Harvey Pekar's Cleveland

Starred review from February 27, 2012
The late Pekar celebrates, to the extent the obligatorily morose underground cartoonist was capable of celebrating anything, his hometown of Cleveland and the life he spent there. After a pocket history of that once great city, Pekar focuses on the period he lived through, a period that sadly came to an end in July 2010 with his death. Rambling but often insightful, and unafraid to show himself in an extremely uncomplimentary light, Pekar illustrates 70 years of recent history as seen through the eyes of one gloomy but talented pessimist. Despite his personal proclivities, Pekar occasionally comes close to visible enthusiasm for a city he clearly loved, warts and all, for his entire life; there is even the faintest hint of optimism that “the mistake by the lake” might someday regain its lost glory. Pekar’s insights are more than matched by Remnant’s art—although akin to the crosshatched realism of one of Pekar’s most acclaimed collaborators, R. Crumb, Remnant brings this very personal history to vibrant life with his own flair for the charm of the ordinary. With an introduction by Alan Moore and a short essay by Jimi Izrael, Cleveland will stand as a must-have volume in Pekar’s body of work.

Starred review from March 15, 2012
The late dean of autobiographical comics was a localist, who lived his entire life in Cleveland, Ohio, not because he thought it was the greatest place on earth but because it was there that he became and always could be himself. He spends the first third of this book telling the city's story, from tentative beginnings at the turn of the nineteenth century through initial modest growth to, after the Civil War, boomtown burgeoning as an industrial giant to inexorable, post-1960s decline as manufacturing fled elsewhere. Then he shifts focus to his own involvement with the city as he grew up, moved to different neighborhoods, worked and made friends with other Clevelanders, and weighed the city's strengths (parks, universities, sports teams, public library, orchestra, bookstores) and weaknesses, especially the racial polarization it shared with other midwestern industrial cities but suffered from more than most. He brings the story down to his last days, endearingly depicting himself advising ambitious, young comics creators on his front porch. One such artist, Remnant, cannily makes the whole book look as if he were channeling R. Crumb, which is entirely appropriate because Crumb created the template look that Pekar's other collaborators could not ignore. A must for graphic-novel, Americana, and localism buffs alike.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)