Huntington, West Virginia 'On the Fly'

April 25, 2011
One of the final books written by the late Pekar, this volume collects five short pieces, mostly relating to a trip he made to West Virginia for a speaking engagement at a book festival: a series of anecdotes from an eccentric, dreadlocked limo driver; a tale about an unsuccessful attempt by one of Pekar's acquaintances to make a vintage diner successful in Cleveland; and so on. At his best, Pekar could find the stuff of engaging comics in the small routines and oddities of the everyday, and there's some potentially interesting oral history hereâalthough not a lot of it cries out for visual interpretation, since most of these stories consist of expository dialogue that describes exactly what we see in McClinton's drawings. But the book falls flat when Pekar turns his focus away from his interviewees and onto himself, including endless, tedious, very familiar scenes in which he's talking on the phone, describing his career, and carping about money. This is far from Pekar's strongest work, and McClinton's artwork doesn't help much: her stylized textures and stripped-down renderings mesh uncomfortably with the photo-reference approach to drawing that often formed the basis of Pekar's comics.

February 15, 2011

This posthumously published collection of narratives provides footnotes on the life immortalized through American Splendor.

The pride of Cleveland and patriarch of the autobiographical comic-book narrative worked with New York artist Summer McClinton on pieces that generally reflect his life through the stories of others whom he found interesting. The opener, "Hollywood Bob," tells the story of Cleveland's limo driver to the stars (and to Pekar), an ex-con who ended up befriending many of the famous people he drove (including Meg Ryan, who doesn't look familiar in McClinton's rendering, and Leslie Nielsen, who gave the driver a "fart machine"). Then there's a series of narratives on "Tunc & Eileen" and their many changes of jobs and partners before finding each other and telling their stories to Pekar. "Neighborhood Spark Plug" is the most compelling of the narratives, detailing the life of one of Pekar's buddies and his ill-fated adventures in trying to restore and relocate a diner before returning to an expanded version of his toy store with delights for adult collectors. The longest and last piece is the title story, recounting Pekar's trip to a book festival in West Virginia, after the interest from the film version of American Splendor had died down (and his speaking fee had dropped from the thousands into the hundreds). Like much of the collection, it's a minor slice of life that doesn't really build to any particular point, except as the book reflects the narrator's obsession "to get the details of the story right."

Pekar fans will enjoy this minor work from a major figure.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2011
Pekars last years seemed his most productive, with at least 11 books he wrote, coauthored, or edited since 2004. When he died last summer, these four stories were finished. All drawn by first-time Pekar collaborator McClinton, they profile people Pekar met through his long-standing interests in comics, jazz, and collectors. He appears in each, though only the title story is primarily autobiographical, the record of a speaking engagement requiring much more time than flying between his Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home and the next state over would seem to warrant. He met a noncomics-fan fan of his work, who squired him to the site of his speech; a woman comics-shop owner; and her gentleman friend, who put him in the movie he was making. With remarkable economy, he makes each of them as distinctive and real as, at greater length, he does the single subjects of the other three pieces: a hood turned chauffeur, a married couple with immensely varied backgrounds, and a toy-store entrepreneur fulfilling his dream of running a diner. A characteristically down-to-earth, comradely career-closer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)