I’ve been gaming my entire life and have been the parasitical worm on society known as a  “games journalist” for a good portion of that. Video games, grandma’s short-lived foray into Wii Bowling not withstanding, have always been fairly nerdy. They may have started with Pong, but it wasn’t long before they turned into Zork. When the hobby started attracting lucrative mainstream bucks, however, the geekier titles were given outlier status. Games with big dudes holding big guns, like Halo and Gears of War, ruled the bloody roost. Then along came Skyrim. Even I know Skyrim is nerdier than wearing a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine shirt to junior prom (if only I had such a shirt in those days...

Before an entire Seinfeld episode took place in a Chinese restaurant, before Larry David counted shrimp, Harvey Pekar stood in line at the supermarket behind old Jewish ladies and grumbled about how they drove him frickin’ nuts. (Before you brand him an anti-Semite, his own momma was an old Jewish lady.) He presented this irksome predicament, and countless others, in the form of self-published autobiographical “Underground” comics that refused to romanticize the human condition. Pekar told his stories straight up, shining the light of truth on both himself and his subjects. But his tales transcended realism. It was his eye, the moments he chose to relay, and his ear, the curmudgeonly-yet-...