AMERICAN SPLENDOR 29
and work as a government fi le clerk in a Veteran’s Administration hospital. Th e title is
satirical—in a 2005 interview he said, “When I was a kid, and I was reading comics,
there was all this patriotism going around, and comics were being called All-American
Comics and Star Spangled Comics and stuff like that, so that’s where I got the ‘Ameri-
can’ from. And then the ‘splendor’... the movie, Splendor in the Grass... I don’t know...
for some reason that always struck me as an absurd title, absurdly funny. I just hooked
up American and splendor—an American splendor—it’s an ironic title. I don’t think
most people would consider my life particularly splendid.” Crumb illustrated many
of Pekar’s stories for early issues of American Splendor , and his artwork helped draw
attention to the comic book.
Writing about his life, or the lives of people he knows, Pekar has said of his work,
“I started thinking about doing stories that were realistic, and the best realistic stories
I could do were autobiographical. It seemed that the more accurately I wrote about my
life, the better the story came out. I also wanted to write about everyday life, quotidian
life, because I felt that writers in just about every area had ignored a lot of what goes
on in everyday life.... I was thinking about writing stories about working and what it
was like to work on a daily basis and how to get along with your boss... Writing about
the nuts and bolts of marriage and things like that.” Many of his stories deal specifi cally
with his worries, fears or neuroses. He writes each story and then hires artists to draw
it. Pekar provides them with stick-fi gure layouts of how he thinks the story should
work. A typical story may be one or 10 pages, and in the early years of the comic, often
focused on some aspect of the hospital Pekar worked in, whether it was Pekar getting
annoyed with a co-worker or listening to a story being told by one of them. Over the
years, Pekar used over 50 artists to illustrate his stories.
Pekar initially self-published, in the tradition of underground comics. “I published
it because I frankly had more and more grandiose ideas about what I could do in terms
of stories in comic books —more complex stories and longer stories. And frankly, there
weren’t any publishers around that I thought would accept any of these stories.” Self-
publishing American Splendor came with both fi nancial and physical costs. Th e initial
print run for a self-published issue was 10,000 copies, all of which Pekar had to store,
pack, and distribute. He did this through issue #16 in 1991.
In the course of those 16 issues, the wider world discovered American Splendor.
Pekar’s third, and continuing, marriage to activist and comic book writer Joyce Brabner
came about as a result of his comic book. She contacted him about getting a missing
issue of the comic and a long-distance romance led to their marriage in 1983; she also
became a regular character in Splendor. In 1998, the two become legal guardians of a
10-year-old girl who also became a character in the comic. Meanwhile, Splendor was
adapted to the stage three times in fi ve years—in Lancaster, PA (1985), in Washington,
DC (1986), and in Hollywood (1990), with Dan Castallaneta (best known as the voice
of Homer Simpson) appearing as Pekar. In October 1986 Pekar fi rst appeared on the
Late Night with David Letterman television show. Pekar hoped to promote his comic
book on the show, but he came to feel that his appearances did not help his sales while
