I first saw Harvey Pekar during one of his infamous Late Night With David Letterman appearances in the early ‘80s, where he came off as just another one of Letterman’s regular stable of weirdoes to my ill-informed teenage self. It wasn’t until I got to college and found a decent comic book store—God bless you, Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens, GA—that I held an actual magazine-sized issue of American Splendor in my hands. I bought that issue (as I recall it was #15, the last self-published one) and then bought the two American Splendor anthologies that Doubleday had released a few years earlier. I quickly realized that I’d figured Pekar all wrong. He wasn’t some working-class crank using comic books to bitch about his job. He was a visionary, using a populist medium to offer an alternative perspective on art, history, literature, and “success.”

In a way, it was entirely appropriate that I’d misunderstood what Pekar was up to before I finally read him. A lot of what Pekar wrote over the years had to do with how people tended to underestimate him, because he dressed like a slob, was self-educated, and had no ...

Oral Adams of I Can Has Internets collected 25 mind-blowingly sexist print advertisements from the good ol' days—you know, back when men were men, women were there to cook and clean, and sicko homosexuals knew their goddamn place. This post first went up at the end of May, but sexism is timeless.

"Often a wife fails to realize that doubts due to one intimate neglect shut her out from happy married love" proclaims an ad for Lysol douches. It recommends women use "concentrated germ killer" Lysol in their hoo-hahs to maintain "feminine daintiness" and "protect your married happiness... keep you desirable!" Failing that, have you considered just hosing that shit down with mixture of bleach and ammonia?

Here's a taste. See all them here. (Bonus: More Lysol ads here.)

We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes—videos, photos, songs, sites—that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people. We salute them with a hearty "Great job, Internet!"

Sometimes people fuck around on their computers and make trailers that present movies or TV shows in entirely new lights. Sometimes these are funny. Here's one that's making its way 'round the Internet today. It imagines our favorite sitcom ever, Arrested Development, as a serious action-drama. Enjoy.

How do you “go hard”? Is it an innate skill, a question of nature versus nurture? With their 2008 single “Go Hard,” DJ Khaled and his super-pals Kanye West and T-Pain made a considerable argument for the latter, but in the video below, two teenagers repping the “TVC, bitches” (the Traditional Values Coalition?) prove that you don’t always have to put in your time playing the hip-hop game to “make the beat flow.” Allow them to demonstrate. [HT to Videogum]

In case you haven’t noticed, we here at The A.V. Club are pretty excited about Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim comic books. We’ve been following the evolution of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for quite some time now—via Wright’s excellent video blog of the production process—but the buzz has been escalating rapidly since the trailer debuted. The movie hit the next logical step in the Internet hype machine last week with the debut of the Scott Pilgrim Avatar Creator, an online avatar generator that, judging by all the manga-eyed, fluorescently-haired icons in our Twitter feed, many of you have already taken advantage of. Paste utilized the generator in a manner befitting the indie-rock-obsessed series, pumping out Pilgrim-ized images of luminaries like Colin Meloy (“The Spoiled Rich Kid”), Neko Case (“The Drunk Fat Guy”), and Win Butler (“The Total Babe”). (Apparently feeling left out, Eddie Argos made his own damn avatar and tweeted it to Wright.) Check out the full gallery here. 

Imagine for a second that you've been handed a TV show. It's a long-running show, coming up on 100 episodes, yet it's been off the air for almost a year. You have almost complete assurance that when this show gets on the air, no one will be watching it. The show has been retooled over and over and over again until it barely resembles itself, and the whole thing is here only because the production company cut a crazy deal with the network so the show would be on the air long enough to get to syndication. You are, for all intents and purposes, producing a show in a vacuum. You see, this show has a reputation of being absolutely godawful, one of the worst examples of a kind of TV comedy that went out of favor long, long ago. So most everyone has made up their mind on this show anyway, and it's unlikely you're going to win critical favor, no matter what you do. Hell, a prominent TV critic "live blogs" most of your episodes on Twitter and mocks you mercilessly.

To be honest, if I were handed this situation and I couldn ...

Yes, Neko Case possesses the greatest voice in the galaxy, but she's also self-professed "piece of shit white trash" who will "pummel your fucking face." That's what the audience at a New Pornographers show in Boston on Friday night learned when someone chucked a New Pornos CD at frontman Carl Newman. Case showed her polemic punk-rock roots when she chided the audience, "I will go to jail—I don't give a shit. I will fuck you up. I will fight every single fucking person in this room. Seriously, don't pull that shit again." The CD remained unharmed. "It's still good," Case said, "we can re-sell that." (Hat tip, @riotactmedia)

John Teti:

Say this for E3: It does make me eager to play games. After a week of experiencing various games one tantalizing 10-minute session at a time, I can’t wait to go home and play my Xbox 360 for as long as I damn well please, without a PR flack looking over my shoulder or a fellow nerd breathing down my neck and waiting for his turn.

