Eruditorum Press

They’ll all look up and shout “Save us!” And we’ll look down and whisper “Back us on Patreon.”

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later.Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

The Agency of a Talking Anteater (Book Three, Part 71: Big Numbers #1)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: On the back of his monster success with Watchmen, Alan Moore declared that he would be self-publishing a comic about shopping mall and algebra.

“It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form… and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater.” – Warren Ellis, “Grey Fog”

This declaration came in the context of Moore talking about his experiences self-publishing AARGH via his Mad Love imprint. This had been a decision made at the behest of Canadian writer/artist Dave Sim, who had found considerable success self-publishing his satirical Cerebus via his own press, Aardvark-Vanaheim. As Moore put it, “For years, this frosthardened son of the North has been standing there in his snowshoes, haranguing those of us within the bullpens and sheepdips of mainstream comics from an uncompromised position that’s been increasingly difficult to refute. ‘Hey! Why work for them guys? You must be some kinda stupid hosers, eh?’” It must be stressed, however, that Sim was in many ways a latter day William Blake—a singular and visionary talent who could not possibly have had the career he wanted on any terms other than his own. Blake, when this comparison was put to him in a 2020 seance, scoffed that “at least my gender politics weren’t that bad,” and it is notable that Moore would eventually terminate his relationship with Sim after Sim appended an introduction to an interview they did together explaining that “it would be really nice if, as a 50th birthday present, I could just type ‘IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD COME OUT OF ALAN, THOU VILE AND ACCURSED.’ And have it work. Just like that when Alan read it. But, alas, I don’t think demonic possession—at least of the sort that Alan seems to have involved himself with—works that way” before digressing into a bit of Biblical exegesis to the effect of “women are hella icky.” Which is to say that, as effective an evangelist for self-publishing as he was, ultimately what worked for Dave Sim was not inherently likely to work for anyone else.

Equally, in a world in which Dave Sim was prominently advocating for self-publishing (and had not yet publicly accused Moore of being demonically possessed), Moore was never going to not try it. A central concern of his triptych of magna opera was the basic fact that these were his great works. They would not be owned by a vast American media company that could endlessly license them off in a cynical bid to bilk as much money as possible from rabid fans of malls and algebra. This was, for Moore, the point every bit as much as his creative interests. From Hell and Lost Girls both found their initial homes in Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology, published via his own Spiderbaby Grafix, but for The Mandelbrot Set, or, as it eventually ended up being named, Big Numbers, Moore decided to put it out via Mad Love, investing the bulk of his profits from Watchmen (save for some with which he bought his parents a greenhouse) into the endeavor, with his wife Phyllis and partner Deborah Delano handling the business end of it.…

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America a Prophecy 3: The Only Thing that Stops a Bad Guy with an Emotion is a Good Guy with an Emotion

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Scrape away the deconstructive close-reading, scrape away the history of decline, scrape away the entire wilfully absurd edifice of an annual blog series devoted to it and what you are left with is an unusually bathos-heavy bit of glurge.

The word “glurge” was coined by Patricia Chapman on a mailing list attached to the website Snopes. “Glurge” referred to a specific category of urban legend—the heartwarming, inspirational, and completely uncited and often fact-free stories that were often sent via e-mail in the late 90s and early 00s by the sorts of elderly relatives who would soon be preyed upon by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. The term originally came out of the site’s then focus on urban legends, describing a common style of story characterized by an unabashed and excessive sentimentality. A doctor operates for free on a young girl that once gave him a glass of milk. A dying child comes back from the brink when her brother sings “You Are My Sunshine.” A marine comforts a dying stranger in the hospital. Stuff like that. 

9/11 provided something of a heyday of glurge—a sticky, cloying spray of it so voluminous that it becomes possible to identify distinct subgenres of glurge. There’s state glurge, like a motley collection of Members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps. There’s imperialist glurge, like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” There’s first responder fetishism, stories of American resilience, impassioned insistence about the dignity of American Muslim. And then, of course, there’s the category that John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic fits into: public mourning.

