Word: splendor
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...when Art Spiegelman published his shattering Holocaust comic Maus (and won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for it). It happened again in 2000, with the movie of Daniel Clowes' alienation epic Ghost World. And now we're coming back to the graphic novel yet again thanks to the film American Splendor, which is based on the autobiographical comic book by Harvey Pekar, who writes about life as a hard-luck, sad-sack, hospital file clerk in Cleveland, Ohio. He's no superhero: the only flying he does is under the radar...
...awkward name. (Maybe it would help if we called them tragic books?) They get sold in comic-book stores or shelved in that corner of Barnes & Noble that buzzes with preteen X-Men fans, a place where self-respecting adult readers fear to tread. No wonder Pekar wrote American Splendor for 27 years before mainstream America finally took notice. The graphic-novel business is reportedly worth about $100 million a year, but it still has no honor in the country that invented it. Yet some of the most interesting, most daring, most heartbreaking art being created right now, of both...
...their number we must now add American Splendor, which is technically a biopic about a guy named Harvey Pekar. Who, you ask, is Harvey Pekar? And why should he rate a biopic when I don't? (That second question qualifies you as a perfect audience for this movie.) But as written and directed by the wife-husband team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the film is concerned mainly with the first question, the shortish answer to which is that Pekar was, until his retirement in 2001, a file clerk in a Veterans Affairs hospital, a housekeeping-challenged resident...
...played (brilliantly) as a sort of hand-cranked motormouth by Paul Giamatti, is a guy who hears America squawking and whining and choking on its own bile. Befriended by such comics artists as R. Crumb, Pekar starts turning out stories for them to illustrate. These anticomics, from which American Splendor gets its title, together with some appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, grant him underground fame but never enough money to quit...
Nicholas F. Josefowitz ’05, an associate editorial chair of The Crimson, is a history concentrator in Mather House. He has spent the summer trying to remodify his GM cornflakes to enjoy them in full organic splendor...