This was written on May 24 of this year, for friends and family. Putting it here now because I can't let 2019 go out without acknowledging the loss that hurt the most. I don't really know who reads this blog, but it's likely that this name won't mean anything to most people, and that feels wrong.

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So long, Camilla Schade.



Camilla was basically part of my family. After meeting my parents in 1975 when I was two and she was in college, she moved to Pennsylvania when the rest of us did in 1977, and was around more or less all the time for more or less all of my childhood and adolescence, working closely with their theater company in Lancaster and touring with us for long stretches in a van. Besides having literally babysat me and my sister, she also formed a lot of my ideas of what acting was (especially comic acting in a solo show, since I saw her first one about a million times, but she was versatile to a degree that at the time I didn't understand was really unusual); she was also a pretty good cartoonist, though I'm not sure how much she ever did with that other than set pieces and programs; and she was basically the coolest grownup I had ever met.

While still working with the company a lot, she started writing and directing her own stuff pretty soon and became a local legend, so that many years later after having moved to western New York, she still had a loyal following in Lancaster. So, after she received a terminal diagnosis recently, she decided to create a solo show about it and travel 200 miles to do that show, as one does. Meg and I went to Lancaster to see her do it, and you can see it too if you like, it's great: here. We got to hang out for a while among her many friends and admirers, and immediately upon meeting Meg she apologized for missing our wedding five years ago (in fact, exactly five years ago today, which feels like one of her weird jokes). I didn't know what to say, since as far as I was concerned I was the one who had flaked out, not having really tried to stay in touch after I moved to NYC and the rest of my family went elsewhere... but unfortunately that's how I was with other extended family, too.

I'm now on a quest to track down video recordings of some of the plays she did in Ithaca, which I know will be weird to see now, but I have to. I remember as a young guy I felt a little confused and irritated about how she had stayed in regional theater, since even though I understood that that was a totally worthy pursuit, I thought she was meant to be really famous like Lily Tomlin or someone. But based on how she talked in the final minutes of her final performance, she was right where she wanted to be: that is, furiously second-guessing all of her choices and laughing at herself.

( some pictures )

When I was getting into Star Trek (original series) as a kid, I had weirdly strong opinions about it. One was that whoever this "D.C. Fontana" was, he [sic] seemed smart and seemed to be the head writer for Star Trek, and those episodes had a kind of super-seriousness, which was cool... and they could be scary, like "Charlie X"... except often they were about some kind of grown-up politics and I instantly got bored.

Now, most of those episodes, I hadn't actually ever seen; the syndication schedule was pretty random, so mostly I got them in the form of short-storyizations by James Blish—an author I like a lot. Unfortunately, somehow, something about adapting Fontana's scripts brought out Blish's most boring prose. When I finally watched them—a little older, so maybe I had more of an attention span—I was surprised by how fun the same plots and dialogue were on screen. Prose fiction and drama have such different needs, and Fontana was a really engaging dramatist even when she worked on totally doofy things like the hippie episode (which was among the ones that Blish somehow made boring).

Paul Krassner was mostly before my time, but I was exposed to a fair amount of The Realist at a tender age and I remember it fondly. Even though most of the jokes were over my head, and sometimes weren't even identifiable as jokes (part of its whole deal was that there was rarely any indication of which articles were satire and which were accurate reportage), there was something about that dry and sharp but also easy-going and flaky style that I could see was special. I'm not surprised that The Realist got only a brief mention in the obit, since it's rarely mentioned by anyone these days and it's kind of hard to really explain what it even was, but I suspect that it indirectly inspired some of the better writing that's on the Internet these days... sort of like what Brian Eno allegedly said about the Velvet Underground.

I had a couple of his comedy albums and I wasn't as crazy about those, but the punchline to the bit about taking ayahuasca with his daughter is for some reason (maybe just the gleeful delivery) one of the funniest things I've ever heard. ( content note: nausea )

Rest in peace, good old Harvey Pekar. What a great and brilliant guy.

