Brian and Matthew Hieggelke at New City Chicago talk to Harvey Pekar about his new book, The Quitter. Peter Schjeldahl's October 17 story on graphic novels (you know, the one I grumbled about) came up. I've provided the second link.

How do you feel about reviews of the book so far?

Well, the reviews have been tremendous. I mean, I've gotten eighty or ninety reviews or something, and all but about five of them have been favorable.

Do the bad ones bug you?

Yeah, they bug me, but especially a couple were written that were kind of malicious. Especially, there was one from the New Yorker that was really--this is really funny. I don't know exactly what the hell happened at the New Yorker, but some guy wrote a piece on graphic novels? In the New Yorker? [Link] And he shit on everybody. Just shit on everybody. So, and he called me--the New Yorker's a pretty polite magazine, most of the time. This guy, man, he was fucking nasty. It was kind of funny to see it in the New Yorker. He called me, the unintentional inventor of comic minimalism. That's like, even if I did something right, it had to be accidental, or something like that. So I guess the thing probably made a lot of people mad. I'm assuming, because about a month later, they published another review by somebody else that was favorable about the book. This time it was in a column called Briefly Noted. But this time it was almost like we're evening up the score here. To find these reviews, I go to up to the public library, `cause I can't use a computer myself, I'm a fuckup with machines. And my wife won't help me. So, I go to the library, and these people at the library are sympathetic to me. And they look on Google for the latest reviews. So when the second New Yorker thing came out--if you look on Google, it'll cite the review and where it's published and stuff. And then they'll maybe give you part of the first sentence of the review or something like that. Well in this one, this makeup review, which was a good review of the book, they said something like, `Harvey Pekar is praised!' You know what I mean; it was weird! It was like, normally they don't just get this man, hey! Get this man, this guy's been praised by us! Or something like that, it was really weird. I think you gotta agree that it's pretty damn strange for a magazine like the New Yorker to review the same book twice within about two months. If I'm talking too much about it, you really start to wonder about me. Maybe you are already, but it was a funny thing.

The NPR website has a few pages from the book and a Terry Gross interview. Publishers Weekly interviewed Pekar and collaborator Dean Haspiel, too.

Pick a peck of Pekar here. And here, cartoonists on the Comics Journal message board jaw about the Cartoon Issue that contained the Briefly Noted in question. Does that make any sense, I wonder?