Public mourning is a concept I’ve always had a complicated relationship with. There’s a stagedness to it—a sense of perfunctory ritual in the place of actual emotive content—that runs counter to how I experience grief. Equally, of course, there are people who value it highly. One need only look at the scenes taking place in the UK when the last post went up and the sheer number of people standing in an hours-long line to shuffle past a box to see that these rituals of mourning carry weight. This is an important thing to keep in mind when we look at a misfiring bit of public mourning like the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip.

On the other hand, it’s not an especially radical observation to note that public mourning really can go embarrassingly wrong. Perhaps the worst piece of public mourning glurge I ever saw for 9/11 came a few years before I wrote that essay, in the parking lot for my vet’s office in Florida, where a car routinely sat bearing a bumper sticker that read “am I the only one who still mourns 9/11?” Like the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, this bumper sticker provokes a certain awed horror. The question it asks is singularly stupid—the only possible response is “of course you aren’t, you narcissistic twatwaffle.” But this reveals what should be perfectly obvious, which is that the question is rhetorical.…

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Striplights and Software (Book Three, Part 70: Shopping Malls)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Moore found his worldview rapidly evolving in the wake of Watchmen.

“It’s a new world, Arcane. It’s full of shopping malls and striplights and software. The dark corners are being pushed back a little more every day.” – Alan Moore, Saga of the Swamp Thing

These evolutions were already in progress, however, as Moore contemplated what he wanted his next major project to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he remained ambitious. Watchmen would have been a perfectly fine career capstone for most people. Indeed, Watchmen was already substantially more ambitious than what most people would attempt, which was at once its virtue and its tragedy. But Moore was surely rankled by the fact that his magnum opus sat in the control of a company he disdained and was steadily sliding towards outright despising. On top of that, he was only thirty-five. There was plenty of time for Moore to write another work of the scale of Watchmen.

In fact, he would decide to write three projects of that sort of scale and ambition, each picking up on different aspects of Watchmen. One of these was From Hell, which saw Moore expand his idea of using a murder and detective story to understand a larger world away from a narrative device for a comic book universe and into an interrogation of the 20th century itself via the Jack the Ripper murders. Another was Lost Girls, which saw Moore give his recurring interest in sexuality as a theme its fullest realization.

It was the third project, however, that was the biggest, most ambitious, and most fascinating thing Moore would work on during the period—a work of audacious formalist complexity that would delve into the storytelling tools he had developed for Watchmen and build an entire philosophical worldview out of them. Moore’s first description of it came in an interview published in February 1988, where he proclaimed that “ I want to do a graphic novel about shopping malls.” Clarifying this willfully puzzling remark, he explained that the comic would be “about a number of things. What happens is that an American shopping mall of Californian scale, one of those monstrous, minature cities you seem to have over there in LA, is erected in this small town in the middle of England.”

This captures one of the essential things about the shopping mall, which is that it was a distinctly American phenomenon even as it was exported to the world, emerging out of the specific concerns of post-World War II America. It is helpful, since Moore sets up the contrast himself, to contrast this with the UK. Both countries experienced a post-War economic boom. In the UK, this involved the creation of the welfare state, and, on a housing level, things like the new towns scheme and the “renovation” of the terraces into tower blocks. These were mixed blessings at best, as Moore trenchantly observed at numerous points during his career, and indeed their failings would be an implicit part of his malls project.…

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Tombs and Seances and Murders (Book Three, Part 69: Brought to Light)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore made savvy use of his artist in Brought to Light, offering a wordy and dense history of the CIA for Sienkiewicz to offer his abstract and often terrifying illustrations to.

