“From Off the Streets of Cleveland,” as the kicker on his American Splendor comic books proclaimed, came legendary realistic memoirist Harvey Pekar.

Pekar was a Beat Generation-aged guy who didn’t find his career niche until the late ’70s. But that’s a gross overgeneralization, something Pekar always refused to do.

Pekar’s roots were in stuff that’s relatively timeless—jazz music, modern lit, the architecture of urban neighborhoods, the subtle emotions of everyday working-class life. He was not a man of fads, fashions, or flash. He was a man out of time, outside the publishing industry’s notions of marketability.

He found his breakthrough concept through lifelong friend Robert Crumb, who had discovered his own breakout shtick as the cartooning idol of a flower-power subculture he’d despised. Pekar would write stories that Crumb would draw. These strips grew into a full-length comic book, which Pekar self-published in annual installments, with a growing corps of illustrator-collaborators.

These comics were sold through comic book stores in “direct market” fashion. Pekar put up his own money to print them. Stores put up their own money to carry them (no consignments or returns).

In a few years, Pekar had become one of the biggest stars in the tiny world of alt-comix. He kept putting out the work on a steady schedule. He maintained a high standard in both his writing and in his collaborators’ artwork.

Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi has argued that no great cartooning is ever writer-centered; that an artist’s visual imagination must be at the core of anything in the genre. Pekar regularly disproved that. The American Splendor books always carried a strong visual flair in their dialogue-heavy panels.

That’s because Pekar, as his own publisher/editor/art director, kept a paternalistic but tight tein on his hired hands. The art in his books was always realistic, always based on the minute details of faces, clothes, and poses. Employing a variety of drawing partners in each volume only confirmed the degree to which American Splendor’s vision was Pekar’s.

Pekar never sought fame. Nor did he openly decry it. He went on the Letterman show during a network technicians’ strike wearing a pro-strikers T shirt, as a simple statement of workers’ solidarity. He used his latter-day brand image to promote the work of other writers and artists, and to discuss the big stuff that pertains to the little stuff (recession economics, Jewish identity). By staying in his realm, he remained true to his self.

Yes! There are still people producing small press zines, in print! Those who live around here, and make zines of the comix variety, are promoted at the local blog Profanity Hill.

From a 1933 issue of Fortune magazine, here’s an in-depth analysis (with full color illos) of the industry that was newspaper comic strips. Competitive big-city newspapers were at or just past their peak, and collectively supported over 230 daily strips.

If you like bad girls (by which I don’t mean heroic rebels or righteous feminist crusaders but women who really do do bad things), you’ll love the collected covers of the Crimes By Women comic books, 1948-54.

The creator of Gumby and longtime Buddhist has walked into the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I will admit to having uttered statements #4 and #5 on Troubletown cartoonist Lloyd Dangle’s list of “Blind and Unquestioning Ways to Love Obama.” Only I don’t think they’re so blind or unquestioning:

#4: “In case you weren’t paying attention—Obama ran as a centrist—which is exactly what he’s being.”

He certainly was never as far to the left as I am, which is still not as far to the left as many people I know are. And he’s filled his administration with Carter/Clinton vets, Beltway insiders, and lite-right “new Democrats.” I knew he’d do this and still supported him.

#5: “He’s so smart he’s using a secret fake-out strategy. We can’t see it yet.”

Well, I can see what I think his strategy is. It’s to render the Republicans utterly irrelevant, leaving centrist Dems such as himself as the natural “party of business.” This would leave the “conservadems” as America’s conservative party, and allow room for a real liberal party or parties, at least in non-Presidential races.

Jim Windolf, writing in Vanity Fair, has a lot of frowner words to say about America’s recent obsession with cuteness. And he even comes close to understanding it.

This comes when Windolf goes into the artistic roots of Astro Boy creator Tezuka Osamu, one of anime/manga’s first popularizers. Osamu made some big-eyed boyish heroes and placed them in awe-inspiringly beautiful settings. But his stories were informed by his lifelong obsessions with two related, real-life horrors—war and environmental destruction.

The current crop of ironic image artists displaying at places such as Roq La Rue take Osamu’s schtick a step or two further. These ladies and gents depict superficially cloying animals and children as portals for the viewers, drawing them into tableaux scenes portraying a full range of powerful emotions.

Yes, the Animation exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is one big ad for Cartoon Network.

But it’s also educational. Really.

