There’s a funny story in today’s New York Times about a battle for supremacy that took place on Saturday in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a bunch of guys named Josh. It couldn’t be more apropos because I just drew this humorous one-pager on the story of my name. Touching upon my being Jewish, growing up different, Star Wars, Superboy, and so much more, the comic has fun with our current obsession with identity and self-discovery. (By the way, I have only ever run into one guy with my exact name—the Canadian Josh Neufeld is a professor of microbial ecology and a very nice fellow).
For those in the know, “The Josh Neufeld Name Story” is also an homage to a story by Harvey Pekar, illustrated by R. Crumb, which first appeared in American Splendor #2 (1977). (As I’m sure you know, I was an artist for Pekar on American Splendor for 15 years.) (The best online link to the original story I could find was this mashup of the comic and Dan Castellaneta’s monologue of it from the American Splendor play produced in 1990. [starts at 1:13].)
Furthermore, my piece is not the first comics reference to “The Harvey Pekar Name Story”—Damon Herd did an homage to the Pekar/Crumb piece back in 2013. And of course the story was dramatized in the American Splendor movie… But I like to think my piece puts a different spin on it.
Anyway, I often use the Pekar comic and a set of prompts I created as part of a workshop where I have students draw their own “name story.” Whether they’re high school art students or people who may have never drawn a comic in their lives before, the results are always fascinating. They help the students get into the “comics space” and enable me to learn a little about each participant.
But it always bothered me that—until now—I had never done my own name story. It’s one of the first autobio comics I’ve drawn in a while, and I enjoyed the experience—hearkening back to those halcyon Keyhole days! (Talking about Keyhole, and my long-time collaborator Dean Haspiel, he and I talk about “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” quite a bit in episode 28 of our podcast Scene by Scene with Josh & Dean…)
On a separate note, because I’m fascinated by the emergence of the NFT (or non-fungible token), I am announcing that I am auctioning off the hi-rez NFT of this comic! It seems appropriate that a piece like this—which I created entirely digitally—would become an NFT, which after all helps artists in this age of endless digital copies to benefit from their work. Plus, the comic is a double-layered reference to a previous original story, which somehow also seems appropriate.
To tie it back to Pekar, I will donate 25% of any proceeds from the auction to the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Library (which features a memorial desk and statue dedicated to Pekar). So hopefully some Pekar/Neufeld fans out there will open their digital wallet for this particular NFT. You can find the auction—and bid it on—here. Otherwise, just read it for free right here!
Anyhoo, enough talk for a frickin’ one-page comic! Here it is, in all its “glory”—“The Josh Neufeld Name Story”:
