In the book's centerpiece chapter, "My Movie Year," powerfully and evocatively illustrated by Gary and Laura Dumm, Pekar, after battling both cancer and crippling depression for the previous year and a half, sits in a theater at Sundance in January of '03 with Joyce and Danielle, having watched "his" completed movie for the first time.

"WOW! That was really innovative the way they mixed acted portions and documentary footage and animation and cartoons, and double casting some roles. Great," he exclaims with delight. "When I did my comics I always wanted people to look at me as some kind of an everyman, but my stuff didn't sell good. Here it seems like they do get it. They see themselves in me, and me in themselves."

The inner demons aren't dispersed so easily, however. In the opening chapter, "The American Splendor Movie," a variation on the same material illustrated with astonishingly vivid characterizations by Mark Zingarelli, Pekar frets, "I've picked up some extra gigs because of the movie's success. But ... I'm not a movie maker, I'm a comics maker ... My publisher is offering me a lot more bread to do comics for him. I'm also getting gigs writing prose articles ... But I'm so tense - how long will this last? Will I finally be able to make some decent money on comics?"

That's why in the opening I didn't say Pekar "had" a problem, I said he "has" a problem: Harvey is still Harvey, and the world hasn't started snapping up graphic novels as if they were The Da Vinci Code.

But American Splendor is now a fixture in the culture and I think the Curmudgeon of the Cuyahoga really has been transformed: his love and regard for his family is as endearing as it is evident throughout the book (note the "Our" in the book's title), his basic premise — that his life as a file clerk in Cleveland, that anyone's day-to-day life, is interesting, dramatic and funny — is egalitarian, humane and has been validated, and that cannot be taken away from him.

In a way Pekar, now 65, is just beginning and he clearly has a lot of great everyman adventures left in him.

A slightly different (ie, better edited) version of this appears in the Cleveland Plain Dealer