From Off the Streets of Cleveland
I am shaken up. Harvey Pekar died sometime last night and it’s a sad day.
Harv was and is one of those formative figures in my life. He entered in at just the right moment that the details of his life story and accomplishments will resonate with me for years and years to come. I was a Marvel kid growing up and as I went through high school I found my appreciation and love of comics shifting towards the actual form of the art, more so than subject matter. I graduated in 2003 with my mindset opened and ready for the whole other side of comics that I hadn’t known about growing up. What also happened that year is I moved to Cleveland for school, and the movie version of American Splendor was released (I saw it a little later when Ahmed brought home an advance screener of the DVD).
It wasn’t just that he was a Cleveland comics hero, or a self-publishing hero, or that he was a real political cat, or that he lived a couple blocks away from each of the apartments I had in college. Or that I got to see that same neighborhood as it was over 30 years again, seeing those exact same bricks that Bob Crumb hatched out behind the RTA stop. Or that first year I saw him twice, stalking around the halls of CIA (never talked to him though — that will be my “I should have said something” story). Or that he never got complacent. Or that he stayed with his home town till his death. It was all of it and more. Pekar’s legacy is reason enough to be damn proud to live in Cleveland.
