YMMV / American Splendor

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: One story, "TransAtlantic Comics," begins with Harvey getting into a minor car accident. To take his mind off it, he reads a fan letter from an Englishman with Asperger Syndrome who hopes to make his own comics about his experiences. After finishing the letter, Harvey is amazed… and the car accident plot starts again, with no mention of the letter again.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Harvey enjoyed jazz albums and was an avid collector (and in fact he wrote many jazz album reviews for several publications), so there are a LOT of references to jazz musicians and songs in the comic book. Harvey was even tapped to do the liner notes — in comic form, of course — for the movie's jazz-filled soundtrack album.
  • Harvey was also quite the voracious bookworm, and includes references to (and criticisms of) lesser-known authors and books he'd read.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At the end of the story "Uncapped" (during the Vertigo run), Harvey says with a sly grin, "It's a wonder my carelessness hasn't killed me yet!" Harvey would later pass away after an accidental overdose of his antidepressant medicine.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Harvey's criticism of Maus — which he explains and expands upon during his acromonious back-and-forth with R. Fiore in The Comics Journal — didn't win him any fans.
• Production Posse: Whenever Harvey worked with an artist whose style he liked, he'd have that artist back a bunch. Frequent collaborators included Robert Crumb, Greg Budgett, Gary Dumm, Gerry Shamray, Mark Zingarelli, Frank Stack, Sue Cavey, Spain Rodriguez, and Dean Haspiel.
• Random Events Plot: Sometimes a story will just be a random sequence of things that happened in a short period of time. The aforementioned story "TransAtlantic Comics" is an example of this, going from Harvey's minor car accident to Harvey reading a fan letter.
• Retroactive Recognition: Judah Friedlander would later hit it big with his role in 30 Rock.
• Spiritual Successor: To the works of Jack Kerouac. In fact, in the forward to the first American Splendor collection, Robert Crumb mentions that Harvey is the type of person who wouldn't be out of place in a Kerouac novel. Harvey would later write a graphic novel called The Beats, about Kerouac and his contemporaries.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Subterranean Pop #6 in 1982 described American Splendor as "bleak stories of boredom," and compared it to "Andy Warhol's early films."

---