Harvey Pekar?

Here's a truly beautiful tribute to to the late Harvey Pekar by ANTHONY BOURDAIN (h/t Le Malon). It's amazing what seven years will do to a person. In 2003 I saw American Splendor in the theater with friends. I intensely disliked the movie, while most of my friends seemed to love it. It seemed rather plotless to me and painfully condescending to the sad life of a middle age file clerk who achieved minor notoriety in writing words for other people's pictures. I squirmed at watching this poor man turn everything he touched to disaster on a level that makes George Costanza look like Warren Buffett. Almost totally unaware of graphic novels at the time, he seemed to me like a flavor of the month eccentric that people will forget as soon as the movie moved to DVD (or VHS for some in 2003). Little did I know that the very things that caused revulsion in me seven years ago make me want to read his books rather desperately now.

I should specify, I still haven't read a word of his work. I'm still more than a little ignorant about Harvey Pekar's life, and frankly of comic books in general. But seven years later I'm 'an old 28' by general agreement, an underpaid musician who works 80 hours a week some weeks and not at all during others. And suddenly, the life story of someone like Harvey Pekar seems enormously appealing. Attributes that sounded like a painful warning of your potential future when you're a college student seem incredibly beautiful in the first flush of adulthood. "God I hope I wouldn't turn into that" has turned into "I'd kill to turn into that." And weirdest of all, I don't think that's a bad thing.