You see, animation (even CN’s unapologetically 2-D animation) involves a lot of math, geometry, spatial relationships, optical theory (“persistence of vision”), and maybe even a daub of artistry. And that’s even without CGI. (For the purposes of this exhibit, CN’s shows are billed as being produced in traditional cel animation; in reality, even something as simplistic-looking as Code Name: Kids Next Door uses a lot of digital compositing, coloring, and assembly.)

As we’d known for almost six months, Guiding Light shone for the last time on Friday, after 72 years on radio and TV.

The show’s finale, and the dozen or so episodes leading to it, comprised a relative whirlwind of happy-ending stories, salted only by the sudden death of one of the show’s villains and the unresolved fate of one of its heroes (last seen in a high-noon shootout with another villain). This spate of happily-ever-afters, while out of keeping with the show’s tradition of complicated tragedy, was still in keeping with the show’s (and the genre’s) other tradition of deux ex machina improbabilities.

As overall TV viewership drifts downward, and the old-line networks’ market share is further eroded by cable and other alternatives, we’re reaching a point when original scripted dramas for one-time, daytime-only airing become fiscally unfeasible. As I’ve written here before, this would result in losing the only U.S. TV genre to feature open-ended storylines with no season breaks. The only other products in this country to offer that type of storytelling are certain comic books and comic strips. Online “webisode” dramas could adopt open-ended formats, but so far none have.

…but retired from all public life? Ex-Seattleite cartoonist Ward Sutton ponders the possibilities.

Rick Anderson reports the post-print seattlepi.com will include unpaid contributions by ex-Mayor Rice and Congressman McDermott, among others. Brian Miller, meanwhile, snarkily suggests a surefire substitute for professional reporting—more cute kitten pictures.

Meanwhile, here’s how the NY Times, Bloomberg.com, and the Puget Sound Business Journal reported the grim news.

Slog keeps adding additional views on the disaster. Included: P-I art critic Regina Hackett (who’s moving on to ArtsJournal.com) taking one last potshot at “the we-precious-few tone of the Times, which rubs itself against the legs of the comfortably middle-class like a cat looking for a handout,” and a commenter who scoffs at the Times’ continuing plight: “The only problem with newspapers is that they are run by newspapermen. You’re the poster child. You guys pretty much fucked-up a monopoly by trying to defend it, instead of trying to leverage it.”

P-I business columnist “the 40 year old” Bill Virgin blames his bosses for not being nice enough to conservatives and for ignoring a lot of suburban issues. (The latter point may be valid; the P-I traditionally had more out-of-town readers than the Times, but lost that advantage in the past decade.)

The Times has confirmed that it’s keeping all of both papers’ subscribers. (Expect a lot of cancellation calls.) It’s also adding five P-I comic strips, including Pearls Before Swine and 9 Chickweed Lane; but it’s not adding any P-I writers, at least not yet.

The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons. This traveling exhibit is now on display at the Museum of History and Industry, which almost never acquires exhibits produced elsewhere. It’s got 150-some pieces of original art, most of which were in Steve Schneider’s coffee-table book That’s All Folks! The Carl Stalling Project CD plays on the PA. A mini-theater plays some of the Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection DVDs to adoring/adorable young’uns.

I’d seen most of the art pieces before in printed form. I wasn’t prepared for how small they were in real life. The ink lines on the cels were sometimes hair-thin; yet, when filmed and projected, these figures almost always moved in perfect flicker-free sequence. I left with more appreciation for the ladies of the studio’s ink and paint department, who turned the animators’ pencil drawings into what you saw on screen. They were expert craftswomen.

…today to Blossom Dearie, the legendary jazz artist of the lilting vocals and the assertive piano playing, as heard in dozens of albums and several Schoolhouse Rock shorts.

The P-I has dumped Bill Griffiths’ Zippy in favor of yet another demographic/domestic sitcom comic strip. The papers are full of those strips, but there’s only one Pinhead. The P-I tried to dump Zippy previously in ’97, but reinstated the strip after massive reader response. Let’s do so again.

…some clever entrepreneur finally caught the idea of putting out officially licensed Popeye brand bagged spinach. It took another two decades for somebody else (specifically, Safeway (which, despite the oft-spread urban legend, IS NOT and NEVER WAS “owned by the Mormons”)) to come up with officially licensed Bugs Bunny carrots!

(Thanx and a hat tip to Matthew Hunter of Golden Age Cartoons.)