American Splendor (2003) by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini: An Underground Superhero with Cancer

Abstract

During the 1960s of the 20th century, The United States become the genuine cradle of underground comics. These publications emerged outside of the large publishing, printing and distribution industries on the day, concentrating on the major topics of the counterculture, such as politics, rock and jazz music, recreational drug use and sex. They developed outside the comic strips of the most popular daily characters, notebooks, magazines and comic books that presented the adventures of cartoons and romantics, war and police, as well as those of the most popular fantastic superheroes, such Superman, created in 1938 by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. In San Francisco, at the beginning of 1968, Zap Comix published the first complete underground comic book by cartoonist Robert Crumb, the emblematic pioneer of this type of publications. Precisely, in the fall of 1962, a second-hand jazz record market in Cleveland led to the meeting between Robert Crumb, then a modest postcard artist, and Harvey Pekar, a bland individual, unkempt and unsuccessful who would end up working until his retirement as a file clerk in a federal government veterans hospital. This is how American Splendor was conceived, Harvey Pekar´s autobiography written as a poetic personal catharsis, and which would be illustrated by representative authors of underground comics such as Robert Crumb himself, Gary Dumb, Joe Sacco, Frank Stack and Joe Zabel. In 1987, the first collection of American Splendor won the American Book Award. In 1994, the graphic novel Our Cancer Year, the particular cancerous experience suffered by Harvey Pekar, written in collaborations with his wife Joyce Brabner, was awarded the prestigious Harvey Award of the American comics industry. All these adventures have been brought to the cinema screens in the docudrama American Splendor (2003) by Shari Springer German and Robert Pulcini.