It may be a reach classifying someone buried in Paris’ prestigious Montparnesse Cemetery as being “unsung” but that I was unaware of Serge Gainsbourg’s stature until two months ago is stupefying to me. I discovered him because of a recommended bio-flick. I was told he looked like a scruffier Shane MacGowan (he does) and that was enough to make interested in director Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg, which I give three stars, but, more importantly, give it credit for making me check out the man’s work, much of it as innovative as it is provocative.

For example, Je t’aime … moi non plus’ (‘I Love You … Me Neither) - his duet with British model (and future wife) Jane Birkin amid Procol Harum-ish keyboards– scandalized Europe and was banned in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom for its sexy moans and groans in 1968, seven years before Donna Summer moaned and groaned her way to disco stardom with ‘Love To Love You’. (And recently used by Sofia Coppola in Natalie Portman’s ad for Miss Dior Cherie Perfume).

As a another example, I give you Rock Around The Bunker, a 1975 concept album about Nazis and World War II that had to have influenced Malcolm McLaren’s nurturing of Nazi imagery in Sex Pistols songs and persona. Remember ‘Belsen Was A Gas’? Remember Sid Vicious’ swastika shirt?

I could go on and on. I hear him in Barry White. I hear him in The Specials. I hear him in Beck. You know Lou Reed’s talking vocal style that everybody thinks Lou invented? Uh-uh. Gainsbourg was doing it back when Lou Reed was still setting his sights on being an occupant of the Brill Building. At the beginning of his career – if he had been American – Gainsbourg would’ve been working in that mid-Manhattan building with Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, and Burt Bacharach, to name songwriters who - like Gainsbourg - went on to be singing stars themselves.

Because that’s how Gainsbourg started out: as a writer of songs. I love his life story. Self-destructive creative people are fascinating: the dichotomy is breathtaking. Just about the only artist type I like better are late bloomers such as German author Theodor Fontane, who published his first novel at the age of 60. In Gainsbourg, I have both since he didn’t release his first album until he was 30, having previously failed at painting.

Gainsbourg’s earliest work is indebted to chanson, a type of French song that is lyric driven, but what differentiates his work from other singers specializing in this genre – such as Edith Piaf – is the space given to the instrumentation. Gainsbourg will step aside and let the organist, pianist, guitarist play. (His songs are marvels of arrangement (for which some credit must go to Alain Goraguer, Arthur Greenslade, and Alan Hawkshaw, the principal arrangers of his hit singles). For example, ‘Intoxicated Man’ is organ driven – it either influenced Hendry Mancini’s writing of ‘The Pink Panther Theme’ or vice versa – and Gainsbourg just disappears so the top-notch organist can solo.

Researching ‘Intoxicated Man’ led me to a Mick Harvey CD with the same title whose artwork I remembered. I remembered thinking of buying it back in 1995 and so it turns that I I had heard of Gainsbourg before. Harvey was a member of Birthday Party (a band that’s never gotten it’s true due), a Bad Seed, and a P. J. Harvey cohort and on his album he covered 16 of Gainsbourg’s songs. Reading the track listing, I could see why I had heard good things about it. Many of Gainsbourg’s best singles are covered (only with English lyrics), singles such as ‘Initial B.B.’, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, and ‘Lemon Incest’, the song Gainsbourg – always one for pushing society’s prudish buttons – dueted on with his daughter Charlotte, a popular singer in France in her own right.

That’s part of the secret of Gainsbourg’s success: duets or female harmonies for the choruses. ‘Initials B.B.’ refer to French actress Brigitte Bardot with whom Gainsbourg had a fling: brief but long enough for her to sing on his 1968 hit ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. (Gainsbourg lyrically has a thing for American pop culture and in his songs you’ll find references to New York USA, Ford Mustangs, comic strips and et cetera.) Bardot also did the original moaning and groaning on ‘Je t’aime moi non plus’ but by the time Gainsbourg wanted to release the track, she had abandoned her inner Bonnie Parker and had returned to her husband and respectability and would not allow Gainsbourg to use her contributions to the original sessions. In walked Jane Birkin – who said she spent her first night with Gainsbourg in a night club then a transvestite club then Gainbourg’s hotel room, an evening that is depicted in Gainsbourg. Birkin overdubbed new moans and groans and went on to be featured on other Gainsbourg recordings, including Historie de Melody Nelson, a concept album that some consider Gainsbourg’s finest.

Gainsbourg continued courting controversy over the last 15 years of his life. Veterans of the Algerian War protested when he recorded the reggae flavored ‘Aux Armes et Caetera’, which they thought showed disrespect to the French national anthem. Bob Marley was pissed off at Gainsbourg for having his wife Rita singing erotic lyrics on another track. (I find this surprising because Gainsbourg and his material reeks of sex, so what did Marley expect? Even in photos of Gainsbourg if he’s not smoking, he’s standing near a woman in a scattered state of undress.) In 1986, he told Whitney Houston “I want to fuck you!” when the two met on a television show and the host Michael Drucker would not translate what he was saying in French. Like I’ve pointed out, Gainsbourg may have been French, but he knew his English well enough.

