Throughout their history, comics have pretty much always been larger than life. The medium itself has unbounded potential; perhaps its only limitation is the creator's imagination. Long before men actually walked on the moon, we were flying to different planets in the pages of four-color funnybooks. 
It's comics that made us believe a man could leap tall buildings in a single bound or that a spider bite could turn a nerdy teenage boy into the world's favorite web-slinging wall-crawler!
No, comics have never lacked for imagination -- and, so, have provided fertile ground for entertaining and escapist fantasies.
But what about reality? Comics got their first dose thereof sometime in the late '60s, with the advent of the undergrounds. Oh, sure, there was a lot of fantasizing going on, too, in those so-called "head comix," but underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Jack Jackson, and Frank Stack, rebelling against the more commercial comics then published by Marvel and DC, also began telling stories that were based on their own real-life experiences. According to comics grand master Will Eisner, it was at this point that the medium matured into the level of literature,. because it was at this point that comics first began to tackle more serious subject matter.
Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll?! Well, yeah, the undergrounds were rife with all that, but they also opened the door to a genre entirely new, at that time, to comics: autobiography. Formerly relegated to prose only, the personal narrative allows for a more intimate relationship between the writer and his or her readers. In that respect, it is inherently involving. And because it treats of the mundane, as opposed to the fantastic, it provides a familiar point of reference for all readers and so can have a greater impact on them.
Don't think truth can be stranger than fiction? Meet Harvey Pekar! As of this year, Harvey's been telling true stories in comics, of his life and times, for a quarter of a century. Since its debut in 1976, American Splendor. has been published roughly every year and has established itself as an important literary icon of our medium. In the past 25 years, Harvey's instructed us in the workaday routines of his job as a veterans' hospital file clerk; he's bared the secrets of his three marriages; he's exposed his own debilitating experiences with cancer and radiation therapy. He's given us insight, with raw truth and no exaggeration, into what real. life is all about. And done it with humor and drama and poignancy.
In April, Dark Horse Maverick will publish Harvey Pekar's 25-year anniversary issue, American Splendor: Portrait of the Artist in His Declining Years.. Illustrated by a bevy of talented cartoonists, the stories abound with paranoia, frustration, dreams, jazz, sex, divorce, Hollywood, adoption, and more -- all fresh off the streets of Cleveland, all penned by one tortured soul, and all true.
