Harvey Pekar was an influential underground comic book creator who paved the way for a lot of what I was able to do with comics from 2002-2007. His stories were taken straight from real life. He looked at the comic book as the finished work of art, not any one page or story in it. He didn’t want to do strips in the newspaper, nor was he able to give you anything less than the ugly truth about everything.
When I was making semi-autobiographical comic books and trying to get a publisher to distribute them, one of the comments I got from them was “we want to see more than just stories about your life”. I would ask “what about what Harvey Pekar does?”
Maybe I just wasn’t as good as him.
The movie based on Pekar’s art and life – American Splendor, named for the title of his comic book series – is a modern classic and a groundbreaking work that chops up the boundaries between comics and movies in ways that no other comics adaptation has yet attempted.
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David M.
