From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes...

American Splendor . I finished reading the American Splendor anthology I picked up over the weekend, and I thought it was excellent. When I saw the film, I thought that Harvey Pekar lived on the west side of Cleveland, but now I know that he actually lives on the east side, very near to Case. In one of his stories he even pops into Tommy's to see who's there. But American Splendor is great for reasons besides the obvious attraction of reading a comic book set in a locale that you've lived in. It's great because it's just about everyday life, and the mundane but critical trials that we face. Harvey doesn't try to shoehorn the stories into some mold, he just tells them like they happened, which is a rarity. Sometimes stories don't have a beginning, middle, and end, and sometimes there's no clear resolution or moral, and Harvey recognizes that. Some of my favorite stories in this anthology are "Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines", "Common Sense", "Ripoff Chick", "Free Ride", and "Hypothetical Quandary".

Now I've gotta get the second anthology ASAP.