 "Ego & Hubris : The Michael Malice Story" Written by Harvey Pekar
Illustrated by Gary Dunn
(Ballantine Books)
Underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar has always made a living off of his own misery. His early self-published American Splendor comics chronicled his daily tribulations as a file clerk living in Cleveland Ohio. After his life became the focus of the semi-fictionalized 2003 "American Splendor" film (starring Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti as Pekar), he worried whether he'd be able to live on his pension once the buzz died down. Therefore it's refreshing, and a little strange, to find him leaping out of himself for his graphic novel "Ego & Hubris," writing about someone who is not only not Harvey Pekar, but who is not a loser.
That would be the non fictional Michael Malice, the 29-year-old co-founder of the wildly popular website Overheard in New York (www.overheardinny.com). As the hero of Pekar's latest comic effort, Malice possesses the titular character traits in abundance, and Pekar wisely tells his story with a world-weariness about people like him that balances Malice's prickly nature.
Malice--the graphic novel "character"--starts out in Brooklyn with a 160 IQ. His mother is "a dimwitted coward;" his father is invasive, remorseless, and a "dick" who eventually moves out. Through his own powers of intellect, and always at the humorous expense of those lesser than him, Malice bores his way into Stuyvesant High School and then Bucknell University, driving his story along with fearless insults while Pekar shades it with devastating understatement. (One vignette about Malice's dad ends: "[My father] always considered himself to be above judgement. He wasn't then and he isn't now.")
We root for Michael solely because of his ambition--there isn't much else to root for--and so "Ego & Hubris" drags a bit after college, when our hero enters the workforce as a temp. For someone so proud of his IQ, Malice could pick loftier targets than office drones twice his age and dim-witted security guards. (In one off-putting scene, he baits and harangues a black rent-a-cop while placating a white one, getting the black guy fired.)
But there's geniune fun as Malice's right-wing beliefs are crystalized (he's not a Republican, he's an anarachist) and his artistic endeavors are explored, leading to a long string of victories puncuated by our hero's finest moment--the chance to meet Harvey Pekar during his year of fame, who takes a liking to Malice and agrees to write his story.
 Harvey Pekar
A recent New York Times piece bemoaned the loss of the "young man on the make" in American literature. Malice has enough on-the-make in him to singlehandedly make up the defecit. "Ego & Hubris" shows how a man becomes Somebody in the 21st century--intelligence, remorselessness, and a healthy bit of ass-kissing.
What the book lacks in worthy foes for Malice it more than makes up for in displays of his searing, eye-opening opinions (check especially pages 78-82, where he ridicules a former friend's suicide and praises life in the process). One senses that the next 30 years will be full of a lot more Malice.
[Vizzini wrote the novels "Be More Chill," "Teen Angst? Naaah..." , and "It's Kind of a Funny Story," and has written for NY Press, Bookslut.com, NYMetro.com & The NYTimes Magazine. He lives in NYC. www.nedvizzini.com]
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