There are more tributes than I can count or read, but here's Josh Neufeld, Tom Spurgeon, and various people in the comments on this article. (Update: and a lot more from Tom Spurgeon.)

Here's another story, which is self-centered but what the hell:

When I was about 11, my parents started talking about how their friend Joyce was "eloping to Cleveland" because of this weird guy she'd just met. Soon after that, they acquired a bunch of the weird guy's comic books, which were like nothing I'd ever seen. A lot of it was over my head, and off-putting in the same way as grown-up things like coffee or beer that tasted too strong and complicated to be fun... but it was totally fascinating. The writing style was conversational and poetic and dry and angry and jokey all at once, with a strange energy that showed through even in (or especially in) the pauses and empty spaces. The art was hard for me to process; being a kid, I was of course drawn to the more polished and stylized pieces drawn by Crumb and Shamray, but just the variety of different approaches—and the whole idea of drawing such everyday things—opened up my mind in a way I'm still trying to absorb. I read every issue for the rest of the 20th century (I know there are some I've missed since then; the proliferation of titles and mini-series got confusing once he got a publisher).

About a year later, my folks collaborated with Harvey on an American Splendor stage play (not the later one that's depicted in the movie; see tiny photo under 1985-1986 here). This was at their theater in Lancaster, PA, and people there didn't know what to make of it at all: a play based on a comic book? and it's not a proper comic book, it's about regular life?? with swearing??? It was a good piece though, and Harvey got really into it.

He and Joyce came to visit for a little while, and I sort of forgot they weren't theater people, because they were just as eccentric, cranky, generous and interesting as the theater people that I was used to eavesdropping on. They were also obviously made for each other. Although they weren't around after that and I only heard from them through my folks, they always stuck in my mind as sort of a legendary far-away aunt and uncle, fixed permanently at the age they were then (which made it really weird to see the AS movie, because the actors playing the 1980s Harvey and Joyce looked more accurate to me than the older real people). Reading comics about huge events like his bouts with cancer and their adoption of a daughter—a year or two after I had heard about those things as they happened—was strange, disturbing, moving, and instructive. (Sorry about all these lists of adjectives, but that's just how it is.) I couldn't imagine being so open about your own struggles and flaws, and at the same time able to craft them into stories worth reading, more or less in real time.

During the late '90s, as I started to get to know people from my own generation who were making comics, this weird feeling of twice-removed family got even weirder as some of those people started to draw stories for AS. Previously the artists had seemed like an invisible crew of mythological creatures. It took me a little while to realize that Josh Neufeld was the same person as "Josh" in the comic—and I remembered with some embarrassment how I was originally irritated to see this new guy added to the book, just because it was always sort of disorienting to get used to a whole new style, but now he seems like an obvious natural. And Dean Haspiel was the last guy I would've ever imagined to be in it, with his big bold lines and very very non-introverted persona, but he was obviously right too. Although AS was often described as something that had been going on forever just chronicling Pekar's day to day in more or less the same way, it wasn't so; he was always trying new things and following new obsessions, and he seemed to really enjoy figuring out how to play to a new artist's strengths.

It never occurred to me to try to draw for him myself. I wouldn't have dared. I still felt massively validated when a tiny story of mine got into an anthology he guest-edited—and then I panicked, thinking it might be some kind of distant nepotism thing. So it was a huge relief when I finally met him again after that and introduced myself with my real name (the story was under my pen name) and he stared at me for a second like maybe it was some kind of prank, and then he apparently decided it was just one of those things that happens: "Huh! That's you? Huh! Nice to meetcha again. Say hi to ya folks." (This was at a book signing in Berkeley, where the still-alive B.N. Duncan showed up in the front row to Harvey's great delight. The Q&A&A&A that ensued was hilarious and, with their unique vocal qualities, probably unintelligible to anyone more than ten feet away—it sounded like a vacuum cleaner wooing an outboard motor.)

Can't think what else to say. I thought he would be around for about a hundred years.