Harvey Pekar has a problem.

Of course, the obsessive depressive retired V.A. hospital file clerk, populist rust belt intellectual, acute cultural observer and splenetic comic book pioneer has more than one problem, as he'd be the first to tell you.

But Pekar's CENTRAL problem is that relatively few of his fellow residents on the planet share his enthusiasm for the graphic novel — book-length, illustrated literary works in panel format aimed at adults — and this lack of mass affirmation and commercial reward has carried over, until quite recently, to American Splendor, his own series of autobiographical graphic novels published more or less annually since 1976, gnawing at the lifelong Clevelander's psyche, inflaming his neuroses and suppressing his bank account.

I say "until quite recently" because things changed dramatically for Pekar, his wife Joyce and teenaged daughter Danielle when American Splendor, the movie, was released in 2003. A composite of Pekar's quarter-century comic series, the highly successful and gaudily-awarded film (Sundance, Cannes, Edinburgh, New York, Montreal), directed by Bob Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman and starring Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, is one of the most innovatively creative biopics of all time, blending fact, fiction, media, and multiple perspectives into a daring, moving whole.

The film and Pekar's life in response to it are the subjects of his engrossing new American Splendor graphic novel, Our Movie Year, an episodic account of his ongoing quotidian life in Cleveland, his family's peripatetic journeys in conjunction with the film, and a continuation of the starkly honest travelogue of his own emotional and psychological interior that has always been the backbone of his work.

The two central — and opposing if not contradictory — emotional themes of the book are Pekar's stunned rhapsodic joy with both the quality of the film and the public and critical response to it, and the anxiety this success spurs within him: Has anything really changed? Will he be able to support his wife, daughter and himself on a government pension and his writing? Will he ever figure out how to change a tire?

Here Pekar continues his tradition of working with a variety of top illustrators, including underground comix legend R. Crumb, Ed Piskor, Josh Neufeld, Zingarelli, and the Dumms, among several others. Although the chapter-by-chapter visual stylistic changes may be a bit jarring at first, this approach parallels beautifully the disparate perspectives from which we view characters in the film, and also artfully raises the notion that reality truly is in the eye of the beholder, as the illustrators — from Joe Zabel's photo realism to Frank Stack's loose impressionism — impart their own personalities to Pekar's tales.