Take The City And Run

Written by Harvey Pekar
Art by Dean Haspiel
completed November 1, 2005

For anyone who has read Pekar’s previous work, The Quitter will cover much familiar territory. Just as his American Splendor comic is largely autobiographical, dealing with his life as an insecure, working class guy living in Cleveland, coming to terms with his problems, listening to and writing about jazz, and discovering and becoming involved with underground comics, so too is this book. The main difference here is the focused effort to tell a large part of the story in a single, concisely put together volume. Anyone whose introduction to Pekar was the movie based on his comic, will find this to be an excellent companion. But even those who have read much of his work already will find satisfaction in this fresh re-telling. And much of this freshness comes from the excellent art by Dean Haspiel, which ties everything together in a new way that was never quite possible before given the variance of artists and styles from story to story. Of course the many different renderings of Pekar count for a large part of what always made the American Splendor work interesting, but this is a different beast and could serve as a definitive version of the many-times-told tale.