Harvey Pekar (1939-2010)

For whatever reason, I’ve always had a stronger interest in newspaper comic strips than in comic books and graphic novels, but I was saddened to learn yesterday that comic-books legend Harvey Pekar has died at age 70 in Cleveland, his hometown.

Pekar’s autobiographical American Splendor series, and his graphic novel entitled Our Cancer Year, chronicled his seemingly mundane life as a disillusioned government clerk, jazz aficionado and cancer survivor. As The Associated Press put it yesterday, Pekar “portrayed his unglamorous life with bone-dry honesty and wit.”

That was the genius of Pekar's work. Instead of featuring spandexed superheroes, sinister villains, talking animals, horrific crimes, silly story lines or flights of fancy, it focused on Harvey Pekar being Harvey Pekar, in all of his sad-eyed, humdrum, misunderstood, unappreciated glory. Except, of course, that he became a much-appreciated writer over time, even achieving cult-like status.

Pekar wrote, but did not illustrate, his material, relying instead on various artists to transform the written word into graphic art. His most famous collaborator was underground “comix” artist R. Crumb, creator of such iconic characters as Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural.

"He's the soul of Cleveland," Crumb told The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper, in 1994. "He's passionate and articulate. He's grim. He's Jewish. I appreciate the way he embraces all that darkness."

The first installment of American Splendor, published in 1976, made its way to the big screen in a 2003 film starring a perfectly cast Paul Giamatti as the grumpy and disheveled but sensitive and insightful Pekar, who also appeared in the cleverly formatted movie as himself.

"He will be remembered as an innovator who wrote stories about ordinary things that were then illustrated by some of the most notable cartoonists of the late 20th century," Lucy Shelton Caswell of the cartoon library and mueum at Ohio State University, told The AP. "People identified with what he was writing about and the stories that these people were drawing because it was so ordinary."