Seattle Splendor

Town Hall Seattle, First Hill's cultural arts center, hosted an evening with Harvey Pekar last night, which we were fortunate enough to attend. Co-sponsored by Elliott Bay Books, the event was mainly to promote Pekar's newest graphic novel, Ego & Hubris, the story of New Yorker Michael Malice.

The building Town Hall resides in was originally a Church of Christ, Scientist, and still retains most of the distinguishing features in it's interior, including rows of hard-backed and tightly-packed wooden pews and tall stained glass windows. It's a large, beautiful room and a perfect venue for this sort of event.

The host of tonight's activities was Paul Constant, the surprisingly youthful book critic for Seattle's self-proclaimed "only newspaper," the Stranger. As he began his introduction, most of the (rather sizable) audience was stealing glances over to the backstage door, where Harvey was intermittently peeking out at us.

Despite his reputation as a somewhat gruff, brusque character, Harvey came across as very warm and open, answering questions freely, both from Paul and the audience. They tackled everything from his upcoming projects (including the very intriguing Macedonia project, which should hit shelves later this year, and DC Comic's revival of his flagship American Splendor title, starting in September), his brief involvement in adapting Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly to comics, his writing process and the business end of working with various artist and publishers (apparently DC's page rates for artists work out almost three times higher than Random House's...not exactly what I would have expected!), and of course, the process of writing Ego & Hubris. The new book was put together almost entirely from letters and anecdotes told to Pekar by the book's subject, Michael Malice, which Harvey essentially edited down to a series of panels for artist Gary Dumm.

Following the interview was a brief audience Q&A session, and book sales and signing, during which Harvey cheerfully answered questions and signed books for dozens of people, the line stretching around a row of pews. It was a wide range of ages and styles in attendance, which was nice to see.

Town Hall is definitely a Seattle event center to keep an eye on. Marjane Satrapi will be appearing there June 2nd, in conjunction with the Seattle Public Library's "Seattle Reads Persepolis" series of events. There's also an "Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution" debate next week, featuring representatives of the local intelligent design "think-tank" the Discovery Institute, a group responsible for, or at least involved in, much of the drive to undermine this country's science education. That might be worth checking out.