A hands-on demo is something of a trial for both sides of the transaction. I’m in constant fear of the inevitable mistake that will get me scolded by the developer who’s guiding the tour—“No, press the LEFT trigger!!!”—and the dev, for his part, is anxious that I’ll uncover a glitch in the rickety build he slapped together for the show under pressure from the marketing department. As I tried out games on the floor today, many developers cautioned me with statements like, “I know those colors are wrong, but this is alpha code. We definitely plan to fix that bug. Remember, it’s just alpha. Alpha alpha alpha.” I feel for them. Any writer who would complain about load times or graphical glitches in an early ...

The hot fashion statement on the E3 floor this week is a free shoulder bag that is being handed out at the Nexon booth. Nexon makes Dungeon Fighter Online, a game that I’m aware of for two reasons. One, the company sends me PR emails on an almost-daily basis featuring headlines like “Girls With Guns – A Winning Combination.” Two, a Dungeon Fighter ad is printed on the side of this enormous bag, which is adorning nerd shoulders everywhere at E3.

David Wolinsky and I don’t have a tape measure here at AV Club Games Section HQ (West), but by our reckoning, the faux-canvas bag measures 2.5 feet tall x 2 feet long x 2 inches wide, with a huge shoulder strap that makes it hang practically down to the floor. Given its bizarre dimensions, this is clearly designed as a swag bag. Well, it’s really designed to turn attendees into walking billboards for Dungeon Fighter Online and Vindictus, but the swag-bag concept is a tenuous justification for its existence. The sad irony is that there’s not so much free stuff being handed out this year aside from the bags themselves, so they mostly twist in ...

Via Today's Big Thing: This feels like the aftermath of a letter/call into Savage Love: Dude ignores his girlfriend to play marathon games of World Of Warcraft on his computer. What would Dan Savage suggest? Confronting him, sure. Withholding sex, probably. Sabotage? Maybe! The girlfriend goes for the last option, deleting all of the dude's WoW characters. He, um, doesn't react well. The video pays off around the 3:50 mark.

If the annual GDC show is the gaming world’s grand intellectual forum then E3 is the bacchanalia. Sure, there’s some lip service given to "big ideas," but that’s mostly teleprompter boilerplate to help a marketing executive segue between the various high-concept, high-polygon-count first-person shooters he has to plug that day. Excess, not artistry, is the watchword of this annual boondoggle. Whatever E3 is, it’s a lot of it. It’s tons. So much that it refuses to be ignored. Thus here I am, not ignoring it, and filing daily updates to boot.

The show officially opened at the Los Angeles Convention Center today (Tuesday), but the avalanche of press conferences always begins the day before. The keynotes from the big industry players are a chance to take the temperature of each company’s overall approach—at least, that’s how I look at them. There’s a lot of “news” in the way of release dates and new trailers, but I find all that stuff thuddingly boring. I don’t care very much whether Killzone 3 is coming out next February or next Tuesday; I’ll play it when it gets here either way. Mundane specifics ...

We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes—videos, photos, songs, sites—that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people. We salute them with a hearty "Great job, Internet!"

Internet entrepreneurs are everywhere, and as with every other aspect of life, there are stupid people and smart people involved. Sometimes you come upon a genius of the rare type that mixes peanut butter with chocolate. Well, the world has found yet another combination: Netflix and Nicolas Cage. Genevieve just sent me the link to Cageflix (which she found via Videogum), which smashes those two amazing concepts together. With the touch of a button, you can add EVERY Nicolas Cage movie to your Netflix queue. You're a little bit tempted, aren't you? Here's the link. Do we smell a book deal?

It came to our attention early this week that two of our longtime commenters, Phel and Prison Wine, were married last weekend. Phel confirmed to us that the two actually met in the hallowed pages of The A.V. Club comments, and we couldn't be more tickled. Congratulations to them. (And if you have anything even remotely mean to say about this pleasant occasion, we're going to delete your comments--our special gift to the newlyweds.)

In the summer of 2005, writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson’s comic book series Astro City launched a new storyline, “The Dark Age,” promising a run of 16 issues (divided into four 4-issue miniseries) that would cover over a decade in the life of Busiek’s superhero-strewn metropolis, as seen through the eyes of two brothers on opposite sides of the law. Earlier this month, “The Dark Age” finally came to an end after five years, with minimal fanfare. For complicated reasons, I’d stopped reading Astro City somewhere in the middle of “The Dark Age: Book Two,” so I wasn’t even aware the story was wrapping up until I saw it listed in a checklist at the back of another Wildstorm comic. I thought I might gear up for the end by re-reading the whole story, but by the time I finished Marc Guggenheim’s introduction to the first trade paperback, I got so excited about Astro City again that I decided to re-read the whole series. 

Then while I was pulling all my Astro City books off the shelf, I remembered that I’d just received the fourth and final volume of the Warren Ellis ...

We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes—videos, photos, songs, sites—that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people. We salute them with a hearty "Great job, Internet!"

Full credit to Pop Candy, which posted this video earlier today after getting a tip from a reader. What you're about to see is a local news broadcast about the controversial fans of the controversial horror-musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At about the 1:25 mark, you'll see R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, in full Frank-N-Furter regalia, talking about the movie. I'm guessing this is 1978 or so...  Enjoy!