You wonder why the children of America are obsessed with death? You wonder why rock groups that look like corpses and zombie comic-book heroes are so goddamn popular here? It’s just the same way your Victorians loved their tombs and seances and murders. The American Empire is dead and does not know it. Like your empire before it, it’s only aware of the truth in its sleep.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

The eagle presents himself as a salesman, and launches into a pitch, though for what exactly is not clear. The content, however, is a history of the CIA, narrated to the reader over twenty-one of the comic’s thirty pages. This is a complicated frame for a story that could have been presented more straightforwardly, but it gives Moore several advantages. The eagle functions as an unreliable narrator—a point that’s made emphatically clear at the outset, when he talks about the CIA’s relationship with Congress in terms of how “My wife, she holds the purse strings, see? I gotta account for every cent. As for laying down the law… hell, she practically drafted a Bill ‘o Rights!… Bitch watches my every move. Still, there’s ways an’ means. What she don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her.” (This stylized dialogue provides the unquestionable highlight of the Gary Lloyd audio adaptation, with Alan Moore voicing the eagle in a style that could be described as “the voice he’d developed for ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ on several lines of cocaine” but is frankly far better simply sought out and experienced for one’s self.)

This gave Moore three separate ways of revealing information. On the most basic level, he could simply have the eagle convey some historical fact—for instance, that “over in Cuba this friendly dictator named Fulgencio Batista ad been running things along with Santos Trafficante, the Mafia’s man in havana, Cuba’s capital. Batista ignored the drugs, gambling, and prostitution for a cut of the profits… Suddenly, in 1959, this socialist, Fidel Castro, an’ his buddy Ché Guevara overthrew Batista in a so-called popular revolution. Under Castro, Trafficante and the mob hadda leave Cuba.” But he could also lean into the eagle’s status as an unreliable narrator, such as the following sentence, “Say watcha like, the Mafia represent free enterprise, which we, as a company, are sworn to protect.” On top of this, he still has Sienkiewicz’s illustrations, so he can then devote two panels to the eagle lighting a cigar (“Havana cigars—best smoke inna world”) and taking a long drag on it, implicitly commenting on the way in which the CIA and its officers enriched themselves on Cuba.

The unreliable narrator also allows Moore to inject some humor into what is not exactly inherently entertaining subject matter. So, for instance, talking about the use of a Pepsi bottling plant in Laos as a front for a heroin-running operation, Moore has the eagle dryly remark that “later we decided that things went better with Coke.”…

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Languages of Apocalypse (Book Three, Part 68: Bill Sienkiewicz)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Bill Sienkiewicz got his start as a Neal Adams imitator drawing Marvel’s Batman imitator Moon Knight, but eventually moved on to a more prestigious project: New Mutants.

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence. – Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights

This was one of the books in the X-Men line, written by Chris Claremont, then at the apex of his clout as a major figure in the industry. New Mutants was a book focused on the younger generation of mutant characters. Among these was Dani Moonstar, a Native American mutant. From the earliest issues of New Mutants it became clear that Dani was haunted by a bear spirit—one that had previously killed her parents. A year and a half into the book’s run, as Claremont prepared to pay off this story, he grew frustrated of working with Sal Buscema. As Claremont saw it, “[Buscema] looked like everything else. And I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be very much a kid-centric book. There needed to be a totally different visual sense.” And so he turned to Sienkiewicz.

For his part, Sienkiewicz had been on a kick of reading Hunter S. Thompson, with the memorably grotesque art of Ralph Steadman, and watching David Lynch films, and so when Claremont came to him with a story that took place largely in an abstracted spirit world and a mandate to bring a distinctive visual sense, he cut loose. Reasoning that “the benefit of dealing with dream logic and nightmares is that anything goes,” Sienkiewicz embraced a harsh and abstract line that made characters feel as though they had been clawed into the page, less drawn than scratched. His Demon Bear was a towering monolith of crazed eyes, murderous teeth, savage claws, and the vague yet terrifying implication of a snout. The result was moody, kinetic, and like nothing mainstream superhero comics had seen before. It was not, to be clear, that Sienkiewicz was creating new techniques; ultimately he was simply importing concepts from the fine art world (in which he had trained before seeking a career in comics) that the stodgy comics industry had largely neglected—the same concepts that artists like Dave McKean and Duncan Fegredo would hit on as well. But Sienkiewicz’s run on New Mutants was the first time these techniques had been employed in a mainstream American comic. It was also a massive hit, and Sienkiewicz ended up spending a year on the book instead of the originally planned three issues, introducing the cybernetic alien Warlock, who, in Sienkiewicz’s conception, was an shifting mass of circuitry that got to cyberpunk horror a full five years before the twin 1989 releases of Tetsuo the Iron Man and “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does.”

