Harvey Pekar is an exceptional sort of blue-collar hipster. He's a college dropout with a highly developed interest in classic jazz recordings, literature, and comic books, and one who's suspicious of anything "co-opted" by Establishment institutions, but unlike the Counterculture generation which followed his, he didn't develop a lifestyle to match his interests. Instead, he began working as a file clerk in a V.A. Hospital in his home town of Cleveland in 1966 and stayed at the job until his retirement in 2001. Unlike his friend the artist Robert Crumb, who was also born before the Baby Boom and whom he met while buying old records at a garage sale, he did not remove himself to a youth culture hub and become an icon to a younger set. He never even developed a personal style to express his unusual tastes and thoughts. In the '80s David Letterman told him on camera that he looks like a man you'd see sleeping on the bus.

Pekar is not, however, a contentedly little man. He's a grouser whose mind fixates on irritations (forgetting his keys; getting stuck behind an argumentative, bargain-hunting old Jewish lady in a grocery store line) but he's also an observer with an ear for intriguing oddities (the distinctive conversation of two of his loquacious co-workers; a random exchange he overhears between two guys hauling a mattress to a dumpster). He nets details like a standup who constructs routines from all the little things that go wrong in a day, all the weird little things that people do, but without the slickness. Life never feels normal or very satisfying to him, and though he's all wound up about it he has a connoisseur's appreciation of its weirdness.

In American Splendor, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's terrific movie about him, Paul Giamatti playing Pekar rattles his grocery cart when the old lady argues with the cashier at the grocery store, but he stomps out without having interfered effectively, vented adequately, or bought anything. Generally his sense of powerlessness attacks his voice; when life is very stressful it gets fainter and scratchier until he has no way to communicate at all. The funniest scene shows him trying to keep his second wife from leaving him when he sounds like an emphysemic doggie squeak toy.

As Pekar explains in this Time Online Edition interview with Andrew D. Arnold, he loved comic books, like most American boys of his generation. In the movie, when he gets really frustrated in the early '70s he begins to illustrate his life in cartoon frames. His concept is so basic--putting into his narrative all the details that other writers leave out and taking out of his narrative all the superheroics of most comic books--that he can convey his idea in pencilled stick figures. Although such a comic book might have been amusing to read, it's not a loss that Crumb offered to illustrate the stories. At that instant in the movie Pekar's voice returns to normal. The stories, illustrated in turn by Crumb and other artists, have been published annually since 1976 as American Splendor.