Comics at the Wisconsin Book Fest: Tell us how you really feel

Lots of people recognize comics as an art form nowadays, but this level of open-mindedness was not quick or easy to cultivate. These seeds probably wouldn't have been sown without Harvey Pekar and Lynda Barry, two artists who speak during separate events at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 10. Few people have so clearly demonstrated comics' potential to probe deep moral and philosophical questions and raise social consciousness without pretension—and with an oddball humor that's impossible to forget. What's more, both prove that the gift of language is at least as important to comics as pictures are.

But the best reason to go and actually see Barry and Pekar speak is that they don't pull any punches—they instead turn these observations into stories that say something significant about the way we live, and the way we malfunction on a daily basis. It's poetry for the demented, but don't expect them to sugar-coat it. 

"One never knows what Harvey's gonna do, whether he's going to stand there and read from his book, frame by frame, or tell us what he thinks about the weather. But it always ends up being completely memorable," says Wisconsin Book Festival Director Alison Jones Chaim.

While many know Pekar for his American Splendor series and the award-winning 2003 film of the same name it inspired, he's much more than a self-described flunky file clerk with a knack for transforming average Joes into working-class heroes. This year he tackled Studs Tukerl's Working, publishing a graphic version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian's accounts of ordinary people talking about what they do all day and how they feel about it. Joining Pekar Saturday at Overture Center's Promenade Hall at 10 a.m. is Buhle, Pekar's co-author on the project and author of more than 35 books on radical social movements.

While the event is also very much about celebrating Buhle's return to Madison from Brown University, where he taught until recently, Buhle seems swept up in the excitement of sharing the stage with Pekar, whose observervations and criticisms of human nature managed to find ground even while Pekar worked a full-time job for 36 years.

"Harvey says that his job at the VA Hospital in Cleveland was great because he didn't work too hard and he never brought his work home. That is a snapshot of a different work environment than the one we have now," says Buhle. "People should come hear him because he is very, very funny and is also the voice of the autodidact, the self-taught reader and intellectual and music critic. And because he is a sort of Studs Terkel. As an oral history fieldworker and teacher, he's the closest thing to Studs we now have."

Lynda Barry, the book festival's other comics hero, is more than just a cult celebrity: Her comic Ernie Pook's Comeek has been a staple at big-city alt-weekly papers since the late '70s, classmate Matt Groening dedicated several of his early Life In Hell books to her, and her ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! comic on Salon.com was later made into a book. Buhle credits her as "the proper sucessor to the most famous of old-time Wisconsin-born comic artists, Frank O. King."

King's Chicago Tribune strip Gasoline Alley might have invented continuity in daily comics nearly 90 years ago, Buhle says, but Barry's a more dynamic force to be reckoned with: "She is our very own giant in comic art today. Lynda's work demonstrates the maturity of comic art, because it is deeply insightful, constantly full of new artistic experiments, and as good as the best of Frank King in artistic terms." And like Pekar, she'll make you laugh so hard you'll either wet your pants or keel over from hiccuping.