Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar

Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner, Art by Frank Stack,

NY: Four Walls Eight Windows (39 West 14th St. NYC 10011), 1994,

$17.95, ISBN: 1-56858-011-8

It begins like this:

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. It’s a story about feeling powerless, and trying to do too much...maybe more than you though you could and not knowing what to do next. It’s also a story about marriage, work, friends, family and buying a home.

Our Cancer Year is our cancer year: “the rest of the world was sick, too.” This was the year of the media manipulated farce of Desert Shield and the techno-killing tragedy of Desert Storm. It was a year put into focus by the act of biography; it’s how the war comes home, as all wars do.

From the book jacket:

Harvey Pekar was born in 1939. Winner of the 1987 American Book Award, he is the author of the comic book series “American Splendor,” wherein he writes about his daily experiences in Cleveland. Joyce Brabner was born in 1952. A long-time community organizer, she is also a comic book writer and political activist, best known for her “Real War Stories” series. They live in Cleveland.

”...daily experiences in Cleveland.”

“They live in Cleveland.”

The poet Charles Olson called his collection of essays “Human Universe.” The poet of the ordinary, Harvey Pekar, demonstrates how that Universe is rooted, grounded, only fully realizable in the local, making the local universal. Our Cancer Year is the story of family values, not the political slogan used by politicians to abuse and confuse us; this story is about brothers, sisters, cousins, and their concern and sacrifice and it’s about the failure of social institutions that pretend to substitute for such concern. And it’s about a family that extends beyond traditional definitions of family, the real extended family so many of us care for and sacrifice for. It’s also what it means to be an adult in this world, what a responsible adult artist does with the craft of story-telling. Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner really live in Cleveland.

Comics is a genre that transcends itself in this story just as this story itself transcends traditional story. Comics and Our Cancer Year are rooted in the most ordinary of experience, and yet Our Cancer Year demonstrates that it is just these roots that make a great story possible. Our Cancer Year could not be told in any other fashion other than the collaboration of Pekar, Brabner and the artist Frank Stack. To say that this is a comic book is to recognize its value and uniqueness while at the same time to claim for it an achievement rarely reached by the traditional novel or its meek cousin the experimental novel.

Cancer is a romance and at the same time and anti-romance that insists that genuine experience be bound intimately to the real: real sacrifice, real work, real love, real nature. The last image of the story is a kind of mockery of Niagara Falls, that greatest of fakeries, real natural splendor turned to feed the fantasies of marriage based on lies, deceptions, and false projections of what family is and can be. After recovering from his cancer, he talks to one of his young political activist adopted “daughter.”

Ju: There is? No. I never saw any other part of this country. Just San Francisco when we arrive. Then Los Angeles and San Diego.

H: It’s not an enormous waterfall or anything, but if you feel like a ride, we could go see it. There’s a good used book store near there...It’s also the place Joyce and I went the day we decided we would get married.

H: It wasn’t exactly a proposal and it was very cold out. It was still winter, but...C’mon. It’s real pretty out there now. I think you’ll like it.

Ezra Pound said that an artist reveals himself in every brush stroke. And there is nothing more revealing than this little dialogue that ends this story. It’s all here, just as this is all there throughout the book. No fake romance about marriage; no fake natural beauty used to convince people to consume, consume products or each other. We need go nowhere else for our nature, neither do we need to go to San Francisco to experience what city life is all about, “There’s a good used book store near there...” We need the local, though. We need to know where we live or we never know how to live. And we need nature when we know to find it everywhere. The last image of the book is the waterfall with an insert of Pekar, man in nature, intimate, connected, not apart from the city or nature but a part of it all.