Tag: Harvey Pekar

The late Harvey Pekar left behind several projects in various stages of composition, but none was as close to him as CLEVELAND, a love letter and social history of the city that was his muse—an everyman town of ordinary people and the mundane swirl of life that is nonetheless extraordinary. For Cleveland, Pekar's script found an artist among the greatest of his collaborators: Joseph Remnant, whose dense cross hatched naturalism recalls Crumb (who we meet in these pages) but finds its own voice with expansive staging and research.

It's been a year since comics writing legend Harvey Pekar passed away at the age of 70, but thanks to the amount of work he had in the pipeline, not only has his legacy lived on, but it's still growing. And friends are remembering.

Political commentary blog Scholars and Rogues is running a series of artistic tributes to the late Harvey Pekar by such folks as Kenny Be (Westword), A.N. Cargo (S&R), Derf (The City), Benjamin Frisch (Wonkette), Karl Christian Krumpholz (Byron), Mike Keefe (Denver Post), Peter Kuper (MAD), Zina Saunders (Overlooked New York) and Aaron Williams (Nodwick). A new piece will be posted each Monday through the end of the year. Above art by Karl Christian.

When Harvey Pekar died on July 12th, he was revealed in death to be a figure more influential and revered than he would ever have dared hope in life. He left a literary legacy...

When Harvey Pekar died suddenly on Monday, he left several comics projects in the works, and Rick Marshall asked Pekar's recent editor, Jeff Newelt about what unfinished projects we might be seeing eventually.

It would have pleased Harvey Pekar, I think, that his passing yesterday was noted in every media outlet from the New Yorker to EW, and not just because they made a movie about him, but as a literary figure of worth and stature. Harvey's life's work was in showing that the ordinary was important, and a working class existence was not a prison but a journey through the profound and beautiful that anyone could experience if they took the time. He found that beauty in simple, quotidian things and experiences that others might have found trivial or mundane, but in the end his message was that what else is there? Life as it is lived is the most precious gift of all.