When I was a staff writer for the Cleveland Free Times, an alternative weekly in Ohio, I worked with a bona fide comic book hero. His name was Harvey Pekar, and if he wasn’t as recognizable as Captain America, he at least had the benefit of being an actual human being.
For years, Pekar had chronicled his real-life adventures in the independent comic called American Splendor. Starting with the underground comix legend Robert Crumb, Pekar had worked with dozens of different artists to tell vignettes from his life as a file clerk in the local VA hospital, his trouble with women, and his obsessive collecting habits.
Harvey was a notorious crank and borderline agoraphobe, unashamed to put his particular brand of misanthropy on graphic display. He was also an ardent fan of jazz and klezmer music, writing reviews for the Free Times, where he was seldom seen in the office. I do remember one day when he showed up, and it was like seeing Peter Parker stroll into the Daily Bugle—albeit a Peter Parker who was hunched over, balding, and perpetually complaining of health problems.
One of Harvey Pekar’s early comic strips, when he was collaborating with Robert Crumb in Cleveland
It was around this time that Hollywood caught wind of Pekar — who had transcended the funny pages with his legendarily disruptive appearances on David Letterman—and decided to make a movie of his life. American Splendor, as the film was inevitably titled, was a bizarre melange of genres — Hollywood biopic, documentary, and animated feature rolled into one—with Pekar appearing both in the flesh and in animated form.
When the movie finished its principal filming in downtown Cleveland, the cast held a wrap party, and I was assigned to cover it. Taking a page from the movie’s unusual structure, I decided to eschew the typical article format and instead present my reportage as a comic strip in the style of Pekar’s own work. Since I couldn’t draw worth a lick, I enlisted Gary Dumm—a local artist who frequently collaborated with Pekar on the latter day American Splendor strips—to accompany me to the party and recreate the scene in ink.
It was a relatively cozy affair, hardly the Hollywood soiree I had imagined, but I did get to meet a couple actors who would go on to much greater celebrity. Paul Giamatti played the part of Pekar. This was after his breakout role as “Pig Vomit” in Howard Stern’s Private Parts but long before his Golden Globe win for playing the lead in HBO’s John Adams (Giamatti can currently be seen in a comic movie of a different sort, playing the villainous Rhino in Amazing Spider-Man 2).
The role of Toby, Pekar’s Asperger’s-afflicted buddy, was portrayed by Judah Friedlander, who would go on to his greatest fame in 30 Rock as the guy who always had a different weird slogan on his baseball cap. At the time of the party, he was coming off his role in the Hip Hop pot comedy How High. Friedlander wasn’t shy about dishing on the smoking habits of his costars, rappers Method Man and Red Man. “They were baked the whole time,” Friedlander joked. “Method Man thought I was the director!”
Both Giamatti and Friedlander were as accessible and low-key as Cleveland itself, trading bon mots as I furiously scribbled down the impromptu dialogue. After they left the party, they even bothered to come back to offer a punchline they’d concocted on the way out. “Paul and I have something to tell you,” Friedlander blurted. “We do our own stunts!”
I translated the scene into a script, which Dumm rendered into comic form, even drawing me into the sixth panel holding my reporter’s notebook. The collaboration ran as a half-page strip in the following week’s Free Times.
This comic strip, which I wrote as a way of covering the American Splendor cast party, was my first piece of original comic art.
As part of the production process, I had seen the original art Dumm brought to the office to scan for the layout. This was the first—and I suspected last—time I would see my name in the credits of a comic; I knew I should commemorate the event with something more than rapidly yellowing newsprint. So I reached out to Dumm and asked if I could buy the original art he had created. He generously agreed to part with it.
I arrived at Dumm’s modest house on the West Side of Cleveland where he lived with his wife Laura (an artist in her own right) and their family of cats. Gary showed me around the eclectically decorated domicile, including a portfolio of original art he had collected.
When he cracked the portfolio open, it was like glimpsing the glow inside Marcellus Wallace’s suitcase from Pulp Fiction. Dumm flipped through page after page of vintage E.C. war art, huge pages that were “twice-up” (meaning two times the size of the printed comic). The original pages had much more detail and depth than the four-color reproductions, and I could see evidence of the penciled art underneath the thick black ink, as well as spots of Wite-Out where the artist had made corrections.
I had never seen anything like it before. Even though I’d been a lifelong fan, it had never occurred to me how comic pages were actually created. I knew theoretically that they had been drawn by the artist, but I never stopped to imagine what form the pages took before being mass produced, let alone that the original art might be preserved and collected.
“Where did you get this?” I stammered.
Gary explained that he had picked up the pages at comic conventions back when they were cheap because no one thought they’d ever be worth any money. Nowadays, he told me, you could go on eBay and find all sorts of original comic art at auction, but the prices had increased exponentially as the underground hobby had exploded on the internet.
And so began my quest to obtain a page of original art from one of the comics I had bought as a child.
I discovered the Original Comic Art category on eBay and started scanning it regularly for something familiar. Before long, I spotted a splash page from X-Factor that held fond memories.
As the auction entered its last hour, I took up station at the computer. I was the high bidder right up until the final seconds, when I was suddenly outbid. This was my introduction to the phenomenon of eBay sniping—using an internet proxy to swoop in at the last possible moment. Eventually, I would learn the rules of the game and open my own account at esnipe.com.
