Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar has died. The author of American Splendor comics died at the age of 70. Pekar, mostly related to his friend, the famous (and for a period of living in San Francisco) R. Crumb was a cancer survivor who was found by his wife, Joyce Brabner Monday morning at his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio

“Splendor” is one of those creative touchstones that occur once every few generations. With him, Harvey has coined a new expression language in comic form. Literally overthrown the whole paradigm on the head, replacing the super-hero with the “anti-hero, who gives voice to the proletariat of work per day, and more importantly than that, a source of inspiration for countless other artists have followed in his footsteps, Joe Matt Jaime Hernandez.

I remember most unadorned, uncompromising style of writing. He had a way of describing the peculiarities of life that gave him a depth and relevance that has never been done exactly the same way. He cut the heart of things …. More than a narrator, who was a truth teller. His spare, almost poetic descriptions of all events from one day to cut the heart of things. Like other poets and writers of the same material (Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski), wrote that what was needed in an unpretentious beauty who broke his heart.