I first heard about Harvey Pekar when I happened to stumble on the AMERICAN SPLENDOR movie on IFC in high school or college. I didn't see all of it---I still haven't---but I thought Pekar seemed like a cool guy doing cool stuff with comics, so he's been on my radar since.
THE QUITTER is, if I remember correctly, the second book of his I've read. I don't remember the first one, so it could be the first. At any rate, I really wanted to like this book, but I'm not sure if I did, to be honest. The jacket copy does more to try and tie the episodic narrative together than I feel Pekar ever does in the text, and overall I was left with a feeling of having listened to some old fart talking about his life without any particular purpose.
If I'm not mistaken, that might be Pekar's whole schtick, so I'm not sure if I want to knock him for it. Maybe the problem with this book is that it's written for hard core Pekar fans---it was written fairly recently, after he was moderately famous---so I just didn't have the requisite context to truly "get it." I feel the same way about watching MCU movies these days, so who knows.
The art was good, at least. Though I found the cut-aways to modern-day Harvey speaking through the fourth wall to deepen the feeling of listening to an old man ramble about vaguely-related topics in his youth.
It's called THE QUITTER, but honeslty it seems like he quit quitting fairly young? Like I said, I think I'm missing something. I did find the jazz stuff cool.
🎷🎷_ _ _