Comic review: Our Cancer Year

Originally published November 4, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1094

We lie to our children practically every day.

When they come to us, whispering their fears, afraid of shadows, afraid of the unknown, we cradle them in our arms, rock them lightly back and forth, and coo repeatedly, “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be OK.”

Except we, as adults, know that this simply isn’t so. Because sooner or later Bad Things are going to happen. Bad and unfair things will happen to you or your loved ones, ravaging your body and debilitating your spirit. During such times there is no guarantee that everything is going to be “OK,” unless you consider dying and being released from the agony of living “OK,” which is, at best, cold comfort.

I am put in mind of this because of two recent experiences.

The first is reading Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner with art by Frank Stack.

I don’t generally review comic book works in this column, preferring to leave that to the province of Maggie Thompson and Tony Isabella. But I received promotional material about the book from the publisher, Four Walls Eight Windows. Rubber-stamped across the press release was the friendly invitation, “Call for a review copy.” So I called and asked them to send me one.

Several hours later, a FWEW rep called back and promptly began to grill me as to my reasons for wanting a copy. Who was I? For whom did I write? What was it that I did write? A column? What kind of column? For what purpose was I requesting a copy of the book? Was I genuinely planning to review it or was I (and I quote exactly) “just trying to do some early Christmas shopping?”

I’m not vain enough to assume that people have heard of me or to get upset when they haven’t. But FWEW had approached me, not vice versa. So, as I answered every question, I followed up with, “And, y’know, your flyer invited me to ask for a review copy.” At the very least, they should amend their rubber stamp to read “Call for a review copy. Try your luck.”

This wasn’t rubber hose stuff, you understand. I was more bemused than anything, and the guy on the other end just wanted to make sure he wasn’t wasting copies. The “early Christmas shopping” comment did cheese me off a touch, however, and it’s an odd way to go about drumming up publicity. Guess it worked, though. They sent me a copy of it, and now I feel as if I dámņëd well better review it.

In any event, I don’t recommend you call for a review copy (or even give it as a Christmas gift). I do recommend that you buy it, read it, and let yourself be drawn into the brutal, unstinting graphic novel chronicles of Pekar’s and Brabner’s (as she muses at one point, “When did it become our cancer?”) bout with Pekar’s lymphoma.

Pekar and Brabner, allowing for the possibility that you haven’t heard of them (always a safe bet in this world, it would seem), introduce themselves at the beginning. Harvey says, “I live in Cleveland and work at the VA hospital as a file clerk. I’ve also been writing an autobiographical comic book series called American Splendor since 1976. That provides me with a creative outlet and some critical acclaim, but not a lot of money.”

His wife of 10 years, Joyce Brabner (not “Pekar,” we’re informed), “used to work in prisons. Now I’m a sort of ‘comic book journalist’ who writes about peace and social justice issues.”

The story begins with Harvey and Joyce involved in any number of activities, but every other aspect of their lives quickly becomes overshadowed by Harvey’s finally attending to a lump in his groin—a lump which, upon being removed, turns out to be the worst possible thing it could be. Typical of Cancer Year‘s stylistic “rightness” is when the doctor gives Joyce the diagnosis. Much of what he’s saying is lettered as tiny and insignificant, except hot-button phrases such as “Biopsy,” “Malignant,” “Cat Scan,” and “Far It May Have Spread” which leap our and capture the numbness one would feel upon receiving such dreaded news.

The recurring theme in the book is fear. In big ways and small ways, and all in different ways, everyone lives in fear. Joyce corresponds, via computer, with young people in the Middle East who have the threat of Saddam Hussein and his gas attacks hovering over them. Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm loom on the horizon.

Harvey, in the meantime, has his day-to-day fears: fear of committing to buying a house, fear of disruption, in any way, of the routine of his life. All these are magnified when the cancer shows up.

Joyce is the only one in the story who doesn’t really have much time to fear for herself. She’s too busy being drawn into the fears and terrors of everyone else, having to remain tough and determined so that others can lean on her. She’s like a rock trapped in a whirlpool—although even the hardest of rocks can be pounded down.

When we’re younger, somehow we believe that—as adults—everything becomes clear. The world becomes a less frightening place once you can deal with it on a grown-up level. Somewhere along the way, you theoretically become indoctrinated into all the “answers.” Somehow, life becomes easier.

Our Cancer Year underscores how this is, unfortunately, not so. The young people in the book are afraid. The adults are afraid. Friends are afraid.

The only ones who do not seem afraid are the medical personnel. They deal with cancer all the time—some more humanely than others. “Dr. Rhodes” is a compassionate woman, who even sits down and reads American Splendor so she can get a better handle on her patient. She’s informative, sensible, and sensitive. As Pekar and Brabner embark on the 12 sessions of chemotherapy which ultimately cleanse Pekar of cancer, Rhodes is unfailingly supportive.

She’s sharply contrasted with the chemo nurse, whose sensitivity training seems just slightly below Louise Fletcher’s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the book’s most agonizing sequence, Pekar—his body covered with hideous blisters—collapses in the waiting room. Blood on the back of his shirt, blood on the chair, as the blisters, rubbed raw, are open and bleeding. As Joyce tried to cope with her pain-wracked husband on the floor, the nurse briskly cleans off the chair without offering so much as a word of succor to the suffering couple. Moments later, when Pekar’s low blood count precludes a therapy session for that day, the nurse snaps at the doctor, “I’ve got other patients coming in. This one’s toxic. Get rid of him.”

On the one hand you just want to reach into the comic book, grab the nurse, and slap some compassion into her. On the other hand, you can’t help but wonder if she was always like this, or if she was once a caring, dedicated nurse who has—tragically—disconnected from her feelings in order to deal with misery on a daily basis.

