Disclosure: I've been following Harvey Pekar's work for 24 years, ever since a mutual friend and former editor of the Cleveland Edition, a long-defunct alternative paper, sent me his fifth American Splendor comic to review in 1980. I compared Pekar's autobiographical stories of ordinary life in the city to the naturalistic novels of Theodore Drieser and called him an "original." He has a brilliant ear for off-the-cuff comic wisdom and from-the-street revelations that sound more found than created, and that nonetheless stayed with me long after the review went to print. I became a fan, buying new issues of American Splendor on my yearly trips back to Ohio.

I later met Pekar in Cleveland, soon after his marriage to Joyce Brabner -- but before he unloaded, at Joyce's insistence, a collection of jazz records stacked from floor to ceiling on all four high walls of a large room in his apartment. (The collection is only hinted at in the movie -- a decision saving the lucky set designer dozens of hours of labor).

We talked about Japanese literature (he made a list of "must read" authors from my suggestions) and comics. He was, I realized, more of a book-hoovering intellectual than he gives himself credit for in his work, in which he often comes across as an obsessive-compulsive muddling through crisis after comically mundane crisis. I also saw that his approach to housekeeping was less laissez-faire than cosmically indifferent, like a hurricane sweeping through a lifetime's accumulation of stuff, letting telephone bills and reading glasses fall where they may.