But that’s unimportant now. We can’t let these controversies detract from Gainsbourg’s contributions to pop music, especially his playfulness as a singer, lyricist and songwriter. What is important now is the music that remains twenty years after he died: songs written for other singers, hit singles, concept albums, 40 film soundtracks. I suggest you check some of them out because his work touches so many genres – jazz, ballads, mambo, lounge, reggae, pop (including adult contemporary pop, kitsch pop, yé-yé pop, '80s pop, pop-art pop, prog pop, space-age pop, psychedelic pop, and erotic pop), disco, calypso, Africana, bossa nova, and rock and roll according to Wiki – there’s bound to be something you’ll that’ll appeal to your French side.

Harvey Pekar will be remembered for the autobiographical American Splendor, but it is his unflinching honesty about himself and his foibles that earns our admiration; indeed, his recent graphic novel Quitter chronicles a youth characterized in part by his quitting things rather than plugging along with failure in sight. Not too many people would admit to that!

Another graphic novel of his, Our Cancer Year can be brutal at times; he's not exactly one of those power-of-positive-thinking patients inspiring everyone with his courage. He was in pain and misery and it shows, though there are also moments of great humor and tenderness, especially between Harvey and his wife Joyce. And that's what real life is like, you know. Beyond the sound bites and romanticized views of whatever, he (and everyone) still has to worry about day-to-day basics: health, money, friends, pets, bathroom disasters....

Despite it all he kept paying his artists and putting out his material even though it usually cost him more than he made; though no starving artist thanks to his day job, money was a constant worry and yet he always budgeted for his comics; whether you like his stuff or not, you have to respect him for his perseverance, for sticking with it despite the hardships it could cause ... for not quitting this time.

Pekar, who died on July 12, 2010 at the age of 70, was a seminal figure in the history of alternative comics. In the real world he was content being a file clerk for the VA Hospital in Cleveland; the job didn't pay much, but he liked his co-workers and he didn't have to think about work when he left at night. Stimulated by the emerging underground comix scene of the 1960s and his friendship with fellow jazz aficionado R. Crumb (when that individual's star was beginning to rise), Pekar realized comics could be written for adults as well as children. And, more importantly, they could cover themes well beyond superheroes/funny animals/Archie. He had been a published jazz critic, but decided he wanted people writing about him rather than the other way around. Not being an artist, he worked up some potential comics scripts and showed them to Crumb, who loved them and offered be Pekar’s illustrator; starting a trend: Pekar would, ultimately, get so many important comics artists to illustrate his stories that his books are a Who's Who of significant comics artists.

Pekar began cutting back on buying jazz albums so he could pay to illustrate and publish American Splendor: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. It debuted in 1976 to considerable critical approval, though—like the vast majority of alternative comics—it was never lucrative despite its cult following. But it was never about the money for Pekar: he felt he was creating something important. And he was rewarded for that outlook when he received the American Book Award for his first anthology of American Splendor. Later, he would become a frequent guest on talk shows, with some memorable appearances on the Letterman show (and disappearances: he was banned for several years after a tirade about General Electric). His Crowning Moment of Awesome, however, came when American Splendor was turned into a 2003 biographical movie (after a number of abortive attempts beginning in 1980). The movie won several major awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film at Sundance and has an impressive 94% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But why should you care about what Harvey Pekar wrote?

What's so special about his material?

If you picked up one of his books and just flipped randomly, you might get a conversation he had with a checker at a supermarket, or his struggle to fix his toilet, or musings on a particular jazz artist, or details about his childhood, or just some little thing that happened to him five minutes ago. The vast majority of Pekar’s works are only several pages long. Many of these little vignettes have no “point” to them in that he's not telling a story with a distinct beginning and end. For example, I remember one comic where he got into a car, drove, and then got out. It all sounds very superficial and trivial. Yet taken together, these comics create as complete a chronicle of a life as can be found anywhere.

What Pekar captured is an Everyman's life. That is his achievement. Everyone's life is comprised of these bits and pieces: some funny, some sad, some interesting, some poetic, some dull; Pekar's genius was to spread his life out for display and, in doing so, capture pieces of everyone else's life as well. I guarantee that if you read enough of his material, you will recognize yourself. Now, Pekar certainly had some experiences well outside the mainstream, especially in regards to the movie. But even then he made it clear he knew that this success was temporary. Sure, the movie and its aftermath came with great perks and thrills and more paid work and increased book sales, but he knew acutely that when the rose faded and the movie disappeared from the public consciousness, he would be returning his everyday struggle to keep his household solvent on his meager pension (he retired from the VA due to anxiety issues in 2001) and diminishing freelance work. In other words, he completely deglamorized the entire experience, sometimes even before it took place!

For all these reasons and more, Pekar was enormously influential amongst comic book writers. If he didn't give birth to autobiographical comics, he surely nurtured them into the significant subgenre it is today. Without him to blaze the trail, to impress the cognoscenti and dazzle readers, would the subgenre have exploded in the 1980s and beyond? Without Pekar's influence, we might not have had Maus; we might not have had Stuck Rubber Baby or Fun Home or Persepolis or Palestine or the works of Canadians like Joe Matt, Seth, and Julie Doucet. His death is a real blow, but his influence will continue to be felt for a long time to come.