American Splendor Presents: Bob & Harv's Comics

Gathered here are the collected works of the titans of adults comics — legendary underground cartoonist R. Crumb and the "high priest of comic-book naturalism" (Newsweek) Harvey Pekar. The comic collision of these underground luminaries is funny, obsessive, ever-so-slightly neurotic, but always biting and honest.

Both Robert Crumb (Self-Loathing Comics), who defined the underground comics of the 1960s, and Harvey Pekar (Cancer Year), whose autobiographical comic (American Splendor) launched an entire movement in the 1980s, have transformed American alternative comics. Four Walls Eight Windows is releasing Bob & Harv's Comics, a collection of their pithy collaborations (Crumb illustrates Pekar's stories) that also shows how superbly suited they are to interpret each other's work.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pekar's American Splendor is hands down the best adult comic book and maybe the best comic book, period, in the U.S. It is full of the adventures of Pekar himself--a genuine working-class intellectual, a clerk in a government hospital who on the side writes about jazz, the comics, and authors whose work deserves renewed attention. He writes and storyboards the stories and recruits professional comics artists to draw them. The most famous of these is his longtime friend, Robert Crumb, dean of the 1960s "underground" comics artists and subject of the extravagantly praised documentary film Crumb (1994). The touchstones for the formal qualities and attitudes of these cartoon-illustrated slices-of-life are the stories of such urban impressionists as Grace Paley and Meyer Liben and the films of the French new wave directors, especially Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer. Pekar and Crumb don't derive from those artists, however; they are their peers. Ray Olson