Heralded with such flattering titles as “mayor of the mundane”, and “The Cleveland Underdog”, Ohio native Harvey Pekar solidified himself as a graphic novel giant with American Splendor, a series of comics about little else other than the day-to-day monotony of his own insipid life. UCLA recently hosted another in its speaking engagements Titans of The Graphic Novel (if you didn’t get a chance check out our last with Neil Gaiman), and what the audience got seemed a wiser, more contemplative Pekar than the more chemically imbalanced and erratic one you might have seen on David Letterman (see the video below for their much-publicized fight and Harvey’s banning from the show). And for all the wisdom he might have acquired in the first few of his twilight years, he was as curmudgeonly as ever — and the crowd loved him for it.
