Harvey Pekar
Curmudgeon. Contrarian. Misanthrope. Naysayer. For all the people interviewed in this film, someone has used one of the above words to describe them. What have they done to deserve such labels? Everywhere these men and women go, something is being celebrated; they don’t get what all the celebration is about and they’re compelled to question it.
An original mix of fiction and reality illuminates the life of comic book hero everyman Harvey Pekar.
HypaSpace was a weekly entertainment news program about the world of science fiction and fantasy, created by and shown on Space, a Canadian cable television station. It had daily and weekly segments. The television show covers movies, television, books, comics and community events. The show has HypaSpace daily shows and HypaSpace weekly shows which sums up the week of news. The series was casual and irreverent. HypaSpace was produced by Simon Evans and Michelle Dudas. There were 260 episodes per year, excluding the first year, which started in May, and the sixth year, as the daily shows were pulled around mid-December with only the weekend edition airing. The daily segments stopped being produced in mid-December 2007, which meant that in its last year, the show had only 26 episodes. There were approximately 1480 episodes of the show. In May 2005, Kim Poirier took over hosting the show, joining original host Jonathan Llyr, now a reporter for the program. Poirier left the show in July 2007. Segments of HypaSpace aired interstitially between Space programs. Llyr hosted the show whenever Poirier was on a break or was ill. He also hosted the HypaSpace podcast, which started on October 7, 2006. Mark Askwith then took over as the host of the podcast.
In the 20th century, no artistic medium in North America with so much potential for creative expression has had a more turbulent history plagued with less respect than comic books. Through animated montages, readings and interviews, this film guides us through the history of the medium from the late 1930s and 1940s with the first explosion of popularity with the superheroes created by great talents like Jack Kirby and hitting its first artistic zenith with Will Eisner's "Spirit". It then shifts to the post war comics world with the rising popularity of crime and horror comics, especially those published by EC Comics under the editorshiop of William B. Gaines until it came crashing down the rise of censorship with the imposition of the Comics Code. In its wake of the devastation of the medium's creative freedom, we also explore EC's defiant survival with the creation of the singular "Mad Magazine" by Harvey Kurtzman.
