American Splendor: narrative and biography between media

The film adaptation of Harvey Pekar's long-running comics series American Splendor has received near-universal acclaim from critics, academics, and arthouse audiences. But while it has succeeded in introducing a wider audience to the work of a previously obscure comics author, the film version ultimately falls into the trap of the biopic genre. In this essay, the author argues that the narrative and thematic conventions of the biographical film tend to overrule any attempt to rewrite them, transforming a text that explicitly criticizes capitalist values into an adaptation that implicitly endorses them.