It doesn’t seem impossible. We are made witness to the painful changes that Harvey and Joyce undergo. Harvey is at the mercy of the treatments, the medication, the “healing” which, it seems, might kill him in the process. Time after time he will collapse in total despondency, claiming he can’t move, wanting to do nothing except die. And Joyce desperately tries to remain dedicated and supportive, working her way through such nauseating moments as salving Harvey’s blisters, only to have one of them burst and strike her in the eye. She cleanses her eye without letting Harvey know what’s happened.

But Joyce is no saint, no machine, and there are times when her patience is pushed beyond limits. When she yells are Harvey or curses him out—angry at him, at her own “weakness,” and terrified of the looming unknown. After all, perhaps the treatment won’t work. Perhaps they’ll reach the end, send Harvey through a CAT scan, and discover a trace of cancer that can send them spiralling right back to where they started. How much can he and she endure?

Frank Stack’s art is masterful, capturing nuances in just a few lines. Rarely has stark black and white been more appropriate, as Harvey and Joyce’s world becomes reduced to a simple either/or choice: live or die. Drained of color, drained of joy, drained of anything except day-to-day survival.

If Our Cancer Year sounds tough to take, well, it is. Nonetheless, it’s a riveting work. I was reading it on a commuter train. As we pulled into Penn Station, the fellow seated next to me—a gray-haired gentleman in a business suit—hesitantly started asking me about it. He had been reading it over my shoulder, even though he knew nothing about Harvey and had never seen a graphic novel or even known that they existed. In fact, he told me—somewhat apologetically—that up until that very moment, he had always assumed that any “comic book” was automatically the province of the very young or the semi-literate. The concept of the comic book as a form of storytelling no less legitimate than any other had never occurred to him. He seemed determined to seek out a copy in a bookstore so he could read the rest of the story.

Knowing that everything comes out OK helps the reader somewhat, but Harvey and Joyce do not share the comforting knowledge that there’s a happy ending. They have to slog through, all unknowing. It’s easy to say that we applaud their bravery, but dealing with the cancer doesn’t seem so much bravery as dogged determination, even stubbornness. What’s brave is the book itself, for it takes undiluted courage to be willing to depict oneself in a manner so raw and uncompromising.

And what is a happy ending, really? A story only has a happy ending because the author has chosen to cease telling the story at that point. The truth is that every story has, ultimately, a sad ending. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, eventually boy loses girl again, because one of them dies. The end. Happy endings are arbitrary—self-delusional, and transient at best. There are no happy endings—just happy rest stops along the turnpike of life before you get to the last exit and pay the final toll.

And what it really comes down to is that, as you’re reading about Harvey and Joyce, there’s a subtext running through your mind. Namely:

What if it were you?

Cancer is arbitrary. Death is arbitrary. It can happen to anyone at any time, for more reasons than we can dwell on and keep our sanity.

I said earlier that two things put me in mind of the fact that we lie to our children when we say that everything will be OK. Our Cancer Year was the first. The second is that, just as I finished reading it, I learned that a long-time friend had just died of brain cancer.

He fought no less nobly than Harvey. He no less deserved to live. He was younger. And he’s gone. Just like that.

How do we cope?

We lie.

We tell ourselves that Harvey Pekar was “lucky”—which is an insane definition of luck, because lucky people don’t contract cancer and go through months of debilitating treatments.

We lie and we whistle in the dark. Because when you read a book like Our Cancer Year, or when a friend dies, it reminds us of the fear that we live with every single day: the fear that we try to ignore, lest we go mad.

People connect with incidents such as this on a personal level. When I wrote my column about my “cancer scare” (and let me make it clear that comparing what I went through to Pekar’s experience is like comparing ants as a picnic to locust levelling a wheat field) it prompted a barrage of letters from people telling me their own experiences. Their own medical histories. Their own fears. When something like this is discussed, it’s like pulling a blanket back ever so slightly—and people peer out from underneath and say, “Me, too. Me, too.”

When we read Our Cancer Year—when we lose a friend—there’s a subtext. A subliminal shudder. We’re not just witnessing what they experienced or mourning their passing. Selfishly, guiltily, we’re thinking: What if it were me? What if it did happen to me? What if it does happen to me? How will I handle it? How will my loved ones handle it? And there’s the oppressive realization that this question is not moot—that, sooner or later, we’ll all find out.

But at this moment in time we (again, guiltily) feel a small measure of relief. Any day could be our last, but this day someone else went down. The soldier standing next to you in line caught the bullet. Sometimes we even seek reasons as to why it might have happened (“Did he smoke? Did he drink? Was he overweight?”) so we can pretend that somehow, in some way, the other guy brought it on himself. And all we have to is remain fit and pure of heart, and maybe we’ll dodge the bullet forever.

Whistling in the dark.

In the dark, every night, we close out the day and, somewhere deep within us, think, “Made it through another day.” No guarantee we would. No guarantee, for that matter, that, when we close our eyes, we’ll open them again.

Every morning my 3-year-old, Ariel, pops out of her room, rosy-cheeked, eyes shining, and says, “I waked up, Daddy! Daddy, I waked up!” She treats this simple event as a moment to rejoice. An opportunity for another day has been granted.

Read Our Cancer Year and join Harvey and Joyce in rejoicing the opportunity to see a new day.

And think about those who didn’t, as you would have them think about you.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, makes a correction his recommended gift list: The computer-with-built-in-printer is not the Canon Deskjet; it’s the Canon Notejet—specifically, the Canon Notejet 486. Hope this didn’t cause any confusion.)