After all, Cleveland, the city he lived in and loved, had, he reminded us, lost half it’s population since the 1950s. A place whose great buildings and bridges and factories had once exemplified 20th century optimism needed its Harvey Pekar.

“What went wrong here?” is an unpopular question with the type of city fathers and civic boosters for whom convention centers and pedestrian malls are the answers to all society’s ills but Harvey captured and chronicled every day what was—and will always be—beautiful about Cleveland: the still majestic gorgeousness of what once was—the uniquely quirky charm of what remains, the delightfully offbeat attitude of those who struggle to go on in a city they love and would never dream of leaving.
What a two minute overview might depict as a dying, post-industrial town, Harvey celebrated as a living, breathing, richly textured society.

A few great artists come to “own” their territory…
As Joseph Mitchell once owned New York and Zola owned Paris, Harvey Pekar owned not just Cleveland but all those places in the American Heartland where people wake up every day, go to work, do the best they can—and in spite of the vast and overwhelming forces that conspire to disappoint them—go on, try as best as possible to do right by the people around them, to attain that most difficult of ideals: to be “good” people.

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The Original (Goodbye Splendor)

Even though I am a person who really never does this sort of thing, I have definitely cried over everything I’ve read about Harvey Pekar in the last several days. I am sure Ryan can attest to this.

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