Harvey Pekar, 'American Splendor' Creator and Comic Genius, Dies

"Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff." So says Harvey Pekar's character in the film about his life, American Splendor, and no one but Pekar would know better the truth of that statement. Pekar, a comic-book pioneer, died on Monday, July 12, near 1 a.m., in his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

The cause of death has yet to be determined. According to Joanna Conners from The Plain Dealer, in 1990, Pekar was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He and his wife, Joyce Brabner, who found his body, wrote a book about living with the disease and enduring the treatment process. Pekar, the son of Polish immigrants, was 70.

Pekar began his comic book series American Splendor in the '70s, but it was a decade later when I discovered his work in a bin of zines and comics at an old hippie record shop near the college I was attending. The Underground Records owner, Bill, last name never given, told me when I bought several of the comics that he met Pekar on a trip to Cleveland in the late '70s.

Like many college students, I was clueless about a major, but I had always loved to draw, so I put down art as my major. It changed about five times after that, but I remember studying the few Pekar comics I was able to pick up in Oklahoma and enjoying the dark humor and the lugubrious atmosphere of his work - things that were the opposite of the rural Oklahoma schoolgirl upbringing I had experienced.

In the '90s, I started writing a music and cultural commentary zine called Okie Load. It had been years since I had seen a Pekar comic - I had finished school, gotten married, had a child. Now I was divorced and partly employed, but my creativity had come back. One of the zine's most popular features was a comic strip I created called Modern Mz Terry.

I drove an old Dodge Omni at the time, and the paint was peeling off of it, so I spray-painted the hood and then painted Mz Terry's angular face, with her half-closed eyes and wild hair on it. After I stopped publishing the zine, I did some print runs of the Modern Mz Terry comics in a small booklet for fans.

I still get requests for more of the Modern Mz Terry booklets from time to time. I now realize that Modern Mz Terry, a grumpy, cynical but ultimately wise and lovable woman from the trailer park, was directly inspired by Pekar's humor and artistic sense.

Though I didn't pursue a career in art (I became an English teacher), I still like to draw, and I will always admire Pekar for showing me the world outside the tiny town in which I grew up. It was and is an ordinary place, and there's nothing wrong with that. Pekar showed us all how the ordinary experience is often the most authentic one.

Reference

Joanna Connors, "Cleveland comic-book legend Harvey Pekar dead at age 70," Cleveland.com.