American Splendor Research Articles

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Constitution Illustrated

Fans of comics and cartoons will revel in the creative deployment of characters from the funny pages throughout Constitution Illustrated. Artist R. Sikoryak is a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review and is the author of several illustrated books. In his latest work, he has concocted an ingenious ploy to enliven the text of the Constitution. Each page features a different section of the Constitution being recited by cartoon characters. Sikoryak has imitated the style and borrowed the characters of dozens of cartoonists. Readers will find favorites both classic and contemporary, from Bud Counihan’s Betty Boop and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy to Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Aficionados will have fun figuring out the artist being imitated on each page, and a helpful index provides a key to the source of each drawing for those who aren’t able to recognize the myriad cartoonists represented.

A Conversation with Carter Burwell and Mark Suozzo

Research Article| April 01 2019 A Conversation with Carter Burwell and Mark Suozzo Mark Suozzo Mark Suozzo Interviewer MARK SUOZZO is music associate professor and codirector of film scoring at NYU Steinhardt. He received a master of music degree from Manhattan School of Music and a BA from Columbia University.Suozzo arranged and conducted strings for Creed’s Grammy-winning hit, With Arms Wide Open, and has arranged for many performers including Aretha Franklin, Britney Spears, and Reba McIntire. His orchestrations and arrangements for the New York Pops Orchestra have been heard in numerous Carnegie Hall performances and recordings.Suozzo has scored feature films and documentaries for filmmakers including Whit Stillman (Metropolitan [Oscar-nominated], Love & Friendship, among others); Shari Springer-Berman and Bob Pulcini (American Splendor [Oscar-nominated], Nanny Diaries); Mary Harron (The Notorious Bettie Page); Jan Oxenberg (Thank You and Goodnight); and Josh Aronson (Sound & Fury), among others. Suozzo’s work also includes scores for the Hallmark Channel, HBO, and PBS. His original music has been performed at the Summer Olympics and the Goodwill Games. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Music and the Moving Image (2019) 12 (1): 18–37. https://doi.org/10.5406/musimoviimag.12.1.0018 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Suozzo; A Conversation with Carter Burwell and Mark Suozzo. Music and the Moving Image 1 January 2019; 12 (1): 18–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/musimoviimag.12.1.0018 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMusic and the Moving Image Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Autobiographical Comics by Andrew Kunka

Reviewed by: Autobiographical Comics by Andrew Kunka Nicole Stamant (bio) Kunka, Andrew. Autobiographical Comics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. ISBN 978–1–47–422784–1, 304 pp. $26.96 (paper). Texts that comprise the Bloomsbury Comics Studies Series work as introductions to different topics in Comics Studies; books in the series include titles that discuss the "power of comics," superhero comics, webcomics, children's and young adult comics, and, with Andrew Kunka's new volume, autobiographical comics. Series editor Derek Parker Royal notes that the series is conceived of as presenting a "democratic approach" to the study of comics: envisioned as "an exploratory bridge between specialist and student," the content of each book "is structured to include an historical overview of its subject matter, a survey of its key texts, a discussion of the topic's social and cultural impact, recommendations for critical and classroom uses, a list of resources for further study, and a glossary reflecting the text's specific focus." It is important to note, then, that both the audience and the organization of Kunka's Autobiographical Comics are prescriptive and that, in addition to tackling an ever-expanding and complex field, he strives to present this information to an audience of specialists and nonspecialists alike. As such, at the end of the first chapter, Kunka provides a section titled "This Book and How to Use It," explaining that he hopes readers can draw on the book in different ways, perhaps looking solely at one section or another for specific information or reading the book through and thereby moving from the general to the particular. That said, and as he notes, the sections are purposefully repetitive and extensively cross-referenced. Autobiographical Comics is ambitious in its scope. It condenses scholarship and primary sources about 1) the history of graphic narrative (including many early and proto-autobiographical works as well as a comprehensive discussion of underground comix); 2) the crucial role of autobiography in comics—especially in the United States; 3) the negotiation of critical issues in autobiographical graphic narrative (including sections on trauma, adolescence, the confessional, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, graphic medicine, censorship and controversy, and web comics); 4) an in-depth discussion of key texts in the [End Page 147] field; 5) appendices which provide primary documents that serve to bolster his observations throughout; 6) a glossary; 7) a section on primary resources; and 8) a section on critical resources. The four appendices include a 2012 panel discussion on comics and autobiography with Justin Green, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Carol Tyler, moderated by Deborah Nelson; Derek Parker Royal's interview with Jennifer Hayden, author of The Story of My Tits (2015), a breast cancer narrative which was originally released on the Comics Alternative podcast in 2015; and two excerpts from graphic narratives that show the authors explicitly negotiate issues of representation and self-representation. The key texts Kunka details include those that comprise what many consider canonical works in the form: Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986, 1991) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004); Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (Story of a Childhood [2004], Story of a Return [2005], and Complete Persepolis [2007]); and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006). Unsurprisingly, it is this trio to which he returns again and again, citing their popularity both in classrooms and in academic scholarship. In this section, he also includes discussions of some early influential works, like Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972); profiles of Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor (1976–1991); and Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima (original manga series: 1972–1985). Finally, he provides analyses of more contemporary works by Phoebe Gloeckner, (A Child's Life [1998] and The Diary of a Teenage Girl [2002]); Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Seth, Lynda Barry (One Hundred Demons [2002]); and Craig Thompson (Blankets [2003]), including details about the works' publication and briefly characterizing the critical conversation about each. Kunka is keenly interested in the production of many of these texts, not solely in their reception and analysis, but also in their creation and marketing, which distinguishes his book from others that consider the relationship...

