Harvey Pekar is file clerk at the local VA hospital. His
interactions with his co-workers offer some relief from the monotony, and their
discussions encompass everything from music to the decline of American culture
to new flavors of jellybeans and life itself. An admirer of naturalist writers
like Theodore Dreiser, Harvey makes his American Splendor a truthful,
unsentimental record of his working-class life, a warts-and-all self portrait.
First published in 1976, the comic earns Harvey cult fame throughout the 1980s
and eventually leads him to the sardonic Joyce Barber, a partner in a Delaware
comic book store who end ups being Harvey's true soul mate as they experience
the bizarre byproducts of Harvey's cult celebrity stature.