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The American Splendor author was a humane and masterful storyteller who saw through the artifice of the Us mainstream

Harvey Pekar carved a unique niche for himself within the spandex world of comics, often working with material from his own life against the backdrop of his native Cleveland. Pekar was arguably the first and best to use the medium to illuminate foibles, flaws and failures. With his death this week at the age of 70, visual literature bids farewell to a true American anti-hero.

Pekar was no artist – he was a writer through and through, as blue collar and geographically territorial as Charles Bukowski, and as idiosyncratic as Robert Crumb. It was a shared love of jazz that would lead Pekar and Crumb to first form a friendship and then a creative partnership that gave Pekar the break he needed. It was his stories, and not the crudely-drawn stickmen that accompanied them,...

Comic book writer who penned the autobiographical American Splendor

Harvey Pekar, who has died aged 70, was the writer of American Splendor, an autobiographical comic in which he wrote about the everyday, often mundane, aspects of his life. Pekar experimented with the narrative form and used a shifting roster of artists on his comics, but it was the sheer ordinariness of the stories that slowly earned him a strong following, critical acclaim and comparisons with Chekhov and Dostoevsky.

Set in the rundown neighbourhoods of Cleveland, Ohio, American Splendor's world was revealed without exaggeration or self-aggrandisement. Pekar, opinionated and curmudgeonly, was often the most frustrating and aggravating character to appear in his books. The writer became a regular guest on the talkshow Late Night With David Letterman, but his confrontational style led to him being banned from it.

In 1990, Pekar was diagnosed with lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy. Heavy medication led to hallucinations and occasional paralysis,...

In sad, but not entirely unexpected news, Harvey Pekar, best known for his long-running American Splendor underground/indie comic book series, passed away early this morning at his home in Ohio. Pekar had been suffering from multiple illnesses, including prostrate cancer, asthma, high blood pressure, and depression. He was 70.

Pekar began American Splendor in 1976 to document non-superheroic, everyday life, including his own, in his native hometown, Cleveland, Ohio, often with a caustic, acerbic, self-deprecatory wit. Pekar's work attracted some of the most-respected and well-known names in underground and mainstream comics, including Robert Crumb, Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, Greg Budgett, David Collier, Dean Haspiel (The Quitter), Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, Eddie Campbell, Gilbert Hernandez, and Ty Templeton. American Splendor's last issue appeared in 2008.

Outside of underground comics, Pekar was best known for a recurring stint on the David Letterman show in the late 1980s. NBC eventually banned Pekar from appearing...

Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays

Edited by Brendan Burford

Villard, May 2009, $16.95

For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year. And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics, stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be found on the comics page.

That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from Perseopolis to Fun Home to Cancer Vixen.