I found a few bargains. As a kid, I was a fan of Marvel’s New Universe titles—an experiment to create a world separate from the one inhabited by Spider-Man that was supposed to be a more realistic take on superheroes. I thought it was a neat idea, but no one else did, which is why the whole line was cancelled after 32 issues. This meant low demand for the original art, and I was able to buy a the final cover from Psi-Force for $150—about 1/10th the price you’d pay for a cover from the more mainstream Marvel books.
The original art to Psi-Force #32, next to the printed cover from the comic I read at the race track.
The Psi-Force cover brought back vivid memories of sitting at the horse track with my father, where I had slid the comic from its protective bag and backing board to read between races. Every time I looked at the original art, I was back sitting on a blanket in a grassy field, the smell of horse sweat in the air, an amplified trumpet blaring the imminent start of the next race.
The appeal wasn’t just the aesthetics of the art itself, but its ability to bring back the feeling of childhood. That seems to be a common phenomenon among collectors of original comic art, according to Steven Alan Payne in his book Grailpages: Original Comic Book Art and the Collectors:
“For the most part, we buy for the most mundane reasons. It follows a similar refrain in collectors from the US and abroad, our story collective. And it goes like this: I bought comics when I was young. They stirred my imagination. And the artists excelled in an industry where they could have been mediocre. And I’m able to collect this art. For the memories. To honor an overlooked art form. And that’s it.”
The title of Grailpages refers to the name for that ideal piece from your childhood that you will likely never obtain, but will always quest after. My grail is the Fall of the Mutants advertising art drawn by Alan Davis that appeared throughout the X-Men family of books right around when I first started collecting superhero comics. Eventually, I learned through his agent that the piece resides with Davis, who has no intention of ever selling it.
My grail: The original advertising art to the Fall of the Mutants storyline.
But if I wasn’t able to obtain my grail, I would at least get close. I tracked down a page from Uncanny X-Men 227 — one of the Fall of the Mutants issues—thanks to a collector on Comic Art Fans, the online hub for the hobby where fans show off their collections in virtual galleries. The owner agreed to sell the page for a reasonable price, so I was able to get a piece of my grail without spending new car money.
That wasn’t the end of it. I bought several other pages from Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor from the period I collected most fervently. I purchased pages from the alternative comix Eightball, Hate, and Optic Nerve, which I had graduated to in my later teen years. And I picked up a page from Alpha Flight that reminded me of the friend who had introduced me to the comic and who later committed suicide for reasons I still don’t understand.
As my collection had mushroomed, my wife — who had been unusually understanding of my childish fixation—grew concerned. It wasn’t just the cash outlays, which had grown by leaps and bounds; it was also the wall space: the framed pages took up entire rooms of the house and threatened to crowd out her superior sense of interior decorating.
Luckily for my marriage, the saga of my comic art collecting was about to come full circle.
Last October, I received an unexpected e-mail from someone at Marvel Comics. The company was about to release a new edition of the legendary comic book Miracleman and needed my help.
Miracleman was one of the great deconstructions of superhero mythology— right up there with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns—but it had long remained out of print due to a complicated copyright dispute resulting from the original publisher’s bankruptcy. Now Marvel had finally untangled the rights and was preparing to re-release the series, making it available for the first time in decades.
The problem was that the original art pages that Marvel needed in order to do the highest quality reproductions had been scattered thither and yon. One of them, miraculously, had landed in my collection.
I had obtained the page because of an art dealer’s mistake. In England, where the beginning of the series was originally published, it was called Marvelman. When it was imported to the states in the 1980s, the comic had to be renamed Miracleman to avoid infringing on Marvel’s copyright. The original page in my collection had been labeled with the original Marvelman title, and the dealer didn’t make the connection, which is how I was able to snag the Alan Davis Miracleman page that Marvel now needed a hi-res scan of.
“I’m editing Marvel’s new releases of Marvelman/Miracleman,” read the e-mail from restoration editor Cory Sedlmeier. “It’s an honor and a privilege to do so, and I’m striving to present the creator’s work in the best possible fashion—and nothing can beat the original art boards.”
This was no small feat. I would have to take the page off my wall, disassemble the frame, and scan the page in multiple sections. But I couldn’t say no. In the comic art collecting community, it’s common to say that you are the “curator” of the piece rather than the owner. This reflects the fact that pieces often change hands, and that they really belong to the community as a whole. Besides, I’d forever feel guilty for allowing a muddy reproduction of a page from one of greatest storylines of all time.
It took some doing—all told I framed and unframed the page three separate times as my taskmaster at Marvel demanded better scans—but it was worth it for what landed in my inbox when all was said and done:
“Thank you for your contribution,” Sedlmeier e-mailed back. “I, as well as Alan Davis, very much appreciate your help making this the best book possible.”
But that wasn’t all. When Marvel published the fourth issue of the restored Miracleman, the first page included a special thanks to those who had contributed original art. Turns out I was wrong when I bought that first piece of comic art thinking it was the only time my name would appear in the credits of a published comic.
The 13-year-old boy on the blanket at the horse track finally managed to get his name into a Marvel comic book after all.
A childhood dream come true: My name in the credits for a Marvel comic book.
Kevin Hoffman is the former editor-in-chief of City Pages, the alternative weekly of the Twin Cities. E-mail him at kevinhoffman1976@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter: @Panopticon13
Read more stories like this one by following the main Alt Ledes page here. Also, Medium has an app!
