and a photocomix profile by Seth Kushner, the 25th episode of his pioneering CulturePOP series. The 25-page piece features photos of and an interview with Harvey, plus photos of, quotes from, and illustrations by his collaborators: Josh Neufeld (artist, American Splendor), Dean Haspiel (artist, The Quitter), Ted Hope (American Splendor film producer), Joseph Remnant (artist, Harvey Pekar’s CLEVELAND) Shari Springer-Berman & Robert Pulcini (directors, American Splendor film) and Michael Taylor (script supervisor). Plus, Joyce Brabner, Harvey’s widow and collaborator talks about her plan to have a monument erected to Harvey in Cleveland, as shown in the excerpt below:

So many fond memories, but we’re especially proud and blessed to have celebrated Harvey’s 70th birthday with him in person. As a surprise present, over 100 artists drew Harvey Heads for our online gallery, and we threw a helluva party for him in Cleveland to open the Pekar Project exhibition.

Happily there are plenty of primo Pekar comics still to come. There’s the just-released Huntington, West Virginia “On The Fly,” a wonderful collection of biographical novellas illustrated by Summer McClinton; and upcoming: YIDDISHKEIT edited by Pekar and Paul Buhle; Not The Israel My Parents Promised Me illustrated by virtuoso vunderkind JT Waldman; Harvey Pekar’s CLEVELAND, illustrated by our own Joseph Remnant, and here on the Pekar Project, the last two parts of Pekar & Rushkoff: How Life Got Incorporated (read Part 1, Part 2) illustrated by Sean Pryor. Plus, Joyce Brabner is working on some TBA graphic novel projects of her own.

If you are going to San Diego Comic-Con, join Joyce Brabner, Joseph Remnant, Danielle Batone, Charlie Kochman and myself for the “REMEMBERING HARVEY PEKAR” panel, Saturday July 23, 1pm, room7AB. We encourage your to bring your memories of Harvey and share them.

To dive deeper into the heady notions they kibbitz about, check out Rushkoff’s book Life Inc: How the World Became A Corporation and How to Take It Back. In a move foreshadowed in Pekar & Rushkoff Part 1, Rushkoff recently eschewed corporate publishing and went indie with his new book, Program or be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age.

Pryor first illustrated Pekar in “Gauntlet of Rock” a story for Royal Flush Magazine, and has since extruded, in addition to the Pekar/Rushkoff series, three exquisite Pekar Project stories, “Searchin,’” “Jungle Music,” and “Two Working Stiffs.”

From "Jewish Chops" by Harvey Pekar & Vanessa Davis

So our man has passed away and sadly didn’t get to see finished art to a handful of completed scripts, including guest artist Vanessa Davis’s charming rendering of “Jewish Chops,” here just in time for Rosh Hashanah. Davis, an outstanding autobiographical cartoonist in her own right, has a new collection out, Make Me A Woman, which was just awarded Heeb Magazine’s “Best Comic of 5770” and she recently created a lovely Harvey Pekar tribute for Tablet.

from "Untitled" by Harvey Pekar & Rick Parker

Harvey dug Rick Parker’s pencils for the previous strip, “UNTITLED“, but didn’t see the final with its, in retrospect, eerily evocative blue tones. Likewise, he was very pleased by Sean Pryor’s all-cylinders art to Part One of Pekar & Rushkoff Kibbitzin’ How Life Got Incorporated. Sean is busy drawing the remaining three parts and we’ll be presenting those, as well as additional stories being drawn by the team from finished scripts over the next few months. In the meantime, please peruse the Pekar Project archives of over 20 stories written by Harvey Pekar (RIP).

You can order your Pekar tee or hoodie here. For more on the making of the Harvey Heads (spearheaded by Pekar Project editor, Jeff Newelt), and a list of the nine artists who contributed to the T-shirt, read an earlier post. Above: a postcard I received from artist Rick Reilly. Rick’s Pekar tee had just arrived and he was moved to record that moment in the best way he knows how.

Me & Pekar. When you work with him, you wind up in his work. Art by Joseph Remnant.

