Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story [Hardcover]

Harvey Pekar (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 11, 2006

“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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; First Edition edition (April 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345479394
• ISBN-13: 978-0345479396
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 0.7 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #656,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars intriguing and compelling December 2, 2006

By Red Eyes

Format:Hardcover

I have followed and rated Pekar's work for years -- writers like Pekar, Crumb,Clowes and a handful of others reach the heights of Chekov and even -- perhaps -- Dostoyevsky at their best, and they have contributed to the comic genre being taken seriously.

However, I have found that as Pekar gets older, his work has become more dull, and his illness has perhaps ( understandably of course ) made his work a little more self indulgent and introspective, but in a rather pedestrian, boring way.

I haven't really enjoyed his recent work that much. A certain edge is gone now, and of course, so much of his work has been packaged, repackaged and sold off in different volumes since his movie success. The idea seems to be "cash in" rather than innovation nowadays with Harvey. (But no one could say he doesn't deserve cash in after all his years as a file clerk).

So, I approached this book with caution, expecting a book cashing in on his recent cinema success, or perhaps rehashing old themes and ideas.

How wrong I was -- this is like a new beginning for Harvey -- a close study , not of himself, and his own inner demons, which he has done admirably for years, though he has started to grow a little tired of late -- but a study of the shortcomings, failings, flawed aspirations, intelligence and eccentricities of others.

It tells the story of one Michael Malice, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the USA. He is an atheist, and feels no affinity with his Jewish ness, (an "identity" which he considers preposterous, scripturally and socially) or his "Russian-ness" (an ethnic identity he considers parochial and primitive). Neither does he see much value in being an American. He loathes his family, loathes his co workers in all the jobs he gets sacked from, loathes his college mates and school mates because he is (unpleasantly and probably erroneously) convinced he is "smarter than all of them." He doesn't seem to have any friends or lovers, and is lost in his own projections about the world -- projections in which he is always the smartest, and the one most hard done by.

Of course, much of American Splendour always included analysis of others, but mostly either in brief studies, or in relation to Harvey's own visions and daily life -- this work however, is very much an in depth study of another quirky loser character, a personality that one doesn't quite know whether to like, loathe, admire or feel sorry for. And that is why the book is so compelling. It is difficult to tell whether the main character deserves more from life and has been overlooked unfairly -- or if he is a miserable, annoying loser with unfounded pretensions and delusions of grandeur.

Either way, the book expresses and investigates significant insights, and whilst reading it, one can't help but think about the way one perceives others, and in turn, reflect on the way one is seen by fellow workmates, family etc. Like a lot of Pekar's work, it enables the reader to see gems of insight in the mundane, the dull and in the apparently banal events of daily life.

Another good point is the length of the book -- it isn't one of those graphic novels you shell out lot of money for, and is grandly dressed up in a flashy sleeve -- but then you read and finish in half and hour. It is a good, reasonable length, and one can savour it and read it for about a week or two.

Harvey is really back on form after a string of rather mundane, repetitive editions of his comic. One of the most enjoyable comic books/short stories of the last few years, and Pekar STILL leaves most other graphic novel authors in the shade.

So many other graphic novels have pretentions of greatness -- but let you down, every time. This one doesn't.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The well-named Mr. Malice May 7, 2008

By Kerry Walters VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is one of the most intriguing autobiographies I've ever read. Its subject, one Michael Malice, could've come straight out of an overdone piece of fiction. He's a rather talentless loser with a mile-wide mean streak. He chalks up his continuous failure in life to bad parents, stupid teachers, dogmatic professors, and idiotic bosses. Malice is smarter than everyone else--he tells us that he was a brilliant child, and defiantly demands to know why he should be modest--and obviously believes that the world neither appreciates nor deserves his genius. It's the stupidity of others, not his own blemishes, that are to blame for anything in his life that dissatisfies him.

But the reality of the situation (as he rather ingenuously confesses) is that he's lazy and a cad. He's manipulative and cruel, sneaky, and duplicitous. He makes fun of a troubled classmate who kills himself. He's vindictive, fantasizing about murdering a teacher's children or wishing that the 9/11 horror had murdered some of his co-workers. He panders to influential people (such as Senator Bob Dole), lying through his teeth to suck up to them, while all the while disdaining them. Curiously, he tells us that he values his integrity above all else. Needless to say, he's working on a pretty idiosyncratic notion of integrity.

Pekar's presentation of him is nothing short of brilliant. Malice obviously thinks of himself as a sort of Nietzschean ubermensch. But in telling his story to Pekar, a cumulative portrait of something far less comes through. Malice suffers from what Nietzsche called "ressentiment," a malicious envy of others that seeks self-promotion through destruction.

Pekar has focused for most of his artistic career on chronicling the ordinary. In Ego & Hubris, he's achieved something rather different. He's given us a chilling account of a man who is wicked in the most banal of ways, a one-dimensional self-promoter who has little to promote--rather like Donleavy's Ginger Man, but with none of the latter's positive qualities. Gary Dumm's wooden, lifeless artwork perfectly depicts Mr. Malice.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ego & Hubris: Pekar turns the lens around August 10, 2009

By Cody C. Gaisser

Format:Hardcover

This is a very hard book to recommend or explain, but I quite enjoyed it nonetheless. Harvey Pekar simply relates the life story of one of his eccentric acquaintances (a conservative anarchist named Michael Malice) in a very deadpan, matter-of-fact first person perspective. A quick summary of Malice's narrative would be: "I am smart and under-appreciated, all of my bosses and coworkers are idiots, here is how I told them off and got fired." Don't expect it to go anywhere - it doesn't. At least not anymore than real life "goes somewhere." Despite his willful obnoxiousness and condescending attitude, Michael Malice still somehow comes out a champion of sorts because he lives life his own way without compromise - always striving to learn and create, and he seems genuinely satisfied with his unorthodox lifestyle choices. You may not want him talking your ear off at a bar, but most people will probably see a little bit of themselves and a LOT of their acquaintances reflected back in Michael Malice's inner thoughts. Pekar is VERY astute at capturing these sorts of universal elements and situations, allowing the reader to identify with someone they might not normally be fond of. By the grace of this man's incredible gift, we are able to understand ourselves and others from new perspectives... which is the real the key to human progress. If you already enjoy American Splendor, you will likely find something to love (or hate) about Michael Malice.