Art & Creativity Quote by Harvey Pekar

Pekar is doing two things at once: protecting his turf and puncturing a lazy cultural shorthand. Comic Con, in the popular imagination, collapses comics into costumes, fandom, and spectacle. Pekar’s work - especially American Splendor - was the opposite: stubbornly unglamorous, anti-escapist, about wage work, petty grievances, and the texture of ordinary days. So the line lands as a refusal to be drafted into a scene that markets itself as a community while flattening everyone inside it into one type.

The analogy to prose is the knife twist. It’s not just a plea for nuance; it’s a status move that exposes how comics creators are routinely denied the basic complexity we grant “literature.” No one assumes Joyce, Danielle Steel, and Hemingway share a personality, politics, or audience just because they write prose. Pekar points out that comics is treated as a genre identity rather than a medium - a subtle demotion that forces artists into a fandom-facing role whether they want it or not.

There’s also an autobiographical subtext: Pekar was famously allergic to branding and boosterism, skeptical of any cultural machine that turns art into a lifestyle. Comic Con stands in for that machine. He isn’t insulting attendees as much as rejecting the idea that an artist owes proximity, gratitude, or performative belonging. The line works because it frames difference as the default and “community” as something earned, not assumed.