Splendor And Eternal Slumber

To live and die in Cleveland...highly unpleasant stuff. But for comic book writer and autobiographer Harvey Pekar, it was true American splendor.

The cult favorite and subject of a 2003 film starring Paul Giammati, was found dead in his Ohio home this morning, by his wife, Joyce Brabner. Pekar had been suffering from prostate cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and depression. He chronicled his life and times to much acclaim as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive “flunky file clerk” engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety.

Adds the Cleveland Plain-Dealer:

“American Splendor” carried the subtitle, “From Off the Streets of Cleveland,” and just like Superman, the other comic book hero born in Cleveland, Pekar wore something of a disguise. He never stepped into a phone booth to change, but underneath his persona of aggravated, disaffected file clerk, he was an erudite book and jazz critic, and a writer of short stories that many observers compared to Chekhov, despite their comic-book form.

“American Splendor” had its roots in Pekar’s friendship with R. Crumb, the seminal underground comic-book artist, whom he met in 1962 when Crumb was working for American Greetings in Cleveland. At the time, Crumb was just beginning to explore the possibilities of comics, which would later lead to such groundbreaking work as “Mr. Natural” and “Fritz the Cat.”

When Pekar, inspired by Crumb’s work, wrote his nascent strip in 1972, Crumb illustrated it. Crumb also contributed to Pekar’s first full-fledged books, which Pekar started publishing annually in 1976.

He also wrote “Our Cancer Year,” the book-length comic, about being diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1990 and the subsequent treatment.