Our Cancer Year | 
 enlarge | Authors: Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner
Creator: Frank Stack
Publisher: Running Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $7.95
You Save: $12.00 (60%)
New (17) Used (19) Collectible (6) from $5.00
Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 137839
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 252
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 10 x 8.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 1568580118
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.1969940092
EAN: 9781568580111
ASIN: 1568580118
Publication Date: October 12, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New and unread, small publisher's remainder mark on bottom book edge shipped in padded mailer with tracking
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"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.
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Picking up the pieces April 14, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I've always admired Joyce Brabner (I've even, truth to tell, had a bit of a crush on her). I like her writing talent, her passion for justice, her activism, her wit, her nonconformity, her looks, her scrapiness, and her determination to protect and nurture her obsessive-compulsive genius of a husband Harvey Pekar. And I love this memoir of the year in which things fell apart on several different fronts, and how Joyce picked them up. Our Cancer Year was co-written by Harvey and Joyce, but let's face it: the protagonist in the story is--and ought to be--Joyce.
Our Cancer Year has three plots going on in it. Joyce struggles to write a book about young kids around the world who work for peace; Joyce and Harvey decide to leave their rented apartment and buy a house; and Harvey is diagnosed and treated for lymphoma. In three intersecting circles, then, we see things fall apart: the trauma for the kids and Joyce's tireless (and occasionally despairing) efforts to befriend and nurture them; the hassles and unexpected emergencies that come with buying and fixing up a house; and the disruption of the quotidian when serious illness comes. The ordinary--which is, after all, Pekar's chosen metier--becomes confused, conflicted, messed up. Things fall apart.
It's Joyce's job to try to put them back together--or at least to be strong enough to help the kids and Harvey get through the storm until calmer weather returns. Her struggle to hold the center is the real story here, and it's a gripping and poignant one that actually caused tears to come to my eyes at one point (when Dana, one of the peace kids, leaves a phone message that an exhausted Joyce is too tired to pick up). Harvey's suffering, the numbness of Uri and the anger of Zamir, the insensitivity of Dr. Cantor, the sheer weariness, fear, and occasional rage of Joyce: these add to the creative tension of the story in ways that, at the end of the memoir, leave the reader emotionally exhausted but grateful for having been allowed to share this year with Joyce and Harvey.
A quick word about the artist, Frank Stack. Of all the illustrators with whom Pekar and Joyce collaborate, I have to say that I like his work least. But he was exactly the right artist for Our Cancer Year. The fluid, impressionistic style that Stack brings to the story chillingly conveys the theme of things falling apart, nothing standing still, the familiar contours going wavy. Such impressionism utterly fails to capture Pekar's obsessive-compulsive need for control, predictability, and definition, and that's why I generally don't like Stack's illustrations of Pekar's stories. But Our Cancer Year is, in part, a chronicle of the breakdown of predictability and definition. So Stack was an inspired choice.
 Didn't feel anything after I finished reading it June 2, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I know there are some fans out there of Harvey, Joyce, etc. I liked the movies "American Splendor" (big fan of Paul G.) and "Crumb" and took a chance on this book. I started reading it a while ago but stopped. A month ago I found out I had a pituitary adenoma (a.k.a. benign, slow-growing brain tumor). While going through one of the piles of books on my floor this morning I rediscovered this book and spent the day reading it. I'm pretty much left with a "So what?" feeling. One of my best friends from high school had NHL at about the same tme that Harvey did. He's subsequently had several surgeries for brain lesions. Maybe I'm just not the "American Splendor" graphic novel type, but I can't recommend this book to anyone, even if they or a loved one has cancer. I thought the illustrations were pretty good in that they well represented the emotions of the characters.
Absorbing and Intriguing book - couldn't put it down May 14, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you can't love Harvey Pekar, you can't love anyone. He is a lovely man, with as many neuroses as the rest of us, who listens and watches and reports on the people and world around him. Although this is about a bout with cancer, and how a man and his wife and friends make it through, it's not depressing. You do feel as though you are with them -the graphic novel format makes this story easy to take in and digest. I might not have read it in a regular format, and it's something I'd be sorry to have missed.
I found the Pekar books to be like peanuts - I kept wanting more and more and hate to finish one - unless I have another ready to read. Harvey's 'comics" are the first graphic novels I've spent time reading, and I am hooked. The drawings add immeasurably to the story - a format I would like to see developed further in the future.
An extraordinary work! February 15, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you like Pekar or you have seen a cancer fight play out, you will totally get this. And if you want to know what a cancer fight is like, with everything exposed, this is the book to get.
Since one reviewer mentioned R.Crumb, I will point out that Pekar said that Crumb was very impressed with what the artist of this book had done and Crumb said he couldn't have done better. The artist has done incredible work in transmitting the story.
This book is as real as it gets. Get it!
A better look at Joyce March 30, 2005
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Those of us who only knew Joyce from the American Splendor film will be impressed by her depth. Hope Davis as Joyce seemed sarcastic but shallow: sleeping all day, flying out to do some sort of activism, then finally latching on to a friend's little girl to fulfill her maternal instincts. And "Real Joyce" seemed content to smile and stay in the background.
There is little of that Joyce here. Whether you like her politics or not, she is can-do all the way. I was puzzled that Danielle is not in this book. Perhaps she's edited out for simplicity, or perhaps the film's timeline was idealized to bring her in during the cancer year.
I, too, was initially put off by the artwork, especially the asymmetrical and misshapen faces, but I came to feel that the drawing style supported the story well. They needed a little more white-out over the cut-and-paste spots, though.
I especially enjoyed the problems with Slim, having run into the same sense of entitlement with PTL contractors.
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