Reviews and Comments

I enjoy Waters' movies so I thought I would give this book a try. The one good thing about it - it was a breezy quick read.

The story is absurd but not in the fun goofy way I was expecting. It was just ... off in very fundamental ways. From blocking that just made no sense to motivations that came from nowhere, this books is a mess. That is to say nothing of the wandering viewpoint that hops around randomly to tell something then hop back. And the telling. "Show don't tell" is not advice that was heeded for this book. Waters at every point lets you know exactly what you should think by just splatting it out there. I didn't expect subtlety, but I did expect narrative competence.

Overall, I cannot recommend this to anyone. I think the time to read this book would better be spent watching two or three of his films.

I have been following Drew Friedman on and off since he did the portraits of game show hosts in the 80s. I bought this book on the pre-Xmas sale at Fantagraphics, almost on a whim.

I was impressed at the older, more mature art style. These portraits are lusher, more restrained than the pointilistic dots of his younger work. The ink wash feels different from the manic energy in a good way. I found myself pausing to take in each page for a long while before reading the bios.

I have very little of the referenced material but now I have an interest to dig in deeper. It was interesting to see the people mentioned commonly in others bios. One could map out influence by just reference count alone.

I liked everything about it other than the intro by Marc Maron, which seemed pretty slight by comparison with the rest of the work. The history of underground at the end by comparison is great!

I recommend the book highly, whether you know all the players or like me were just tangentially aware of them.

This book was fine as late era Pekar work goes. It would be above average for most people but it feels relatively slight here.

Harvey is a minor presence as he largely tells the story of people he knows. The problem is that I didn't care that much about them nor find them that interesting. The very last story was my favorite, the title story. That was Harvey centric which made it better to me.

The Summer McClinton art was generally good if inconsistent. Some pages were straight up beautiful while others looked rushed. I have The Beats but have not yet read it. She has art in that book that I want to see now.

Overall this book is worth reading for any Pekar fan, just don't expect a masterpiece.

Just got to Part 2, the prescriptive part about how to fight against anticompetitive big tech. That's good, I was not eager to read any more case studies. We got it.