Honoring Harvey Pekar

Alan Moore, and others, including Pekar's widow Joyce Brabner, have just completed a Kickstarter project for a memorial statue to be placed at a Cleveland Heights public library.

The goal has been met (with almost 800 funders), but the project is still open through the weekend. There are a number of interesting goodies to be had at various levels of involvement. $99 gets you a seat at a video conference with Moore at which 'impertinent questions' may be asked. The statue is described:

A way to celebrate comics as art and literature at a Cleveland Heights public library. A literary landmark, a desk that's always filled with paper and pencils for people to sit and write or draw comics at the same place where Harvey Pekar liked to work.

Mounted on the desk, a sculpted bronze comic book “page.” Stepping out from a panel, Harvey-- using his semi celebrity to focus on the creative possibilities of the art form he opened up to so many people. On the reverse, gridded into bronze ruled "panels," a giant slate storyboard that looks very much the way Harvey always started his own scripts. (He wrote and drew stick figures, just like Paul Giamatti in that movie.) Plenty of chalk and plenty of encouragement from a library that cherishes comics. At different times each year, a librarian can unlock the middle drawer of the desk and pull out copies of books that Harvey read as a kid that inspired him to write, AMERICAN SPLENDOR scripts, memorabilia and anything else that could inspire library patrons to be creative with comics.