Maybe it’s because Harvey Pekar was such an everyman, because he wrote about everyday trials and tribulations of everyday people, of himself and the other lives he chronicled in American Splendor and here in The Pekar Project; maybe it’s because of this universal identifiability that a wave of sadness, like a collective family member passed, swept across social and regular media when news spread of Harvey’s death on July 12, 2010.

Multiple Facebook walls, including my own, became instant vigils, tribes huddled around a YouTube video instead of a campfire. Twitter mourners howled like dogs at the moon, but in 140 characters and with links to blogs, videos, drawings. And the media from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post and Harvey’s hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer all posted remembrances of our beloved curmudgeon who, of course, was never really a curmudgeon, but a cool cat to the end.

I’m going to write a more personal in-depth appreciation of what it was like working with Harvey, and we’re going to do a number of tributes on the Pekar Project in the coming days. In the meantime, members of the extended Pekar Project family have written moving tributes including Dean Haspiel (artist of The Quitter), Brian Heater (editor, Daily Cross Hatch and chronicler of the Pekar 70th Birthday Cleveland Expedition), Josh Neufeld (frequent Pekar collaborator, creator of A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge), Joseph Remnant (Pekar Project artist), Michael Malice (subject of Pekar’s Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story),
Sean Pryor (Pekar Project, Royal Flush artist), and Tara Seibel (Pekar Project artist.)

There are still more Pekar Project stories to come, including three more installments of Pekar’s epic encounter with Doug Rushkoff illustrated by Sean Pryor, a 15-page story about garbage drawn by Rick Parker, a guest strip drawn by Vanessa Davis, and more. Joseph Remnant is busy illustrating Harvey Pekar’s CLEVELAND a 120-page graphic novel to come from ZIP Comics in 2011. Also, the current, July 2010, issue of JUXTAPOZ contains a 13-page art-filled feature interview with Harvey on the Pekar Project.

Harvey let his readers know he had so many issues; he was anxious, obsessive, pessimistic. But one issue he never had was self-consciousness; he was 100 percent himself. Harvey was Harvey unrepentantly, and this relentlessly being himself inspired others consciously and unconsciously, even when he exposed his foibles and fuck-ups or especially when doing just that, to be more themselves.

Part of me curses G-d, didn’t Harvey deserve a break? Like wanting Charlie Brown to finally kick that fucking football out from Lucy’s hands, I wanted Harvey to relax and enjoy the fruits of his labors. The next best thing and how we can honor Harvey is for you to read his stories, and of course, buy his graphic novels. If you are an artist, you may want to draw a tribute Harvey Head to be added to our gallery of 100+ Harvey Heads that we created for his 70th Birthday (email jahfurry at gmail.com for specs).

The Pekar Project band, from top left: Rick Parker, Joseph Remnant, Jeff Newelt, Tara Seibel, Harvey Pekar, Sean Pryor. Photo by Seth Kushner

Co-creating this Pekar Project has been one of my greatest joys and proudest achievements, and on behalf of Rick Parker, Joseph Remnant, Tara Seibel, Sean Pryor, SMITH Magazine, and myself, our condolences to all of Harvey’s family & friends and especially to his wife and collaborator Joyce Brabner.

—Jeff Newelt, Pekar Project editor

art by Sean Pryor

A year ago, our own cuddly curmudgeon, Harvey Pekar, joined author / media theorist Doug Rushkoff on his WFMU radio show, The Media Squat, to talk about a pet peev to both authors: the corporate takeover of society. Doug recently wrote LIFE INC: How the World Became A Corporation and How to Take It Back and Harvey legendarily bashed GE on Letterman in the ’80s, so jamming on this was a natural. To create this comic, “Pekar & Rushkoff Kibbitzin’ About How Life Got Incorporated” (part one of a four-part epic collaboration), we treated the transcript of their talk like the first track laid down for a jazz record. Harvey & Doug remixed the script and then artist Sean Pryor brought the dialogue to life. Note the masterful switch in coloring technique whenever the story shifts from the conversation itself to images of subjects being talked about. Sean first collaborated with Harvey on “Gauntet of Rock” a story for Royal Flush Magazine, and has since rocked out three Pekar Project stories, “Searchin’”, “Jungle Music,” and “Two Working Stiffs.” Sean also designed and contributed a Harvey Head to the new Pekar T-shirt.