Sienkiewicz’s work on New Mutants was aided by the particular dynamic he had with Claremont, who, in 1984, was arguably the single most mainstream writer in superhero comics.…

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The Great, Warm, Red-White-and-Blue Beating Heart of This Beleaguered Country (Book Three, Part 67: The Christic Institute)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The CIA was very bad, and then there was a bombing in La Penca, Nicaragua, that injured a journalist, Tony Avrigan.

In this, the eleventh hour, with the world poised on the brink of Red Armageddon, it is vital that we, as a nation, should rally around those symbols that are closest to the great, warm, red-white-and-blue beating heart of this beleaguered country. They are our hope and our inspiration, the legends that urge our people onward even in times of deepest crisis. -Alan Moore, Watchmen

Subsequent investigation revealed that “Per Anker Hansen’ was in fact a man named Vital Roberto Gaguine, an Argentinian leftist who had traveled to La Penca along with Swedish journalist Peter Torbiörnsson. Tobiörnsson was in fact a Sandinista sympathizer who had worked closely with a Nicaraguan intelligence unit called the Fifth Directorate, run out of the Interior Ministry by Tomás Borge, although he has always maintained that he simply thought Gaguine was a spy and not a bomber, and in his later career worked to expose the details of Sandinista involvement in the bombing. This has not entirely satisfied Honey, however, who, not unreasonably, points out that pinning the blame on the Sandinistas would have benefitted the Reagan administration, who instead stonewalled and obfuscated the investigation, and who points out a number of aspects of the bombing that remain unexplained.

The details of Gaguine’s involvement and Torbiörnsson’s complicity, however, did not begin to emerge until 1993, and Torbiörnsson’s full involvement did not emerge until 2009. Long before all of this, when the bulk of the evidence to be unearthed was still related to the CIA theory, Avirgan and Honey found themselves in touch with the Christic Institute, who felt that the evidence they had collected tied in with their ongoing investigations of the CIA. Ultimately Avirgan and the Christic Institute filed a $24 million lawsuit against a wide spread of people alleged to have been responsible for a conspiracy to commit the La Penca bombing along with drug and arms trafficking, illegal assassination programs, and more. It should be stressed that many of the underlying claims in the lawsuit were ultimately well-documented—the Iran-Contra scandal was, after all, real, and the lawsuit was filed months before it emerged into popular awareness. And, more to the point, the CIA really was responsible for a host of illegal activities including drug smuggling and illegal assassinations.

Despite its prescience, however, Avirgan v. Hull was a deeply ambitious lawsuit, and the Christic Institute had bad luck in drawing James Lawrence King as the judge. King was a Nixon appointee who would have a long career of conservative and pro-government rulings, and on June 23rd 1988 he dismissed the case, declaring that the Christic Institute’s case consisted of “unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first-hand knowledge” and levying one million dollars in fines against the Institute for filing a frivolous suit.

It is undoubtedly the case that King was a particularly hostile judge, and opinion was sharply divided on whether his dismissal and penalties were unduly harsh, but even writers who are sympathetic to the Institute’s aims tend to suggest that the lawsuit was deeply flawed.…

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Out Today: 2000 AD #2330

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I’m absolutely over the moon to be able to announce that today sees the release of my professional comics debut, which you’ll find in this week’s issue of 2000 AD. It’s a Future Shock called “Look At Your Hands” that I’ve done with the stunning Laura Helsby on art, with two-time Eisner nominee Jim Campbell on letters. I am, as you can imagine, absolutely charmed and delighted to be breaking in via this specific route, which I think you’ll agree is by far the absolute funniest way I could possibly do it.

