In Memorium...

Comics writer Harvey Pekar, creator of the classic AMERICAN SPLENDOR series, died a few days ago. I had the honor to have been involved in a couple of his final projects with editor Paul Buhle. THE BEATS is a graphic history of the Beat poets and here's Harvey's script for my brief contribution, "Jazz and Poetry." His slightly unorthodox way of working out a comics script was also detailed in the terrific film of his life, AMERICAN SPLENDOR.

From there, I gathered reference and illustrated the pages as follows...


Harvey and Paul were pleased with how the piece turned out, so they invited me to participate in their next project, STUDS TERKEL'S WORKING, a comics adaptation of the classic collection of interviews with working class people. Since the interviews were pretty straightforward oral histories, Paul and Harvey trusted me to adapt my three pieces directly from the original text. These projects were a great privilege to be involved with and would be an asset to any collector's library.

Order THE BEATS here...

Order STUDS TERKEL'S WORKING here...

I receive no royalties for either book but I imagine that Harvey's widow will.

Editor Paul Buhle on working with Harvey...

In addition, Harvey had a long gestating project about the history of Jazz that I'd recently become involved with... I provided him with illustrations from my own long gestating history of Jazz (What, doesn't EVERYBODY have one?) in hopes of getting the project sold somewhere down the line. Sad to say we'll never get to read Harvey's book... it would've been one to remember.

My Jazz sketches here...

Thanks, Harvey (and Paul) for the opportunity...
Lance Tooks