A Quote by Harvey Pekar

Plays have been made of my comics. — © Harvey Pekar
Plays have been made of my comics.
Glenn and I were listening to a radio show in the car, and he said, "Glass Eye Pix should do radio plays." I loved the idea of working in a different medium. We've made comics, books, movies, video games, models, advent calendars, why wouldn't we try audio plays?
I am new to superhero comics, though growing up I read Archie comics, religiously. I've been doing a lot of catching up, reading what's out there and it's been wonderful to see what's going on in contemporary comics.
I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. I was drawing comics all the time and didn't have the time or energy to do anything else. That got to me in the end. I never made enough money from comics to be able to take a break and do something else. Now I just can't stand comics. . . . I wish my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.
There are a lot of good comics, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics - there are black comics that work only black crowds, gay comics that do only gay crowds, and southern comics that only work down South, and so on with Asian, Latino, Indian, midgets, etc. The previous generation's comics were better because they had to make everybody laugh.
I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers, so any way people read comics is fine with me. Digital is just helping people who might not necessarily have access to comics help them; that's great.
Anything really well-made has the effect of making you want to do what you do-better. Abrams has always made very beautiful books. It's exciting to see this same excellence applied to the presentation of comics. Abrams ComicArts shows comics are stepping out of vaudeville and into Carnegie Hall-but the Marx Brothers will always be welcome!
I've been trying to make this argument that digital comics and print comics are both art, but there are subtle differences.
Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.
In early comics, you see the amazing awkwardness and bizarre reasoning in the storyline, and it's because comics hadn't really been invented yet. There was no format for them to follow. They were just making it up. So I try to incorporate that kind of awkwardness in my comics quite frequently, which is odd. In some ways, I can't be as awkward as I'd like. But I do think that's one way in which my comics are unusual, because I will try to make the artwork look bad, occasionally.
The comics I made from 1990 to 1997 were largely based in vaguely urban, vaguely dystopic settings because that was my reference point for comics storytelling in general.
I've been a fan of comics, but I've never been, like, a diehard: like, I've never really owned a bunch of comics or anything. But I've always been drawn to them and read them.
I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.
We were always drawing comics as kids. My brother Charles made me draw comics. I was very much under his domination. He was actually a much stronger artistic visionary than I was.
When I was a small child, I partially learned to read with comics, in particular with 'Scamp,' about the Lady and the Tramp's male child. That was the prime comic that made me fall in love with comics as a kid.
The good news is that the comics field is small enough and informal enough that once you have made a comic, you have achieved your dreams: you have broken into the comics industry. The problem with breaking in, though, is that staying in is harder.
The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.
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