Our Cancer Year [Paperback]

Harvey Pekar (Author), Joyce Brabner (Author), Frank Stack (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 1994

It was they year of Desert Storm that Harvey Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, discovered Harvey had cancer. Pekar, a man who has made a profession of chronicling the Kafkaesque absurdities of an ordinary life (if any life is ordinary) suddenly found himself incapacitated. But he had a better-than-average chance to beat cancer and he took it — kicking, screaming, and complaining all the way. Pekar and Brabner draw on this and other trials to paint a portrait of a man beset with fears real and imagined — who survives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"This is a story about a year when someone was sick, about a time when it seemed that the rest of the world was sick, too." So begins Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's painful comic book autobiography centering on the year that they found out that Pekar had cancer; the year that also saw Operation Desert Shield turn into Operation Desert Storm. Drawing upon the many personal trials they faced, Pekar and Brabner create a portrait of a man beset with fears both real and imagined.

From Publishers Weekly

Joined by his wife and collaborator Brabner and illustrator Stack, Pekar's (The New American Splendor Anthology) first book-length comics narrative is by turns amusing, frightening, moving and quietly entertaining. As always, Pekar's work records his apparently ordinary life as a hospital clerk in Cleveland while simultaneously capturing the epiphanic combination of mundanity and awkward, sporadic nobility of everyday life. In 1990, Pekar was diagnosed with lymphoma and needed chemotherapy. By the time the disease was discovered, the couple was in the midst of buying a house (a tremendous worry to Pekar, who fretted about both the money and corruptions of bourgeois creature comforts). Brabner, a self-described "comic book journalist," had to oversee both the new house and a sick and very difficult husband. Pekar's cancer treatment and suffering will take your breath away, but there's a happy ending; and the book (and their marriage) is distinguished by Brabner's great tenderness and determination in the middle of Pekar's medical nightmare. Stack's brisk and elegantly gestural black-and-white drawings wonderfully delineate this captivating story of love, community, recuperation and international friendship.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (October 13, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568580118
• ISBN-13: 978-1568580111
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Work, October 22, 2001

By 

Quinn Skylark (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Cancer Year (Paperback)

A fine work of autobiography. Understand, however, that Harvey is critical of everything, himself included, and his unflinching eye depicts his personal agony alongside the state-of-the-world at the time. As in many of his extended works, Harvey uses his story to get up on a soap-box, but if you think of his comics as an extension of his life, you might be begining to appreciate what he really is. Harvey IS his stories.

I was struck by the relationship between Harvey and his wife Joyce: if there is a better depiction of the difficulty in love in the midst of illness, I don't know it. Their relationship is loving and it touched me deeply.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Learn to read the art as well, September 2, 2003

By 

Milo Miles "doctornork" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Our Cancer Year (Paperback)

It's very important to emphasize here that Frank Stack's artwork is not "sloppy" or "crude" in any sense. He and Bill Griffith probably have the strongest straight-art chops of anybody doing comics now. But Stack isn't just technically accomplished. Once you learn to follow his deceptively simple lines, he's profoundly expressive in his impressionist manner. Especially dealing with the tough stuff in this story, he finds the exact unsentimental tone. If he was a more prolific storyteller (or had just a bit more vivid sense of humor) his work would be mentioned right with Griffith, Crumb, Sheldon, Williams, Woodring -- the likes of those. Barbner and Pekar's single finest stroke may have been choose Stack to do the art for "Our Cancer Year."

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For Pekar fans and people struggling with illness, June 7, 1999

By 

"brooks_e" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Cancer Year (Paperback)

I found this book interesting since I'm a fan of Pekar's American Splendor series and his appearances on David Letterman's shows (apparently at an end, unfortunately for Pekar, even more unfortunately for Letterman). This book's an in depth look at Pekar's struggle with lymphoma. Given the subject matter, it's probably no surprise that this isn't as amusing as the American Splendor anthologies. But for fans, or for people struggling with illness, it's probably a worthwhile read.