"I'd been familiar with comics, and I'd collected 'em when I was a kid, but after I got into junior high school, there wasn't much I was interested in"
About this Quote
Pekar’s line lands with the plainspoken shrug of someone who’s allergic to mythmaking - which is exactly the point. Most pop-culture origin stories are built like superhero arcs: the kid discovers The Thing, The Thing saves him, destiny ignites. Pekar refuses that script. He’s not narrating a calling; he’s narrating a dropout moment, the instant when “kid stuff” stops delivering and the adult world hasn’t offered a replacement yet.
The phrasing matters. “Familiar with” drains nostalgia of its glow, and “collected ’em” is deliberately unromantic, more habit than passion. Then comes junior high, the social factory where taste gets policed and adolescence begins swapping private pleasures for public survival. “There wasn’t much I was interested in” reads less like boredom than alienation: a smart, inward kid realizing the available cultural menu doesn’t fit, and lacking the language to explain why.
Context sharpens it. Pekar becomes the patron saint of the anti-epic in American comics, turning the mundane (dead-end jobs, records, awkward talk) into material. This sentence sketches the prehistory of that aesthetic: not a lifelong devotion to comics, but a gap in desire that later gets filled by making his own. Subtextually, he’s also arguing for art as something you back into, not something you’re anointed by - a working-class, Cleveland-flavored rejection of the “born genius” narrative. Even here, he’s doing Pekar: demystifying the self, making disappointment sound like a foundation.
The phrasing matters. “Familiar with” drains nostalgia of its glow, and “collected ’em” is deliberately unromantic, more habit than passion. Then comes junior high, the social factory where taste gets policed and adolescence begins swapping private pleasures for public survival. “There wasn’t much I was interested in” reads less like boredom than alienation: a smart, inward kid realizing the available cultural menu doesn’t fit, and lacking the language to explain why.
Context sharpens it. Pekar becomes the patron saint of the anti-epic in American comics, turning the mundane (dead-end jobs, records, awkward talk) into material. This sentence sketches the prehistory of that aesthetic: not a lifelong devotion to comics, but a gap in desire that later gets filled by making his own. Subtextually, he’s also arguing for art as something you back into, not something you’re anointed by - a working-class, Cleveland-flavored rejection of the “born genius” narrative. Even here, he’s doing Pekar: demystifying the self, making disappointment sound like a foundation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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