Splendo(u)r

Earlier this week, tuesday night to be exact, I was trawling Amazon for film recommendations and found American Splendor. It's a film about cartoonist Harvey Pekar and his comic American Splendor, essentially it's a biography of his life, briefly (like, real briefly) covering his childhood, before moving swiftly to the point at which his second wife leaves him, he meets cartoonist Robert Crumb, and eventually decides to do his own comic. As it happens he can't draw, but he finds a plethora of artists (beginning with Crumb) willing to illustrate his quirky tales of his mundane life working in admin at a veterans hospital, the first issue was published in 1976. The comic series was essentially a roving autobiography written directly about Pekar and the people in his life, including his battle with cancer in the 'Our Cancer Year' issue. It became a cult hit, despite never selling enough to allow him to quit his day job, it did allow him to feature regularly on the Letterman Show until he pounded the shows network NBC live on the show.
Anyway, the film was great, Paul Giamatti does a great job of playing Pekar, and the interludes during the main plot, which feature Pekar and numerous other characters from the film, are awesome. I started watching the film some time after midnight (so technically wednesday the 14th of July), and finished watching it around 2ish. At 1:00am that morning Harvey Pekar died. There's no need to elaborate on how surreal that coincidence is, it's entirely possible that i was the only person in the world watching that film at the exact time, watching him talking about his life, as it was simultaneously ending. There will certainly be a lot of people much more upset about his death than me, not to mention the obvious family and friends, other fans who might have been following the comics for decades, but i enjoyed the film and felt a really affinity for Harvey Pekar in it. It makes it neater in terms of getting to know his life from head-to-tail, but that hardly makes up for the loss. Anyway his comics are pretty cheap on Amazon (right back to were it started) so I might buy one with my few remaining pennies. RIP Harvey Pekar