Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story - Hardcover

Pekar, Harvey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345479394 ISBN 13: 9780345479396

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2006

Synopsis

“Michael Malice is one of the most puzzling twenty-first century Americans I have ever met.”
–Harvey Pekar

Who’s Michael Malice, and how did he become the subject of a graphic novel by Harvey Pekar, the curmudgeon from Cleveland?

First of all, Michael Malice is a real person. He’s 5’6” and weighs 130 pounds. Although on the cusp of thirty, he could easily pass for a scrawny teenager.

One day Michael, a guy with a patchwork employment record and dreams as big as his ego, meets Harvey and begins to relay all these wild stories about his life. Simple as that. Harvey thinks the guy is bright but a bit of a riddle–though not the kind wrapped in an enigma. It’s strange. He seems like the type of person you meet every day, rather ordinary, until you really get to know him. Then you realize he’s exceptional, unusual, and contradictory. Pleasant one minute, really nasty the next. But isn’t cruelty part of human nature? We digress. . . .

Harvey writes up and illustrates one of Michael Malice’s tales, “Fish Story,” which is part of American Splendor: Our Movie Year. It makes a splash and spawns this book, Harvey’s first hardcover, a graphic novel event about one guy’s life.

Ego & Hubris relates how, a year and a half after his birth in the Ukraine, Michael Malice moved with his parents to Brooklyn. He’s an intransigent kid, a hard-ass–both a demon to and demonized by the people who cross his path. His life is a constant struggle for validation in a world where the machine keeps trying to break him down. But Michael has a way with people . . . or rather, has a way of getting even with people. Hey, if you can’t live up to your parents’ expectations, at least you can live up to your name.

Michael had never come close to fulfilling his huge dreams–until now. And just as Harvey’s been the everyman for a certain generation of graphic-novel readers, Michael Malice will be the everyman for a new generation.

About this title

About the Author

Harvey Pekar, a native of Cleveland, is best known for his autobiographical slice-of-life comic book series American Splendor, a first-person account of his downtrodden life, which was made into a movie starring Paul Giamatti. He is also the author of Best of American Splendor and American Splendor: Our Movie Year. He is an omnivorous reader, and obsessive-compulsive collector, and a jazz critic whose reviews have been published in The Boston Herald, The Austin Chronicle, and Jazz Times. He has done freelance work for the critically acclaimed radio station WKSU and has appeared eight times on Late Night with David Letterman and two times on The Late Show with David Letterman.

Reviews

American Splendor's Pekar branches out into a full-length story of someone else. This first-person tale documents the life of New York native Michael Malice, a fairly streetwise geek of frightening intelligence, if he does say so himself. Which he does. Numerous times. Malice's autobiography consists of a long string of episodes where he is right and everyone else is wrong. From first grade—where a teacher forces him to mispronounce a word in a children's story—to his string of nowhere temp jobs, he's in constant contact with people who are far stupider than he. The story gets much of its power from the shock value inherent in the narrator's unshakable confidence in himself. Dumping a girlfriend with leukemia, beating up on his intellectual inferiors, heaping contempt on those he doesn't agree with, Malice has endless energy for pointing out the faults in others. Still, Pekar makes him a compelling and memorable character, with his endless hunger for something better. Malice is clever and, at moments, surprisingly sympathetic—chiefly when he contradicts his own stated principles and derives intense satisfaction from the approval of others. Dumm, longtime Pekar collaborator, illustrates in his usual straightforward, quotidian style. (Apr.)
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The dean of nonfiction comics tells the story of a guy who is just becoming tolerable at the end of the book, when he snares a job developing a show for VH1 and gets all smile-button. Michael Malice has his excuses: insensitive, officious parents; dumb schoolmates; dim-bulb teachers; clueless fellow coeds; lying college advisors and professors--in fact, liars all around. But he is a jerk who boasts about his flair for verbal cruelty, gloatingly recalls every time he was right but suppressed (by his lights), and cuts no slack for anybody else's attempted diplomacy, fears, and mediocrity (they're all liars, you see). On the other hand, he is honest, scrupulous, and smart. Pekar nails his most salient qualities in the title, though. For Malice, it's all me, me, me, and I'm better than everyone else. (He's an Ayn Rand admirer. No, really.) Pekar counters his fascination with Malice, perhaps purposely, by choosing the rather ham-fisted Dumm, who makes every character look 45, to draw the book. One thing's for sure: Pekar isn't resting on his laurels. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345479394
• ISBN 13: 9780345479396
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160