Life & Wisdom Quote by Harvey Pekar

Pekar’s line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a rebuke. “I think” softens the punch just enough to sound conversational, even modest, while “far more potential” plants a flag: the problem isn’t comics, it’s the public imagination around them. Coming from the patron saint of the unglamorous, Pekar isn’t hyping capes and crossovers. He’s arguing for a medium that can carry the weight of ordinary life without apology.

The subtext is classed and cultural. Comics, long treated as disposable entertainment for kids (or guilty adult pleasures), get cordoned off from the “serious” shelf where novels, memoir, and journalism live. Pekar’s career - American Splendor’s cramped apartments, dead-end jobs, petty humiliations - was a sustained protest against that hierarchy. He used comics as a delivery system for the stuff literature often sanitizes: boredom, awkwardness, small talk, the psychic wear of work. His point is that panels and speech balloons aren’t limits; they’re compression tools, able to stage time, tone, and memory with an efficiency prose sometimes can’t match.

There’s also a strategic optimism here. Pekar isn’t asking for comics to be respected out of charity; he’s implying they haven’t even been properly tried. It’s a dare to creators and readers alike: stop measuring the medium by its most commercial outputs. Judge it by what it can do when someone treats it like art, reportage, autobiography - and then refuses to prettify the truth.