RIP Harvey Pekar

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=11143916

Even though he was not young and obviously had health problems, I find this immensely sad. One of the most brutally honest and yet most likable comic book creators ever... He will be missed.

Ironic that the Harvey Awards nominations were announced today.

I met Harvey Pekar at a couple of comic cons back in the late 80s. He was a pretty nice guy and liked to talk. His story on collecting jazz records and the crazy things he would do for his record collection is one of my favorite all time comic stories, as I can completely understand where he is coming from.

It was a bummer finding this out today that he had passed on.

I'm one of those mainstream lamers who only got interested in comics after seeing American Splendor (the film). The first thing I did after seeing the movie was tracking down a few compilations of the comic itself. I guess I would have come around to reading graphic novels at some point, but his stories were the catalyst for me.

RIP Harvey Pekar

i was a big fan of American Splendor the film, and tho my engagement with dude didn't go far beyond that i say RIP. quite a lot of responses over at the thread What Has become of Harvey Pekar!?

Ironic that the Harvey Awards nominations were announced today.

?? Why? He wasn't nominated.

oh man at Jim Lee and DiDio choosing to honour him on the DC website with a page of Bizarro, rather than a page of Vertigo Splendour.

Oh man, this is sad. Had to do a double-take when I saw the thread. I loved Harvey.

Would it be fair to say that Harvey Pekar pretty much created the whole genre of autobiographical slice-of-life comics? Are there any examples of that which would predate American Splendor?

Binky Brown is a lot more ambitious thematically than just a slice-of-life, but inspired heaps of UG shorts that were a lot more minutia-focussed.

In The Days Of The Ace Rock 'n' Roll Club was created contemporaneously with early American Splendour.

Yeah, I knew about Binky Brown, but from what I've gathered it's not really slice-of-life. I didn't mean to say Pekar pioneered autobiographical comics as such, obviously others had been doing them before him. But I think "slice-of-life" in comics is a genre of its own, though it probably didn't come into full bloom before the 90s. Never heard of In The Days Of The Ace Rock 'n' Roll Club though, what is that?

Yes, that's why I said it inspired a decade-and-a-half of others that were more slice-of-lifey.

Ace Rock'n'Roll is Eddie Campbell's pre-Alec autobio/roman-a-clef stuff.

Eight or nine 7-pagers from 1978, printed at various times through the 80s, collected by Fantagraphics in 1993: http://www.comics.org/series/19216/

I think Chester and Joe are the ground zero for the 90s slice-of-life explosion, more than Pekar, though a lot of the proponents were copying fourth-hand versions. For a contemporary of Pekar, Dori Seda is perhaps more seminal for the 90s confessional style, too.

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