Subversive U.S. comic-book writer Harvey Pekar poses with a copy of American Splendor in 1986. (Mark Duncan/Associated Press)

In comics circles, cranks are king.

Harvey Pekar was the king of cranks. He was a born contrarian, a writer whose ironically titled comic-book series American Splendor was a compendium of personal grievances, largely about human nature and its failings.

Pekar could write reflectively about the peculiar people who passed through his life. But his most enduring subject was himself.

Pekar, who died Monday at the age of 70, was a product of Cleveland, his blue-collar hometown. His disillusionment with the American Dream and its diminishing returns echoed his city’s decline as a manufacturing centre, and he found an outlet for his frustrations in comics.

Pekar published his first issue of American Splendor in 1976. Alternative comics were in the doldrums then, a decade removed from their fresh, acid-inspired inception. Few platforms existed for alternative cartoonists, and a market for their idiosyncrasies seemed impossible.

Yet, like many comics creators, Pekar was driven. He would write scripts and scribble the layouts with crude stick figures, then hand the work to other artists to illustrate. The cartoonists who drew for him were among the best at their craft: Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Chester Brown, Jim Woodring and others. Pekar could write reflectively about the peculiar people who passed through his life — a co-worker, for instance, at the Cleveland veteran’s hospital where Pekar continued working as a file clerk even after Hollywood came calling. But his most enduring subject was himself.

Few people have been drawn as often as Harvey Pekar. The many portraits of him by artists with varying styles and personalities make Pekar an unusual everyman. Most of these images captured Pekar’s primary features: the glowering eyes and scattered comb-over, the frown, the hunch — a look by turns haunted and befuddled. The portraits were often more menacing than the real Pekar, who resembled a stray sock lost in the dryer, a snuggly miser with a Midwestern twang and a large collection of ill-fitting shirts.

One of the best portraits came in the 2003 film American Splendor, less an adaptation than an expansion of Pekar’s comic world. Played by Paul Giamatti — himself a cuddly schlub — the performance so captured Pekar’s clumsy charm as to make Pekar’s own cameo in the film perfectly seamless. The movie was a surprise hit, an Oscar nominee, and put Pekar in the limelight, just in time to benefit from the surge of interest in graphic novels and their small-print indie ancestors.

If Pekar’s Hollywood success seemed unlikely, it paled next to his run in the 1980s as a crackpot-for-hire on Late Night with David Letterman. Pekar was strictly an underground phenomenon when he became a regular guest on the show, with Letterman playing straight man to Pekar’s lovable curmudgeon (a phrase used so often to describe him, it could prove to be an epitaph). Pekar embraced the role with glee, turning his anti-social ticks and dislocated tirades into compelling television; his mouth was too filthy for Late Night’s pre-cable standards, so his rants were punctuated with hilarious gaps where the salty words were censored. A screed in 1988 against General Electric -- which owned the network, NBC -- got him blacklisted from the program, though he was later forgiven. By the time Pekar’s movie became a hit, his comic sensibility was being compared to Woody Allen’s.

Like Allen, Pekar’s passions included jazz, of which he wrote prolifically. He published erudite essays and reviews of jazz records (or “sides” as he called them) in numerous places, his pieces teeming with the encyclopedic observations of a true obsessive. He also wrote an opera, Leave Me Alone, with jazz saxophonist Dan Plonsey, its libretto a scripted harangue that begins, “Hello, I’m the famously dyspeptic Harvey Pekar.”

Much of Pekar’s output was collaborative. While some interpretations of his work, like the comics drawn by Crumb — whose disaffection Pekar shared — were natural expressions of Pekar’s personality, others were maddeningly dull. His body of work belongs as much to collaborators as it does to him. Yet his story is irresistible, a reminder of the power of a personal voice.

Guy Leshinski is a writer and cartoonist based in Toronto.