BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Quitter, Masters of American Comics, Tunes for 'Toons, The World on Sunday)(Book Review)

The Quitter, by Harvey Pekar, illustrated by Dean Haspiel (Vertigo; $19.99). Pekar's downbeat chronicle of his life, "American Splendor," has achieved classic status, but this memoir of his early years is less consistently effective. Pekar is a master of moments captured in a few frames, and his talent seems less suited to a longer narrative. Still, he retains his ability to make the reader sympathize and wince, as when his Communist mother doesn't understand his need for emotional support after some black kids beat him up. He writes about becoming resigned to boring jobs, wiping out of the Navy, worrying about money. "I still wonder today how I'm going to get by the next several years," he says, and the book is really an acknowledgment that sometimes all a person can do, his whole life, is get by.

Masters of American Comics, edited by John Carlin, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker (Yale; $45). In 1906, a group of newspaper executives attended a talk entitled "Is the Comic Supplement a Desirable Feature?," which charged that "crude coloring, slapdash drawing, and very cheap and obvious funniness" would numb people to "the finer forms of art." By contrast, the cultural prestige that comics currently enjoy is exemplified by this book, which features appreciations of a familiar canon--from George Herriman to Chris Ware--by a starry list of contributors, such as Dave Eggers and Jules Feiffer. Not all the contributions are equally valuable. Raymond Pettibon's appreciation of Will Eisner turns into a free-associative rant about the editorial pages of the Times. But an essay on Lyonel Feininger, who eventually abandoned comics for a high-art career, and taught at the Bauhaus for several years, is illuminating. Hundreds of color reproductions allow the ingenuity of the artists' work to speak for itself.

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