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Review - American Splendor: Another Day (2nd Attempt)
NOTE: I thought I'd lost my first, much longer review, when actually it somehow back-posted to 10/14, when I actually started writing it. This is an entirely new draft written on 10/28. The other version is better, but maybe it's slightly amusing to readers to contrast both versions. I'm not always long-winded. Incidentally, I find the first three sentences here very annoying now, though it's probably healthy to write something you know will be instantly dated. It keeps you honest. I was thinking about this this morning, looking at the garbage articles that are written for www.msn.com that are, at best, brief distractions at work, never meant to be saved, and often ignored.
American Splendor: Another Day TPB
Written by Harvey Pekar
Art by Dean Haspiel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, Chris Weston, Ty Templeton and Various
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics. $14.99 USD
I lost the first, much longer review I wrote. Not like losing a house or anything, but still annoying. So this will be brief. This is a different Pekar reflected in these stories. He's not the ranting younger man, and he's not worried about dying from cancer. He's a more or less regular guy dealing with being the father of a rebellious teenage girl, plus he has to endure various mundane indignities such as a missing cat, high-strung flight attendant, and late freelance writing checks. There are a couple stories from his youth here as well, and a longish story about a friend considering taking a job as a nurse, so it's not a tight thematic work, just whatever he felt was interesting enough to write about. Pekar is excellent working at this small scale, with small amusements (Dean Haspiel defending his shirtlessness) and tiny victories (fixing a toilet without calling a plumber). Most of the stories don't end with any big punchline, but that's fine; it's not really about that.
Most of the artists here seem inspired to be working with Pekar. Leonardo Manco does some of his best work here; Chris Weston puts an amazing amount of detail into his two-pager. Dean Haspiel has apparently taken his place as go-to Pekar collaborator after their graphic novel, The Quitter, but I find his style at times too exaggerated and melodramatic, as if he doesn't always trust Pekar's material to be interesting enough when drawn faithfully. In fact, it's the scripts that save the work of artists like Ho Che Anderson and Hunt Emerson here.
American Splendor: Another Day TPB
Written by Harvey Pekar
Art by Dean Haspiel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, Chris Weston, Ty Templeton and Various
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics. $14.99 USD
I lost the first, much longer review I wrote. Not like losing a house or anything, but still annoying. So this will be brief. This is a different Pekar reflected in these stories. He's not the ranting younger man, and he's not worried about dying from cancer. He's a more or less regular guy dealing with being the father of a rebellious teenage girl, plus he has to endure various mundane indignities such as a missing cat, high-strung flight attendant, and late freelance writing checks. There are a couple stories from his youth here as well, and a longish story about a friend considering taking a job as a nurse, so it's not a tight thematic work, just whatever he felt was interesting enough to write about. Pekar is excellent working at this small scale, with small amusements (Dean Haspiel defending his shirtlessness) and tiny victories (fixing a toilet without calling a plumber). Most of the stories don't end with any big punchline, but that's fine; it's not really about that.
Most of the artists here seem inspired to be working with Pekar. Leonardo Manco does some of his best work here; Chris Weston puts an amazing amount of detail into his two-pager. Dean Haspiel has apparently taken his place as go-to Pekar collaborator after their graphic novel, The Quitter, but I find his style at times too exaggerated and melodramatic, as if he doesn't always trust Pekar's material to be interesting enough when drawn faithfully. In fact, it's the scripts that save the work of artists like Ho Che Anderson and Hunt Emerson here.
Posted by ChristopherAllen at 8:50 PM [Link to this post]
1 Comments:
I have a copy of your lost review. It was saved into my RSS feed. Usually when your blog loses a post, I never see it, but for some reason I got this one.
Good review, by the way.
American Splendor: Another Day TPB
Written by Harvey Pekar
Art by Dean Haspiel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, Chris Weston, and Various.
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics. $14.99 USD
I finally got over my distaste for the ugly cover and started reading it, and found it was hard to put down. It's not that every story is great, but most are pretty good, and half the fun is seeing some familiar artists try their hands at Pekar's work for the first time. I don't know what Ty Templeton has been up to, but he does good work with "What Happened To Your Parents?", which is about Harvey's folks. Some of his choices, like a huge open panel of black space surrounding Harvey to convey the feeling from Harvey's father dying, are a little overdone, but the delicate shading is something Pekar stories don't often have in the artwork.
"The Day's Highlights" is one of the longer and more interesting stories in the collection, and proof that Pekar is just as interesting as a concerned parent than a ranting malcontent. In fact, becoming a parent has been as beneficial to Pekar's work as it has to Robert Crumb's. But despite Haspiel's enthusiasm, I don't find find him an ideal artist for Pekar. I like his visual style, but the storytelling is often highly exaggerated posing and expressions that end up conveying a sort of distrust that Pekar's tales are interesting enough to work with straightforward treatment. Better is Haspiel's job on "Today I Am A Man," a very relatable tale of the sense of satisfaction the not-so-handyman feels when he solves a household repair problem without involving a professional. Gilbert Hernandez draws the follow-up, "Today I Am A Mouse," where Harv has to get help from a neighbor to fix his toilet, and it's pretty good, too, though lacking the punch of the first story. Probably unavoidable, as the first story was triumphant and this one is the opposite, intentionally.
Haspiel does draw one of the funnier stories, "New York Signing," with several amusing convention scenes, including the perhaps unintentionally funny moment where Harvey is concerned that Haspiel has his shirt off, and Haspiel defends himself with, "This is my thing, man." Way to take a stand for shirtlessness! I liked the one-liner from Nellie Kurtzman when Harvey said he got to meet her father, the legendary Harvey Kurtzman, at a convention in 1986: "That wasn't a good time to meet him." A good writer like Pekar recognizes the value of the line and the effect it has by not explaining it, just leaving it to close out a scene, a little mysterious bomb.
Most of the artists here seem excited to be working on a Pekar story. Leonardo Manco hasn't done this nice a job in years. Chris Samnee makes me want to see more of his work. Eddie Campbell does his usual lovely work designing a page, and gets Pekar's hair exactly right. If you have a three page story with nothing but Harvey Pekar laying on his bed and thinking to himself, you need an artist as good and interesting as Rick Geary. Chris Weston's two-page comic convention story is beautiful and a little odd, but how come the bottom two inches of the page have no art? Was there a house ad here in the original issues or something?
"Joy Gets the Job" isn't about Pekar, but is as good as any of the stories where he's the star. It's about his friend Joy going to interview for a job with a doctor and being very skeptical about it until he won her over with his personality and care for his patients. It's heartwarming on its own, then has the nice side effect of making the reader think about why the story appealed to Harvey enough to use, and the care he put into telling it right.
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