Narrativity, Purpose, and Visible Adaptation in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor (2003)

En partant de l’observation de Christian Metz selon laquelle meme les films soi-disant non narratifs sont regis par les memes mecanismes semiologiques que ceux qui regissent les films de fiction, cet article examine une occurrence precise de ce phenomene dans l’adaptation de l’autobiographie en bande dessinee de Harvey Pekar, American Splendor par Shari Springer Berman et Robert Pulcini (2003). Confronte au defi de la transposition a l’ecran de la nature episodique et de la faible narrativite de la bande dessinee de Pekar, Berman et Pulcini ont introduit une dimension teleologique. Mais les cineastes mettent ainsi en avant leur propre re-mediatisation, rendant ainsi visible le travail d’adaptation et invitant les spectateurs a analyser la maniere dont leur adaptation constitue aussi une reinterpretation et une reorientation du materiau source.

American Splendor and the universal grotesque

Abstract Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor is infused with trans-generic texts that evoke the spirit of the Rabelaisian carnival, which foregrounds bodily anxiety and sensory engagement. For example, Pekar relates at length his issues with health, food, sex and other so-called ‘base’ preoccupations. There are repeated scenes of physical bodily anxiety, such as Pekar’s struggle with throat ailments and later a cancer, which he presents in such graphic detail that it can be considered integral to his artistic voice. Through this sharing of a visceral, sensory experience, Pekar creates a deeply affecting work to which audiences can relate on a transcendent physical level. The film adaptation of American Splendor (Berman and Pulcini, 2003), with its multimodal and multi-genre form of storytelling, enhances this aspect of his work, retaining much of the physical discomfort and grotesque tendencies but blending music, stage, drawing and documentary film to truly represent the expansive parameters of the original. Most importantly, the film retains Pekar’s ability, through sensory engagement and the grotesque, to reach an audience at their most basic level. This article discusses how the film adaptation of American Splendor, emphasizing the grotesque physical attributes of its characters as well as a multi-modal form of storytelling, demonstrates Pekar’s ability to create a universally understandable mythic universe within a superficially quite personal and specific narrative structure. This, in part, explains why Pekar’s work continues to have a powerful emotional resonance.

A profusion of signs: Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics and the implications of reading American Splendor through the lens of documentary

Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor belongs to a diverse body of comics that take as their subject real persons and actual historical events. This article proposes that the twin aspects of narrative and visual representation present a vital intersection between such comics and documentary. Yet, thinking about comics as documentary presents certain obstacles. Despite extensive and critical reflection on the relationship between image and referent, a broadly accepted assumption of documentary as tied to ‘the paradigm of recording’ has remained persistent among academics and the broader public alike. However, Jacques Rancière’s insistent emphasis on the intersection of aesthetics and politics; the capacity to make visible, speak about and thus reconfigure the world inherent to both, might instead be used to frame this enquiry. The article draws on Rancière’s conceptual frameworks to examine the construction and articulation of the real offered in American Splendor, proposing that American Splendor presents a radically graphic dislocation between representation and referent, consequently defamiliarizing the conventional conflation of documentary with camera-derived imagery. This intervention raises new sets of questions relating to the core concern of documentary; the real and its visual representation.

