Successful Pekar statue drive closes; his Cleveland book coming in March

It's official: The Harvey Pekar library statue will be built.

His widow Joyce Brabner's fundraising campaign on the website Kickstarter closed Sunday night with $38,356 in pledges. Brabner says she hopes to dedicate the Comics as Art and Literature Desk inside the Cleveland Heights-University Heights library on what would've been Pekar's next birthday, Oct. 8, 2012.

"It's great to take this thing that hurts and turn it into something that could matter," Brabner says.

Pekar, Cleveland's legendary underground comic-book writer, died last July at age 70. The memorial is Brabner's response to an earlier idea for memorializing Pekar: Some fans wanted to erect a statue over his grave in Lake View Cemetery.

"When Harvey died, there were all these New York folks banging the drum, saying Harvey needs a statue, he was a working class hero, a literary lion, our man," says Brabner. "I thought they were nuts."

Brabner and Pekar felt a person's works should be celebrated after death, not the person. So Brabner took the statue idea and turned it into a practical memorial dedicated to creativity: a desk and small statue dedicated to comics, the genre Pekar did so much to elevate into a serious form of literature.

The desk will always be filled with pencils, paper, and art materials from the art supply company Faber-Castell. Rising from the desk will be a bronze plaque of a comic book page. A small statue of Pekar, shrugging his shoulders, will step out of it. Two Pekar quotes about his artistic philosophy will be engraved on the memorial: "Anybody’s life story is potentially the source of a great novel, comic book, or movie," and, "Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures."

"If somebody sits down at the desk and starts to make the connection that their stories are worth telling, that’s an important message," Brabner says.

Pekar is on Clevelanders' minds because a preview of his forthcoming book, Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, ran in Monday's Plain Dealer. Unfortunately, the accompanying article erroneously reported that the book came out Monday, causing readers to deluge Pekar's favorite bookstore, Mac's Backs, with phone calls. Actually, the book comes out in March.

The article was right about this, though: Pekar fans can still contribute to the memorial project. Donations will cover incidental expenses, everything from installation and legal fees to shipping gifts to pledgers. (For instance, Brabner has promised to create and send Harvey Pekar dolls to the 29 people who donated $125-$199 to the Kickstarter campaign.) Any proceeds left over will go to expanding the Heights Library's comic book collection. To contribute to the campaign, send money through PayPal to hpekar@aol.com, or a check to The Estate of Harvey L. Pekar, P.O. Box 18471, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118.

To read the obituary for Pekar on the Cleveland Magazine blog, click here. To read our essay about him in Cleveland Magazine's December 2010 cover package, "Our Miserable Year," click here.

(art from smithmag.net/pekarproject)

As LeBron returns, ESPN.com writer explores Cleveland's code of honor

Tomorrow night, Cleveland confronts the future it thought it had, the hero it thought it made. The whole sports world will watch as the Cavaliers confront LeBron James for the first time after the breakup.

It's our chance to show LeBron, and the country, and ourselves, that the Cavaliers' slogan, "All for One, One for All" -- the musketeers' code of humility and equality -- fits Cleveland better than star worship.

Wright Thompson gets that. He's an ESPN.com writer who visited Cleveland for the Cavs' home opener and stayed long enough to get to know the city. He's penned a first-rate piece about Cleveland's pride and preoccupations, our neuroses and our codes of honor.

Cleveland used to be the center of America's rise, he writes. This used to be a factory, and these used to be jobs, and this mill used to be a future, not a silent metaphor for the past. There are two Clevelands, the one that exists today and the ghost city floating just above it, in the memory of the people who've been here for a long time, and in the imagination of those who just arrived.

Thompson's piece avoids the too-common traps of the fly-in national writer trying to define the state of a city. He doesn't grab the most provocative thing someone tells him, doesn't gravitate to the worst disappointment. Instead, touring the city with several well-chosen guides, he listens for patterns, recurring ideas, then digs deeper.

