Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic, and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series.
34 Facts About Harvey Pekar
2.
Harvey Pekar and his younger brother Allen were born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Jewish family.
3.
Saul Harvey Pekar was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store on Kinsman Avenue, with the family living above the store.
4.
Harvey Pekar said he did not have friends for the first few years of his life.
5.
One of the few white children living there, Harvey Pekar was often beaten up.
6.
Harvey Pekar worked odd jobs before he was hired as file clerk at the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1965.
7.
Harvey Pekar held this job after becoming famous, refusing all promotions, until he retired in 2001.
8.
Harvey Pekar was married from 1960 to 1972 to his first wife, Karen Delaney.
9.
Harvey Pekar took all the money out of their bank account and ran off.
10.
Around this same time, Brabner and Harvey Pekar became guardians of a young girl, Danielle Batone, when she was nine years old.
11.
Harvey Pekar lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with Brabner and Batone.
12.
Crumb and Harvey Pekar became friends through their mutual love of jazz records.
13.
Around 1972, Harvey Pekar laid out some stories with crude stick figures and showed them to Crumb and another artist, Robert Armstrong.
14.
The first issue of Harvey Pekar's self-published American Splendor series appeared in May 1976, with stories illustrated by Crumb, Dumm, Budgett, and Brian Bram.
15.
Pekar and his work came to greater prominence in 1986 when Doubleday collected much of the material from the first ten issues in American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, which was positively reviewed by, among others, The New York Times.
16.
Harvey Pekar self-published 15 issues of American Splendor from 1976 to 1991.
17.
In 2006, Harvey Pekar released a four-issue American Splendor miniseries through the DC Comics imprint Vertigo Comics.
18.
Harvey Pekar wrote about the effects of the film in American Splendor: Our Movie Year.
19.
In June 2007, Harvey Pekar collaborated with student Heather Roberson and artist Ed Piskor on the book Macedonia, which centers on Roberson's studies in that country.
20.
In 2010, Harvey Pekar started the webcomic The Harvey Pekar Project with the online magazine Smith.
21.
Harvey Pekar was an assiduous record collector as well as a freelance book and jazz critic, focusing on significant figures from jazz's golden age but championing out-of-mainstream artists such as Scott Fields, Fred Frith and Joe Maneri.
22.
Harvey Pekar published his first criticism in The Jazz Review in 1959.
23.
Harvey Pekar wrote hundreds of articles for DownBeat, JazzTimes, The Village Voice, and The Austin Chronicle; as well as liner notes for Verve Records and other labels.
24.
Harvey Pekar reviewed literary fiction in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.
25.
Harvey Pekar won awards for his essays broadcast on public radio.
26.
Harvey Pekar was invited back repeatedly and made five more appearances in quick succession.
27.
The most heated of these was in the August 31,1988, episode of Late Night, in which Harvey Pekar accused Letterman of appearing to be a shill for General Electric and Letterman promised never to invite Harvey Pekar back on the show.
28.
Harvey Pekar appeared in Alan Zweig's 2000 documentary film about record collecting, Vinyl.
29.
In 2009, Harvey Pekar was featured in The Cartoonist, a documentary film on the life and work of Jeff Smith, creator of Bone.
30.
Shortly before 1 am on July 12,2010, Harvey Pekar's wife found Harvey Pekar dead in their Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home.
31.
Harvey Pekar had been diagnosed with cancer for the third time and was about to undergo treatment.
32.
In December 2010, the last story Pekar wrote, "Harvey Pekar Meets the Thing", in which Pekar has a conversation with Ben Grimm, was published in the Marvel Comics anthology Strange Tales II; the story was illustrated by Ty Templeton.
33.
Harvey Pekar believed there was no limit to how good comics could be.
34.
In October 2012 a statue of Harvey Pekar was installed at the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Library, a place he visited almost daily.