trailer tuesday

damn it, 2010 has been a rough one. this week's entry is honor of harvey pekar, one more on this year's list of people i am going to miss terribly.

i can't say enough about what harvey meant to me and i know a lot of other folks feel the same way. in my case, harvey was the comic book equivalent of punk rock. in much the same way that punk demolished the notion that rock stardom/notoriety was the domain of an exclusive club with very few members, harvey democratized comics. his success, marginal as it was most of his life, gave me the same joy i got from the minutemen or minor threat. if you were willing to keep plugging away, harvey told me, telling the stories only you could tell in the manner that only you could tell them, then you had already won. all else was incidental. your audience will find you. harvey's audience did. and we were rewarded. i can't think of very many other literary figures that i am reasonably sure told me nothing but the unvarnished truth about themselves throughout a body of work that spans thirty-odd years. can you? pretty damn admirable, in my book.

i know this is trailer tuesday but i am tacking on this extra clip because it is, to me, harvey in a nutshell. all the things i feel like we had in common in forty-two seconds.

so long, man. get some rest.