In any case, I hope you’ll check it out, not least because, in my entirely unhumble opinion, it’s really quite good. (I am in fact comfortable saying it’s better than “Killer in the Cab.”) Not only that, but there’s a nice one-shot Judge Dredd in there, new installments of Durham Red and Enemy Earth, and a Rogue Trooper story by Garth Ennis and Patrick Goddard. Yes, you read that right: my comics debut is in the same issue as a friggin’ Garth Ennis story.

You can snag it at your local newsagent or comic shop, or get it online from 2000 AD’s web store. And, since they’ve released it as a preview, I can at least give you the first page, which is enough to see our cool and exciting premise and just how incendiarily good Laura’s art is.

I’ll be posting detailed writers notes to the $25 tier of the Patreon this afternoon, and a big interview with me and Laurz at the 2000 AD website.…

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Ordinary Torture (Book Three, Part 66: The CIA)

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Content warning: Images of physical mutilation

Previously in Last War in Albion: Joyce Brabner, after getting into the world of comics by becoming a major figure in Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic American Splendor (and marrying Pekar in the process), is contacted by the Christic Institute, run by Daniel Sheehan, a lawyer who came to prominence during the Karen Silkwood case.

You’re tuning it out. I can see your ocular focus shifting. You’ve been trained to handle interrogation, in a very specific way. I bet you can even bypass ordinary torture. And none of these people picked it u. Because DHS is formed out of sixteen domestic agencies. And you’re from the Central Intelligence Agency. – Warren Ellis, Jack Cross

Silkwood’s family ultimately sued Kerr-McGee for negligence in the original plutonium poisoning, successfully recovering $1.38 million dollars in a settlement; Sheehan was among the attorneys in the case, and founded the institute in the wake of their success to pursue similar cases, using civil suits to right wrongs that the criminal justice system had proved inadequate for.

This was often a successful strategy—in one of their early cases, for instance, the Institute represented survivors of the Greensboro massacre, in which white supremacists shot and killed five participants in a “Death to the Klan” rally. State and federal prosecutions failed to secure any convictions, and so the Christic Institute led a successful civil suit to secure justice. But it is important to stress the degree to which the Christic Institute’s strategy was also one of public relations. Sheehan was always, in part, a legal impresario, and one who was prone to making sure he was prominently centered in stories about the group. This meant that the Institute could often be a blunt instrument; one media article about it quotes the leader of another public interest group as saying that “Danny Sheehan is to investigating what a depth charge is to sports fishing.” This bluntness would ultimately have significant consequences.

In 1984, the Institute represented Stacey Lynn Merkt, who had been arrested transporting refugees from El Salvador on behalf of the Catholic American Sanctuary Movement. In the course of working this case, Sheehan was visited by multiple religious leaders who repeated claims passed by unnamed government officials that the Sanctuary Movement was in fact smuggling known terrorists into the country. Perturbed by this dedicated misinformation campaign, the Institute began investigating their source, and soon found itself investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II. During the War the US had set up the Office of Strategic Services, its first effort at an intelligence agency. At its head was General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who quickly developed a taste for extravagant covert operations, dropping agents behind enemy lines to commit sabotage or exploring complicated gadgets and tactics—at one point he was investigating how to use bats as a bomb delivery system. In late 1944, Donovan wrote to Franklin Roosevelt arguing for the establishment of a permanent intelligence service.…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy Ebook

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I’m pleased to announce the release of the first volume of a new Patreon-exclusive ebook series Apocrypha Eruditorum, which will collect some of my essay series and writings that don’t and are unlikely to have a home in any other release. This inaugural volume collects my series An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy, which covers the movies in the Star Wars Saga, along with essays on some other films by Rian Johnson, and it’s available right now to all $10+ Patrons, who also have been getting things like my reviews of the second and third John Wick movies, Portal, and Portal 2 and should get four more pages of Britain a Prophecy sometime this weekend.