Style, Voice, and Authorship in Harvey Pekar’s (Auto) (Bio)Graphical Comics

By considering Harvey Pekar’s role as author of the American Splendor comics alongside the activities of Robert Crumb and his other illustrators (with specific reference to Val Mayerik and Carole Sobocinski), I argue that the structural position of “author” is at least sometimes occupied by both author and artists in comics. Such a conclusion clarifies the nature of the author function in the medium of comics, as well as helping to articulate the bivocal or heteroglossic nature of the comics form. The implications of the dual visual and textual modes of authorship available in comics, I suggest, offer a possible explanation for the autobiographical trend in recent comics which are both written and drawn by the same person.

Harvey Pekar: Conversations (review)

Reviewed by: Harvey Pekar: Conversations Jordana Hall Harvey Pekar: Conversations, edited by Michael G. Rhode. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 226 pp. $50.00 (c); $22.00 (p). Harvey Pekar: Conversations includes almost twenty-five years of transcribed interviews with the creator of American Splendor from various sources such as fanzines, public radio shows, and the Washington Post. Together these interviews offer a close look at Harvey Pekar, a Jewish writer who rarely foregrounds his Jewishness, but someone quite outspoken on comics, politics, music, money, and success. More important to comic scholars who recognize [End Page 190] the impact of Pekar’s long-running, initially self-published comic, the book offers insight into the creative processes of Pekar and many of the artists he has worked with over the years. Michael Rhode begins the edition with a short introduction that notes the significance of his subject in the history of comics, the one who introduced realism to American comics. Rhode explains that while Robert Crumb and Justin Green did autobiographical work of a humorous or scatological nature, Pekar was the first to “create a comic book memoir on its own terms” (p. viii), making him the true founder of memoir comics. Pekar also diligently stuck with his endeavor despite his lack of success, self-publishing for many years before being picked up by Dark Horse comics. As one will find in other books in the University Press of Mississippi’s Conversation with Comic Artists Series, Rhode follows this short, but informative introduction with a handy timeline of Pekar’s life, including significant life events as well as a list of publication dates. Rhode’s book is most interesting as a psychological study. As readers sift through the various interviews, they will get a better understanding of what it means to be Harvey Pekar. Anyone familiar with the American Splendor comics will likely recognize the gamut of attitudes and emotions that play intermittently throughout the interviews (despite Rhode’s lamenting the inability to convey Pekar’s joy in music from a transcription). What does come across is bitterness at his lack of success, a deep desire for recognition and approval, and the flashes of anger that accompany any sort of social injustice. His fight with David Letterman on late night television, mentioned throughout the early interviews especially, is an example of this. Interviews later in the book likewise reveal a politically activist spirit one might associate more with Pekar’s wife, Joyce Brabner, which perhaps explains the success of their marriage (his third) since both seem dedicated to comics and human rights. What Conversations also reveals is a conflicted desire to be both popular and substantive, something Pekar seems bitterly cognizant of as a contradiction in terms. This seems most obvious in his discussions of jazz in the interviews. His criticism and tastes are best described as experimental and somewhat eclectic, something that promises little popularity. At times Pekar very nearly warns his interviewers that he is not the “common man” that he is often perceived to be. Though he did not finish college, he is well read, and his interest in comics only returned with the advent of the underground comix movement and an opportunity to experiment beyond something “aimed at adolescents or people with an adolescent intellect” (p. 36). Pekar is clearly disparaging of the superhero comics that first turned him off the medium at an early age. Yet superhero comics remain popular today. Marvel and DC enjoy [End Page 191] far more success in both comics and movies precisely because they appeal to mass audiences, to popular tastes. Thus Pekar laments the deplorable state of comics publishing and popular entertainment at the same time as he laments his lack of financial success, realizing that one surely comes at the cost of the other. The idea of “selling out” is a temptation that often reverberates throughout the interviews, and it is perhaps his inability to ever truly sell out that makes Pekar appealing as a subject in his autobiographical comics. After all, every good story needs conflict. However, the success of Ted Hope’s American Splendor movie (2003), another popular topic in the interviews, allows Pekar greater independence...

