Art & Creativity Quote by Harvey Pekar

Pekar’s line lands with the kind of cranky specificity that made his cultural criticism feel less like theory and more like a guy at the counter telling you what’s real. On its face it’s a blunt taxonomy: “fiction readers” over here, “comic books” over there. The intent isn’t just to insult comics or praise novels; it’s to expose a social boundary that shaped his career and his chip-on-the-shoulder worldview.

The subtext is class and legitimacy. Pekar came up when “comic books” still carried the whiff of juvenile escapism, disposable entertainment, low-status reading. By contrasting them with “fiction,” he’s pointing to an audience that wants its seriousness pre-certified: hardcovers, reviews, syllabi, cultural permission slips. His phrasing is tellingly cautious: “aren’t particularly interested” isn’t a ban, it’s a shrugging verdict about taste formation. People aren’t refusing comics after careful evaluation; they’ve been trained not to see them as a place where adult narrative can happen.

Context matters: Pekar’s own work (American Splendor) was precisely an argument against that divide. He wrote comics like realist literature - small-bore lives, work, boredom, resentment, intimacy - and then spent decades watching the culture misread the medium as the message. So the line functions as both complaint and diagnosis: the obstacle isn’t artists failing to be “serious,” it’s readers carrying an inherited prejudice about what seriousness is allowed to look like. That makes it a Pekar classic: irritably observant, a little unfair, and uncomfortably accurate about how cultural hierarchies police our attention.