The smell of fresh baked bread in the morning. Obscure jazz musicians. Literary authors never on the radar screen. Divorce, hypochondria, cancer, comics, nerds, friendship, enemies, Lives of cranky desperation. This is a small sampling of the cornucopia of subjects Harvey Pekar wrote about in his ongoing underground comic, American Splendor. It has finally come to an end. Harvey Pekar died on July 12 after suffering from cancer, asthma, high blood pressure, and depression.

It was not exactly shocking. Harvey chronicled every pain, annoyance (major or minor, he had plenty of both), and failure that came into his life. He also wrote about the joys, pleasures (major and minor, he had plenty of both), and successes. Harvey wrote and self published his comic American Splendor since 1976. This was before the internet. This was before independent comic stores. This was before there was any kind of audience for autobiographical comics. This was a Herculean labor of love.

Like many people, I first encountered Harvey Pekar on the David Letterman show in the early '80s. Irony on the television was much more novel back then and I enjoyed watching celebrities squirm under Dave’s oblique insults and surreal non-sequitors. Harvey was one of the few guests to throw it back in Dave’s face and was always a pleasure to watch. There are some great clips here.

I was a big comic nerd back then, big into all of the standards--Superman, Spiderman, etc., but I always had a taste for the weird. It should be no surprise that Howard The Duck somehow landed on my lap. The comic, Howard the Duck was about a smart-assed, slightly curmudgeonly, talking duck, from a universe where talking ducks are the norm, who gets interdimensionally transported to earth, lands in the mean streets of Cleveland, and has various super adventures, that occasionally dabbled in acerbic social commentary. I liked the art, the writing, the attitude, and the fact that it took place, not in Metropolis, not Smallville, but in Cleveland, two hours drive from where I lived.

I never completely outgrew comics and I made the transition to underground comic books. Better and more interesting art, and more adult subject matter (drugs and boobs) attracted my attention. Searching these comics out, I saw a copy of American Splendor, recognized the cranky Letterman guest and made my purchase. Leafing through the seemingly mundane pages, I saw snippets of the life of a smart assed, slightly curmudgeonly hospital orderly in the mean streets of Cleveland. Something else struck me. Being an aspiring artist, I took notice of who drew what. Pekar had hired the main artists who had worked on Howard The Duck for his own comic. Apparently, he appreciated their ability to capture that elusive “Cleveland flavor” as much as I did.

Harvey Pekar had an amazing knack for mimicking and reproducing the many local dialects that Cleveland has. Polish immigrants, black homeboys, Jewish mothers, uptight doctors, and nerdy record collectors were effortlessly and accurately depicted. Almost every story had a mini portrait of a friend, coworker, or random encounter in Cleveland. Even though they were basically gestural sketches, these characters seemed real to me. They had gravity and weight. I’ve seen these people around. I was amazed that a crappily-produced, black and white, newsprint comic could capture life like it did. This was something new.

Not every story was a winner. Some devolved into plain bitching and were rightly criticized as such. But many of them successfully illuminated various aspects of life. Pekar was a mostly self educated, jazz and literary reviewer, and life long civil servant who was waiting for his big break his entire life. And when I say “waiting” I mean aggressively, hunting down, with every ounce of his being. He chronicled the little, subtle moments, like the healing power of fresh baked goods to major life changers, like the effects of chemotherapy or adopting a child. A major, but contradictory thread through his work was his battle to maintain his artistic credibility and his desire for the big payday by going mainstream. American Splendor had sucked major amounts of Harvey’s bank account, which was never very full to begin with. Pekar regularly depicted struggles and angry phone calls to various magazine editors to pay him a handful of bucks for a jazz record review. Scrimping, saving, and scheming, Harvey had no qualms about showing an unflattering depiction of himself. He also had no problem writing about his struggles to retain his artistic integrity or what it means to be a friend, husband, and father. He was a multi-faceted human beings and he gave us the full show, warts and all.

Besides the Howard The Duck alumni, Pekar “hired” (most worked for peanuts) some of the titans of underground comics (although being a titan of underground comics is about as impressive as being the world’s tallest dwarf), including his old friend, Robert Crumb. Harvey was definitely hoping to bootstrap his comic onto Crumb’s underground success, which probably paid off in the long term, more then the short term. Crumb’s gritty realism meshed well with Pekar’s slice of life stories. This team up appeared as a major chapter of Harvey’s crowning achievement, "The American Splendor Movie". Here, many of Harvey’s dreams came true. "The American Splendor Movie" gathered all of his best pieces for a streamlined version of his life. The directors and actor Paul Giamatti obviously loved the source material and were determined not to “Hollywoodize” Pekar’s work and faithfully adapted the major and minor aspects of his life. The film succeeded in spades, being an artistic, critical, and financial winner. It also put Pekar on the popular radar and he managed to get a few decently paying jobs because of it. He also managed to rain on his own parade by worrying if he deserved all of the attention and that people would come to his work for the wrong reasons.

The comic American Splendor ushered in (for good or ill) a flood of self published, autobiographical comics. Harvey Pekar inspired and enlightened fans and fellow artists with his confessional work. He chronicled his travels on the high road and the low road and hid nothing from his readers. I have read and reread all of his comics over the years. Like any good piece of literature, different facets of the stories reveal themselves as you age and grow in experience. With his incredibly prolific work ethic (he continually published his comics for the last 34 years with almost no outside support), Pekar charmed, cajoled, ranted, and soliloquized. Armed with his acerbic wit and constant empathy, Harvey Pekar was one of the few people to achieve artistic (and finally financial) success without completely selling out. His voice will be sincerely missed.