"May contain graphic material": comic books, graphic novels, and film

Since the first Superman film came to the screen in 1978, films adapted from comics have become increasingly important as a film form. But 1978 was also important because it was the year of release for Will Eisner's A Contract with God, and Other Stories, generally credited as the first long-form comic book to label itself a graphic novel. Since that time, advances in computer-generated special effects have significantly improved the ability of film to capture the style and action of comics, producing such hugely successful films as X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002). Meanwhile, the genre of the graphic novel has greatly evolved as a form-especially through the works of people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore-taking comics in dramatically new and different directions, generally darker and more serious than conventional comics. Graphic novels have also formed the basis for less visually spectacular, but intelligent and thoughtful films such as Ghost World (2001) and American Splendor (2002). Booker surveys this important development in film history, tracking the movement to a more mature style in comics, and then a more mature style in films about comics. He focuses on detailed discussions of 15 major films or franchises, but also considers the general impact of graphic novels on the style and content of American film in general. The Batman franchise, especially in the 1989 film and in 2005's Batman Begins, has provided adaptations of a classic comic-book motif inflected through the Dark Knight graphic novels of Frank Miller. The marriage of new film technology and the development of the genre of the graphic novel has produced a number of important innovations in film, including such breakthrough efforts in visual art as The Crow (1994), and Sin City (2005). Films such as Road to Perdition (2002) and A History of Violence (2005) have provided interesting adaptations of noirish graphic novels that rely somewhat less on visual style to achieve their effects.

Film and comic books

In Film and Comic Books contributors analyze the problems of adapting one medium to another; the translation of comics aesthetics into film; audience expectations, reception, and reaction to comic book-based films; and the adaptation of films into comics. A wide range of comic/film adaptations are explored, including superheroes (Spider-Man), comic strips (Dick Tracy), realist and autobiographical comics (American Splendor, Ghost World), and photo-montage comics (Mexico's El Santo). Essayists discuss films beginning with the 1978 Superman. That success led filmmakers to adapt a multitude of comic books for the screen including Marvel's Uncanny X-Men, the Amazing Spider-Man, Blade, and the Incredible Hulk as well as alternative graphic novels such as From Hell, V for Vendetta, and Road to Perdition. Essayists also discuss recent works from Mexico, France, Germany, and Malaysia. Essays from Timothy P. Barnard, Michael Cohen, Rayna Denison, Martin Flanagan, Sophie Geoffroy-Menoux, Mel Gibson, Kerry Gough, Jonathan Gray, Craig Hight, Derek Johnson, Pascal Lef?vre, Paul M. Malone, Neil Rae, Aldo J. Regalado, Jan van der Putten, and David Wilt Ian Gordon is associate professor of history and convenor of American studies at the National University of Singapore. Mark Jancovich is professor of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia. Matthew P. McAllister is associate professor of film, video, and media studies at Pennsylvania State University.

My Dual Career

Why did the author of American Splendor comics spend 37 years clerking at a VA hospital—and fret over retiring? The vicissitudes of life and work.

