I’ve been reading Harvey Pekar‘s comics for over twenty years, so I was very happy to see American Splendor, the new film about Pekar and his autobiographical comics of that title. Pekar’s comics are naturalistic to the extreme; they are slices of life from Pekar’s own life, and the lives of people he knows, works with, or meets. At the same time, these comics are quite self-conscious, aware of themselves as a medium, and as the progress they increasingly reflect the fact that Pekar’s semi-fame as a comics author is a big part of his life. The film remains pretty much true to the double nature of the comics, combining dramatizations of Pekar’s life, as recounted in his books, with the excellent Paul Giamatti as Pekar, together with on-screen commentary by Pekar himself, and photographed scenes that replicate drawings in the comics, not to mention the real places they are based on. What I’ve loved most about Pekar’s comics has always been their down-to-earth humor and grimness–Pekar is funny, but also even a more negative, doom-and-gloom pessimist and depressive than I am. The film does justice to this sensibility, while at the same time pointing up the comic’s reflexivity. It even manages to be quite charming, without being offensively sappy in a way that Pekar would hate.
American Splendor
I’ve been reading Harvey Pekar‘s comics for over twenty years, so I was very happy to see American Splendor, the new film about Pekar and his autobiographical comics of that title. Pekar’s comics are naturalistic to the extreme; they are slices of life from Pekar’s own life, and the lives of people he knows, works with, or meets. At the same time, these comics are quite self-conscious, aware of themselves as a medium, and as the progress they increasingly reflect the fact that Pekar’s semi-fame as a comics author is a big part of his life. The film remains pretty much true to the double nature of the comics, combining dramatizations of Pekar’s life, as recounted in his books, with the excellent Paul Giamatti as Pekar, together with on-screen commentary by Pekar himself, and photographed scenes that replicate drawings in the comics, not to mention the real places they are based on. What I’ve loved most about Pekar’s comics has always been their down-to-earth humor and grimness–Pekar is funny, but also even a more negative, doom-and-gloom pessimist and depressive than I am. The film does justice to this sensibility, while at the same time pointing up the comic’s reflexivity. It even manages to be quite charming, without being offensively sappy in a way that Pekar would hate.