Much like Cleveland Magazine's December package "Our Miserable Year," Thompson notes the irony in Harvey Pekar, who embodied the complete opposite of sports heroism, dying just days after LeBron's Decision.

Who will Cleveland miss more? Thompson writes. That question is a proxy for a larger, more difficult one: Is the future of Cleveland in the image of LeBron James or Harvey Pekar?

Thompson feels the hurt LeBron inflicted on the city, but his insight into LeBron's motivation and character, gained on a drive from the Q to LeBron's mansion in Bath, is saddened, not angry.

LeBron rose above every possible obstacle. ... His greatest dream, it seems, was to make a life in a perfectly normal, nice suburban subdivision. It's so clear now. LeBron James went from poverty to the bubble of celebrity. He's spent his entire life on one of these two islands. He's not from northeast Ohio. He's from his own struggle.

He completes the thought later, when he notices LeBron's admiration for what the Saints mean to New Orleans:

Instead of grasping the golden ticket to Legend, he seemed to want the ordinary one to Star, the sporting equivalent of a perfectly normal, nice suburban subdivision. Whatever the reason, he didn't get that Cleveland felt about him the way New Orleans feels about the Saints.

There's plenty more -- poetic observations from Dennis Kucinich, dinner with Daniel Gibson at a neighborhood bar in Westlake, Lithuanian moonshine in Collinwood. More than a blogger can blog. Check out the full story here.

Harvey Pekar, 1939-2010: Cleveland's honest eye

Harvey Pekar did not do small talk.

In fall 2003, I drove him and his wife to Tommy’s for an interview, my chatty banter utterly failing to dent their impregnable grouchiness. American Splendor, the biopic about Pekar’s life and underground-comics career, had just made Pekar the everyman hero of indie cinema, but the experience had only nudged his mood-needle ever so slightly.

“This was kind of an exceptional time for me, a diverting time,” he said over sandwiches, his huge, dark eyebrows in full weedy bloom. But he was “kinda depressed” it was ending, since he had to hustle for writing jobs again. Maybe the movie would help, he allowed. “Then I’ll be happy,” he said — and caught himself. “At least as happy as I get, which is not too happy.”

I respected that. Pekar’s gloom gave him an artist’s vision of Cleveland, like a painter going through a lifelong gray period.

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff,” went his credo, and paging through the anthologies of Pekar’s American Splendor comics showed that his realist’s eye caught something about the town by focusing on his file clerk job, his favorite cheap diners, his bohemian’s taste for jazz and klezmer. Over breakfast in a diner, cartoon Harvey chatted about the yuppies moving into Ohio City, driving up rents. Telling a story about his family, he looked up at a two-story house with a double porch and told his readers how Cleveland was once filled with big immigrant families who’d share a home -- one generation below, kids’ or brother’s or nephew’s family up above. His collage of West Side Market images showed the characters, the crowds, and the hucksterism of the barking vendors. “Ever see anything prettier?” one asked, holding a handful of cherries out to the reader.

The filmmakers took Pekar’s vision and let just a little sunlight in. “If you’re looking for romance,” he warned viewers, “you’ve got the wrong movie” — yet the film distilled Pekar’s relationship with his wife, Joyce Brabner, into a misfits’ love story. Shooting in Cleveland and Lakewood, the filmmakers discovered the town’s character in little bakeries and empty warehouses and brick apartment buildings, spots unchanged since at least the 1970s.

Pekar didn't change either. When I met him, Jane Campbell, then mayor, had just dissed his recent New York Times op-ed cartoon. “An air of depression pervades the city,” he'd written.

“Harvey’s been attacked for that for years,” Brabner told me. When he appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in the ’90s, some locals complained he didn’t join the comeback-city cheerleading and talk about the new Jacobs Field.

“There are people who like me to talk about Cleveland the way it is and be honest,” Pekar said.

Exactly. Pekar had to be relentlessly unsentimental to achieve his art: Seeing Cleveland's essence in everyday life.

(art from smithmag.net/pekarproject)