(Yes, that’s the actual cover. I’m extremely proud of it, though I should note that the actual photo was kindly provided by Peppa Bridger when I asked for something like it on Twitter.)

“But wait,” you may be asking yourself, “didn’t that series only ever get eight installments?” Well, that was true once, but now I’ve finally written the concluding essay on The Rise of Skywalker just so I can put this out. And it’s available to all my Patrons, not just ones at the $10+ level.

To give an update on the Patreon, at the time of writing it’s at $2,161, which is still nearly $1500 down from what I was making in March. So that’s not great. What I’d like to do, in the short term at least, is target $2700, which is the point at which it will at least cover my family’s rent. We’ve traditionally paid that every month with the Patreon, and so having the Patreon below that number is genuinely alarming. $2700 is still a pretty painful loss compared to before all this went down, but it’s at least manageable; I can make it at that level for half a year and then do a round of fundraising off the fact that my Doctor Who reviews are going to be Patreon-exclusive. But there’s still a ways to go between now and that level.

So please, if you haven’t backed the Patreon yet, get on that. $5 gets you all my publicly released ebooks and all my new writing. And if you have backed it, have you considered upping your pledge? I’ve already noted what the $10 tier gets you, but there’s gonna be something pretty fun coming for the $25 Patrons around… ooh… May 3rd? I think May 3rd. And even if you can’t back it or have hit the most you can afford to spend, please at least consider spreading the Patreon link around. I’ve got no advertising budget or anything; I depend on word of mouth and reputation. So whatever it is of mine that you like, please tell people, and tell them how they can help me afford to keep doing it.…

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Sunburn Tatters (Book Three, Part 65: American Splendor)

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Last War in Albion is produced with the support of my Patrons. My Patreon is currently in some trouble after a Patreon-mandated start from scratch to switch to per month billing, and is currently below the level of our monthly rent, which my family has historically relied on my Patreon to pay. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting it.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore contributed a story to Joyce Brabner’s Real War Stories project. Brabner got into comics, as she tells it, by appearing in one—specifically Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the lawyers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled cement tree-stump of the Boroughs. – Alan Moore, Jerusalem

American Splendor gradually evolved from the meandering anecdotal form into more long form and piercing accounts of Pekar and his life. Many of the stories were simply several page accounts of conversations Pekar had with various people in Cleveland, while others offered more piercing accounts of Pekar, his anxiety, stubbornness, and sense of himself. A story in American Splendor #3 entitled “Awakening to the Terror of a New Day,” for instance, starts with Pekar on the phone with his ex-wife, trying to get back together, only to be rebuffed, at which point he loses his temper at her and is castigated for it, concluding that “I shouldna lost my temper. That’s one reason chicks don’t dig me. They’re scared a’ me.” He lays down in bed, wakes up anxious, masturbates, and is left feeling hollow and empty inside. He takes a bath, reflecting on his job, and how he doesn’t want to get out of the tub. “Sometimes I wish I could freak out,” he thinks, “have a nervous breakdown, anything to get away from the same routine.” Instead he rises from the tub, gets dressed, grouching about how his clothes are tattered but how he doesn’t want to spend money on new ones because “what could be more ridiculous than fat slobs spendin’ a lot a’ money on clothes. They’re gonna look lousy anyway.” He has breakfast, leaves for work, and decides on the walk that he should take the civic service exam and look for a government job. The comic ends with him sitting at the bus stop, resolving that “I gotta take the days one at a time… make a plan an’ try t’ follow it out. I might be able t’ make it if I get my ass in gear. I’ll check out the gover’mint gig scene an’ think over where I stand with th’ chicks I know. Mybe I’m overlooking someone. T’day’s Thursday. Tomorra’s Firday. Saturday I c’n sleep late.” A final caption notes that “Man looks wherever he can for hope,” and the strip ends. It’s elliptical, willfully unsatisfying, but more than anything is simply a poignant reflection on working class life in Cleveland in the 1970s.

Pekar’s work drew a number of admirers, although the comic remained a niche operation that ran at a steady but sustainable loss.…

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