life. Finally, the Lower East Side improved and became gentrified and tossed everybody out. But Cleveland just kept decaying. Harvey grew up with those neighborhoods falling apart, and was unimpressed by the suburbs of the rich. (He didn’t live in them, for one thing.) But basically that was despair in front of his eyes. He once said to me, he lived in the 60s and 70s in one neighborhood after another that was destined for urban removal.

Was that Jane Jacobs you mentioned?

Yes, the great exponent of urbanism and against automobilization. And Harvey drove, but like so many of us, he had a sense of despair of suburban transformation and abandonment of the inner cities.

There’s something so incredibly beautiful and compelling about daily life in his work, as you well know. In an interview with Ryan Claytor, he said that he hoped people would identify with his work in American Splendor. Do you think that worked? Do you think people identified with these stories?

Oh, gosh, I answered some other query yesterday or today by saying that more people heard about him through the movie than any other way. Way more people. Then they would read comics. But it’s almost like people thinking of Art Spiegelman as a Holocaust comic artist, and being unaware of anything else. And not too interested in anything else! That’s sort of an aside, but I’m not sure people really wished to identify with blue collar life in Cleveland. So do they identify with him? They may identify with him in the human emotional issues, without identifying with his life in the VA. Although it’s a perfectly natural white collar job. Sort of an average clerical white collar government job.

Tune in tomorrow when we close our series by talking with Paul about the art, and the artists.