Life & Wisdom Quote by Harvey Pekar

Pekar’s disappointment lands less like a complaint and more like an ethical charge: if comics are a medium, why are so many practitioners treating it like a genre? Coming from the writer of American Splendor, this isn’t abstract gatekeeping; it’s a lived argument. Pekar built his career on the stubborn idea that the quotidian is worthy of panels, that a trip to the grocery store can carry as much formal and emotional weight as a cape fight. So when he calls for “diversify[ing] the kind of work,” he’s not asking for token variety. He’s demanding a broader ambition for what comics can hold: class, labor, boredom, embarrassment, small-time cruelty, the textures of real life.

The subtext is a critique of both the market and the comfort of community norms. “People” here includes creators, publishers, and readers who reward repetition because it’s legible and sellable. Pekar’s phrasing is tellingly mild - “don’t try” - implying not a lack of talent but a lack of will, a creative conservatism that settles into the safest lanes. It’s also a shot across the bow at the superhero monoculture that dominated American comics for decades, and at the alternative scene when it ossifies into its own predictable aesthetics.

Pekar’s intent is reformist in the most Pekar way: cranky, human-scale, anti-glamour. He’s arguing that comics deserve the same breadth we grant novels or film, and that artists should risk being unmarketable, even unlikable, to earn that breadth.