Harvey Pekar, the legendary writer whose comic book series American Splendor revolutionized underground comics in general and autobiographical comics in particular, died last night at the age of 70. The news was announced this morning in Pekar’s hometown paper, Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer. (Link via The Beat.)

 

A longtime file clerk for the Veterans Administration Hospital in Cleveland, Pekar’s friendship with legendary underground comics artist R. Crumb led to Pekar experimenting in the comics form with 1976’s American Splendor, an autobiographical comics series that paired Pekar’s curmudgeonly wit with quirky art from the likes of Crumb, Gary Dumm, and Frank Stack (among many more) to tell stories that insightfully plumbed the mundanities of everyday life. Pekar continued to self-publish Splendor for a decade before publisher Doubleday first collected the work for bookstores in 1986. (Already a watershed year for mature comics, the everyday pathos of Pekar’s work marks a stark contrast to that year’s other major works: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.) Pekar continued to intermittently publish American Splendor over the ensuing decades, issuing new stories through publishers like Ballantine Books, Dark Horse, and DC’s Vertigo imprint, including such works as 1994’s Our Cancer Year (about his battle with lymphoma) and 2004’s Our Movie Year (about Pekar’s life during and after the filming of the 2003 film adaptation of American Splendor, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pucini and starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar). Pekar’s most recent collection, American Splendor: Another Dollar, was published by Vertigo in 2009, and featured collaborations with Darwyn Cooke (DC: The New Frontier), David Lapham (Stray Bullets), Chris Weston (The Twelve), Dean Haspiel (The Quitter), Ty Templeton (Batman Adventures), and Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), among others. | Jason Green