American Splendor: Our Movie Year

On my trip to Western MA in December, I came across The Bookloft in Great Barrington MA. This is an excellent old school independent bookstore with excellent atmosphere, and a great selection. Definitely worth a look if you're in the area. They had small but eclectic graphic novel section and I ended up purchasing this.

Title: American Splendor: Our Movie Year
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date: 2004
Writer: Harvey Pekar
Artist: R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Mark Zingarelli, Ed Piskor, Josh Neufeld, Frank Stack, Gerry Shamray, Greg Budgett, Dean Haspiel, Joe Zabel

Graphic novel collecting a year's worth of Harvey Pekar's autobiographical American Splendor series. This issue covers the making and release of the American Splendor film. Pekar tells a fascinating story about his quest for a Hollywood adaptation of his long-running comic book series. When the film did finally happen, Pekar was in the midst of a battle with his anxiety attacks and a relapse of his lymphoma.

The book details how he was able to recover to see the release of the film and its showings at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, as well as Pekar's travels with his family to promote the movie.

Of course a variety of mishaps occur along the way, including the Northeast Blackout of 2003, which stranded Pekar and his family in New York right when the film was set to premier.

In addition to the ongoing chronicle of the movie's release, the book also includes a bunch of stand-alone stories, as well as some of Pekar's historical features on jazz music.

As is typical for Pekar's work, it is illustrated by several artists, so there is a constantly changing art style from one story to the next. R. Crumb is the artist who helped Pekar get started and he still has one of the most distinctive styles here. Pekar's artists avoid exaggerated superhero-style art in favor of a 70s underground look that keeps the characters looking like real people.

There are lots of little treats in the story for the geeky readers. Pekar might not have much interest in mainstream comics, but he talks at length about Hollywood personalities, visits Weta (the effects studio for Lord of the Rings) in New Zealand, checks out a manga shop in Japan (he's not that impressed), and visits Allan Moore in England for an afternoon.

As much as Pekar presents himself as a cynical everyman, his writing is very intellectual, particularly when discussing music and politics. He puts a great deal of thought into what he writes about, and his depth of knowledge on jazz is encyclopedic. I was also surprised by how positive Pekar is. In spite of his pessimistic, hard-luck outlook on his own life, Pekar speaks very highly of just about all of the people that he worked with, whether on comics, music reviews, or the movie. Pekar is always upbeat and appreciative of the creative and talented people that he has had the chance to meet.

Because this is a collection of a year's worth of Pekar's writing in various individual features and comics, there is some redundancy to the book, and some of the music features are clearly meant to be of local interest. But even the repeated material is presented by different artists, and it's fun to see the variety of interpretations of the same sequence of events.

This may not be the absolute best starting point when it comes to Pekar's work, but it's a good place to jump in for those who got to know Pekar by way of the movie.

Rating: 8.5/10