History and Comics

History and Comics Paul Buhle The graphic novel, with its non-fiction variant the graphic history, has most definitely arrived.1 So has the prestigious museum exhibit of comic art history. Historians, like so many other scholarly observers, seem at once bemused and a bit puzzled at the meteoric rise and the space that this phenomenon has come to occupy in the chain book stores and the neighborhood library, not to mention the Arts and Entertainment section of an occasional New York Times.2 The full story may be alarming, if we allow ourselves to be alarmed by the replacement of scholarly prose with images and dialogue. The comic-format—so long a favorite of Americans in the (now fading) daily press, more highly regarded in Europe and Asia as a format for artistic expression in magazines and tabloids— has also begun to invade even the academic world, as it reaches the ordinary reader and most especially the young reader. The professor (and we speak of ourselves) mulls the ever-approaching deadlines of textbook assignments for next semester and asks a question unknown and perhaps unimaginable to predecessors . . . comics as history? The problem is avoidable only at a cost. For at least a generation, students have increasingly thought about history (and other disciplines) "in pictures." Sympathetic teachers accord today's youngsters the ability to reason out familiar issues no less than previous generations, but in quite different forms. Field lists of books for graduate students are steadily pared downward, but visual knowledge grows. At the undergraduate level, the shift is still more pronounced. From early ages, young people have learned to "see" history in a different way on the Web, and the problem may well be more ours than theirs. We can think usefully about the deployment of comic art in the classroom along a number of lines. A brief essay can only be suggestive, but the following inventory of approaches is intended to help begin the process by relating graphic history to other forms of historical understanding. The first approach might well be oral history. Like documentary film but to a more pronounced degree, graphic history often has a way of simplifying themes; like non-documentary film, it tends, although by no means exclusively, to privilege action over dialogue. But it is to the very root of the historical saga, in oral history or storytelling, that graphic history is closest. [End Page 315] There are some good reasons for this similarity. The rise of oral history and graphic history within the academy and outside follow remarkably parallel lines from the Depression era onward. The WPA slave narratives and southern folklore-musical recordings emerged alongside the first modern comic books. These shared, one might say, the notion of a folk and definitely ungenteel Americana. The apex of comic book sales in the middle 1940s notably found (or perhaps created) massive audiences of young adults unfamiliar with the usual literacy: GIs. The short-lived consolidation of the comic book industry, ending in the middle 1950s—shortly after the launch of the groundbreaking Oral History Research Office at Columbia—coincided with a further reframing of the popular historical narrative. History could be understood and told in a variety of ways, as television's first "quality" show—You Are There, a unique fictional "oral history"—was demonstrating with great popular success and wide use in classrooms. The best of the contemporary comic book lines, assaulted at once by Congressional hearings and by competition from television, had recently evolved toward what might be called a tragic realism, based in part upon the reports of combat veterans and the experiences of the creators themselves.3 An autobiographical style permeated a portion of the next comics generation, the so-called "underground comix" of the 1960s–70s. It may be said to have found its fullest realization in the comics written for various artists by Harvey Pekar, come to life in new ways with the lauded 2004 film under the same name: American Splendor. In the continuing...

50 Signs of Mental Illness: A User-Friendly Alphabetical Guide to Psychiatric Symptoms and What You Should Know About Them

