Art & Creativity Quote by Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar’s jab lands because it’s aimed at a category that’s supposed to be his natural constituency. A comics writer dismissing “people who read lots of comic books” is less self-hatred than brand definition: he’s drawing a border between comics as a subculture and comics as a medium. Pekar’s work (most famously American Splendor) treats panels like a delivery system for the unglamorous stuff - bad jobs, medical bills, petty irritations, small moral reckonings. That’s not escapism; it’s documentation with a pulse. So the line isn’t snobbery so much as a warning label.

The subtext is that “comics fandom,” especially in the late 20th century, often organized itself around genre pleasures: superheroes, continuity, collecting, insider debate. Pekar’s stories actively refuse those incentives. They don’t reward you for knowing lore; they reward you for recognizing yourself. His narrator isn’t an avatar of power but a guy trapped in the fluorescent purgatory of everyday life. If your reading habit is built on plot momentum and spectacle, Pekar’s pages can feel like anti-entertainment: the point is the friction, the banality, the way life keeps happening without catharsis.

Context matters: Pekar came out of Cleveland, not an editorial bullpen, and he positioned himself closer to short story writers and memoirists than to the comics industry’s prestige ladder. The quip doubles as cultural critique: the medium’s biggest audience can become its narrowest gatekeeper. Pekar wants readers who don’t “love comics” so much as they’re willing to let comics be literature, or at least be honest.