JustASC

This is sad: Harvey Pekar, who told his mundane but nevertheless engaging life story in the American Splendor series of comics, has died at age 70. Pekar’s comics, which were created in collaboration with top artists, chronicled a certain kind of Jewish type seldom encountered in the media or popular imagination: the blue collar Jew who never quite grasped the brass ring that propelled so many of his co-religionists into the suburbs and the professions. We all know a cousin or an uncle like Pekar: smart or maybe not-so-very, hard-working but perhaps too curmudgeonly or principled or uncompromising or self-sabotaging to play the kinds of games that spell typical success.

Pekar also inspired one of the great films of the past 10 years: Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor, starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as his infinitely patient wife Joyce Brabner. Like Pekar himself, the co-star’s peformances and a canny script wring incredible emotion out of the  grayest and least likely of materials.