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ForumFull Access50 Signs of Mental Illness: A User-Friendly Alphabetical Guide to Psychiatric Symptoms and What You Should Know About ThemDAVID V. FORREST M.D.,DAVID V. FORREST M.D.Search for more papers by this author,Published Online:1 Jan 2007https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.2007.164.1.178AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Most self-help books about psychiatric conditions include a presumptive diagnosis in the title and require that the patient has been diagnosed or will self-diagnose. This book starts with signs and symptoms and explains what they add up to and how they may be treated. The symptom is described in second-person address, allowing the reader to try it on. For example, under “euphoria (meaning hypomania or intoxication),” one reads, “So what if you’re crossing in the middle of the block; pedestrians have the right of way, don’t they? You wonder why the driver is so grumpy. It’s a great day!” (p. 114).The tone is friendly, interested, and inviting, and the scholarship behind it is seamless:Obsessive compulsive disorder is a fascinating illness, in part, because the symptoms seem so Freudian, even though the underlying causes are neurological. You obsess about dirt, sex and violence. You imagine scenarios that represent your worst fears and strongest taboos … One might think that such symptoms have their origin in childhood, when we learn to suppress our primitive urges. But there is no evidence that childhood development is disturbed in those who go on to suffer from OCD later in life (p. 238). The “50 signs” are as follows: Anger, Antisocial Behavior, Anxiety, Appetite Disturbances, Avoidance, Body Image Problems, Compulsions, Confusion, Deceitfulness, Delusions, Denial, Depression, Dissociation, Euphoria, Fatigue, Fears, Flashbacks, Grandiosity, Grief, Hallucinations, Histrionics, Hyperactivity, Identity Confusion, Impulsiveness, Intoxication, Jealousy, Learning Difficulties, Mania, Memory Loss, Mood Swings, Movement Problems, Nonsense, Obsessions, Oddness, Panic, Paranoia, Physical Complaints and Pain, Psychosis, Religious Preoccupations, Self-Esteem Problems, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Performance Problems, Sexual Preoccupations, Sleep Problems, Sloppiness, Speech Difficulties, Stress, Suicidal Thoughts, and Trauma. These rubrics cover the waterfront, and it is hard to think of a major area not covered. Shame disorders and gambling come to mind. While movement disorders from typical neuroleptics are patiently explained, diabetes with the atypicals is briefly mentioned; patients could use more help in warding off the metabolic syndrome (1). The book helpfully distinguishes what not to worry about, for example, the section, “Some Unusual Beliefs Are Not Delusions” (pp. 79-80) and a good index is provided. If “you” only have one of these problems, will you want the whole book? Perhaps few patients have only one, and there are always one’s acquaintances to evaluate. I am reminded of the kooky girl in the film American Splendor who knew the DSM by heart and gratuitously diagnosed all the other characters. But for the cartoonist R. Crumb, she chose the old symptom term, polymorphously perverse . The author’s treatment recommendations are generally sound, and more important, presented comprehensibly with a positive spin. For example, discussing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor as a treatment for depression, he writes, “sexual side effects can usually be treated with sildenafil (Viagra). Though viewed as harmless by most doctors, these medications can interfere with the metabolism of some other medications” (p.104). While he gives credence to St. John’s Wort, he gently urges readers to consult a psychiatrist.The book should have a wide lay appeal, but as one who trains residents and medical students, I believe it would also be useful for apprentice general clinicians and therapists. Compared with training student professionals to listen, it is more difficult to teach them how to talk to patients in a helpful way. The strength of this book is not in its outdoing a textbook or presenting novel material, but in its parsing subjects and phrasing acceptable ways to speak about them. It wouldn’t hurt doctors a bit to read Hicks’ book and commit some of his patient-friendly language to memory.New York, N.Y.Reference1. Boyd JH: A psychodynamic approach to screening for the metabolic syndrome. J Am Acad Psychoanal Dynam Psychiatry 2005; 33:671–683Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 164Issue 1 January, 2007Pages 178-179THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY January 2007 Volume 164 Number 1 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 January 2007 Published in print 1 January 2007

Removing the Experience: Simulacrum as an Autobiographical Act in American Splendor

This article articulates how American Splendor's filmmakers deploy postmodernity and the seemingly antithetical logic of the simulacrum as the central means of documenting the real-life experiences of Harvey Pekar. Paradoxically, the film also attempts to reveal how these experiences necessarily continue to exist outside the simulacrum, in an affective realm.

Alternative comics: an emerging literature

In the 1980s, a sea change occurred in comics. Fueled by Art Spiegel- man and Francoise Mouly's avant-garde anthology Raw and the launch of the Love & Rockets series by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, the decade saw a deluge of comics that were more autobiographical, emotionally realistic, and experimental than anything seen before. These alternative comics were not the scatological satires of the 1960s underground, nor were they brightly colored newspaper strips or superhero comic books. In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield establishes the parameters of alternative comics by closely examining long-form comics, in particular the graphic novel. He argues that these are fundamentally a literary form and offers an extensive critical study of them both as a literary genre and as a cultural phenomenon. Combining sharp-eyed readings and illustrations from particular texts with a larger understanding of the comics as an art form, this book discusses the development of specific genres, such as autobiography and history. Alternative Comics analyzes such seminal works as Spiegelman's Maus, Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, and Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Hatfield explores how issues outside of cartooning-the marketplace, production demands, work schedules-can affect the final work. Using Hernandez's Palomar as an example, he shows how serialization may determine the way a cartoonist structures a narrative. In a close look at Maus, Binky Brown, and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, Hatfield teases out the complications of creating biography and autobiography in a substantially visual medium, and shows how creators approach these issues in radically different ways. Charles Hatfield, Canyon Country, California, is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge. His work has been published in ImageTexT, Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, the Comics Journal, and other periodicals. See the author's Web site at www.csun.edu/~ch76854/.