With the graphic novel seeing release today, DC Comics has provided Newsarama with an additional five pages of The Quitter by Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel.

Newsarama has spoken previously both with Haspiel (who instigated the project, according to Pekar), and to the writer himself, who explained the origins of the new graphic novel:

“At first, I was thinking of doing something non fiction,” Pekar said. “When I was a kid, I was a big boxing fan, and I thought I might do something on Jewish boxers who were pretty dominant in the ‘20s and ‘30s. I think Vertigo wanted something more personal, so I started thinking about my experiences growing up. I did a lot of fighting as a kid, so I thought I could do something that would be along the lines of a prequel to the movie, where I talk about how I got to be the nervous wreck that I appear to be in the movie.

“I decided that I’d write about my early life, and talk about the influences of being the only white kid in a black neighborhood, and having immigrant parents who really didn’t have the same values as I did, and consequently, very little that I did impressed them. I had given the process of me getting screwed up in my younger and teenage years a good deal of thought, so once I started working on it, everything kind of fell in place. I had thought about this, and ‘psychoanalyzed’ myself for a really long time, and I was interested in how I’ve been influenced, to the point where I was practically paralyzed over it – I just wanted approval so badly. If I started something, it meant something to me, and if I didn’t get immediate approval and meet with immediate success, with things going hunky dory right from the jump, I would quit it. That became a pattern of my behavior.”

Click on the links above for the full interviews with Haspeil and Pekar (more preview pages are included in the Pekar interview). Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.