Best of American Splendor

Front Cover
Ballantine Books, 2005 - Comics & Graphic Novels - 332 pages
Experience the heartwarming all-American story of a crank and his comic book.

What’s a file clerk from Cleveland doing with an Oscar nomination? How did a movie about Harvey Pekar win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival? The story begins in 1976, when Harvey began publishing his autobiographical, slice-of-downtrodden-life comic book series American Splendor, illustrated by a who’s who of underground comic artists, including R. Crumb, Kevin Brown, Greg Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, and Gerry Shamray. After self-publishing American Splendor for nearly two decades under less than splendid conditions (and racking impressive accolades in the process), Harvey finally got a break when Dark Horse Comics took over the publication in the early 1990s. It was an opportunity for Harvey to reach a wider audience–which, as it turned out, included a few Hollywood types, too. (Who knew?) But that’s another story. . . .

Now we are happy to bring you the Best of American Splendor, a collection of some of Harvey’s greatest work. Harvey Pekar has been compared to Theodore Dreiser, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lenny Bruce, but this collection is a true American original. Just like Harvey.

From inside the book

Contents

Section 1
21
Section 2
31
Section 3
32
Section 4
97
Section 5
110
Section 6
147
Section 7
158
Section 8
193
Section 10
224
Section 11
228
Section 12
239
Section 13
245
Section 14
273
Section 15
283
Section 16
292
Section 17
302

Section 9
215
Section 18
323

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