Harvey Pekar

Another Survivors' Tale
Interview conducted by Jim Ottaviani and Steve Lieber

David Mazzucchelli, in the winter 1995 issue of Crash, captured the feelings of a lot of erstwhile comics readers: “People who’ve read comics as kids and gave them up . . . are apt to see something in comic-book form and just say: ‘Oh, I know what comics are,’ and not want to spend time with it. No one I know goes to a movie theatre and says, ‘I know what movies are. I don’t want to see this.’ ”
Harvey Pekar has spent the last 20 years making sure that people who “know what comics are” don’t. American Splendor, which made its debut in 1976, is the medium’s longest-running autobiographical series. Self-publishing until 1990, when his non-Hodgkins lymphoma made this impossible, Pekar has written about his experiences as a record collector, writer, street-corner comedian and working stiff at a Cleveland VA hospital. American Splendor has maintained an underground feel by sticking to newsprint, featuring artists like R. Crumb, Spain and Frank Stack and by suffering from spotty distribution.
Joyce Brabner, who married Pekar on their third date, has even less name recognition in the comics world than her husband, although she has worked with many of its highest-profile writers and artists. She edited Eclipse’s Real War Stories, which brought Mike W. Barr, Steve Bissette, Brian Bolland, Rebecca Huntington, Paul Mavrides, Dean Motter, Denny O’Neil and John Totleben (among others) together on behalf of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. Her work on Brought to Light with Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz brought everyone involved critical praise from both the artistic and activist communities.
Pekar and Brabner collaborated on Our Cancer Year, the longest chapter of American Splendor yet. It ties Pekar’s illness with Brabner’s activist concerns, and as she says, they “argued unsuccessfully with our publisher about tagging it as ‘health/autobiography’ but we ended up in the graphic novels/sci-fi and humor ghetto again.” Though not a bleak and depressing book, Our Cancer Year is neither humorous nor (science) fictional. But like Art Spiegelman (whose Maus was initially placed on the bestselling fiction list) Pekar and Brabner work hard to shake both their readers and their publishers out of comfortable assumptions. Though it doesn’t benefit from the same superb production values as Maus, Our Cancer Year is also a survivor’s tale that has stood on its own outside of comic-book specialty stores. —Jim Ottaviani

Jim Ottaviani: There are some contractual-obligation questions to ask, but I don’t feel like starting with any of them, so . . .
Joyce Brabner: A radio talk-show host asked me our favorite question so far, “How did it feel, Joyce, in the middle of your ordeal, to know that someday it would all be just a comic book?” Go ahead and ask that one.
Ottaviani: So, Joyce, how did it feel, in the middle of your ordeal, to know that it was just going to end up some lousy comic book?
Brabner: Well, it wasn’t going to end up a lousy comic book because, of course, we’re committed to graphic art [laughter]. But the new story line, the post–Our Cancer Year story, has me inheriting a cosmetics empire, committing a couple of undetected murders as I claw my way to the top, and then, with all that money, I get to wear suits with shoulder pads [laughter].
Ottaviani: That sounds really good, unless you’re going to do animal testing. You know, Berke Breathed’s “Mary Kay Commandos”. . .
Brabner: Listen, that’s what some of my next comics are going to be about. Mark Badger and I are doing a series of animal-rights comics.
Ottaviani: Seriously? You want to say something about that?
Brabner: Yeah, Harv, is that OK with you?
Harvey Pekar: Why not?
Brabner: Will you let me talk about my brilliant career?
Pekar: Can I stop you?
Brabner: I was asked to do some comics by PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals]. Because I grew up dealing with serious illness, and because Harvey’s had cancer, that’s a difficult assignment. Opposing the use of animals to test consumer products is easy. We don’t need more shampoos or oven cleaners. But, Mark has MS, multiple sclerosis. Someday, he might not be able to draw anymore. And Harvey could get sick again.
So because even the idea of looking at the use of animals for medical research made us uncomfortable, we decided that was a signal that maybe we’d better go forward and look even closer at what’s going on.
We’re writing about something young activists and med students will have to pull together and resolve—about why we need a far more compassionate, humane way of doing science.
So far, we’ve looked at incredible waste and cruelty, government contracts for tests that should never have been conducted to begin with—redundant experiments, tests that prove nothing or give people a false sense of security. PETA likes to use the drug thalidomide, which was animal tested, though researchers defend that by saying that not enough animals were tested.
A more objective source, a science writer named Deborah Blum, won a Pulitzer prize in 1992 for a series of newspaper articles that inspired her new book The Monkey Wars. She talks a good deal about how primate testing can create new viruses and cause epidemics or other hazards to human health. According to Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, the suburbs of Washington, D.C., just experienced a near-miss.
But, that’s me just wading into the issue, entering at the point where I feel most comfortable. We would rather hack away at stuff that’s in everybody’s best interest to let go of first rather than confront our own self-interests.
Pekar: By “we,” who do you mean?
Brabner: Mark. Me. But, on the other hand, who’s the new vegetarian in the house, ever since I told you I wouldn’t let you watch any of those animal-testing videos?
Pekar: Well, I don’t want animal testing, and I’m not uncomfortable saying that.
Brabner: But, we’ve never looked to see if any of the drugs you took during chemo were developed through animal testing. Because we’re afraid of what we would find even though we had no choice. Meanwhile, Mark’s in line for clinical trials. He wants very much for a new drug to be tested on him.
Ottaviani: Do you see any polarizing issues on the horizon, ones that will clearly divide the pro-testing/anti-testing community? For instance, I would’ve thought that AIDS might’ve done it.
Brabner: Remember, this is still stuff I’m learning about. The world is running out of excuses. Animals that think, feel and communicate still suffer because most people are convinced that’s necessary, even when they understand that pain, captivity and murder are wrong. Who else could we test? Only terrible people? Someone in jail? Well, I worked with people in prison for nine years. I know about coercion. I know who can and can’t give informed consent. On the street, I’ve seen people sell blood.
Years ago, my sister dated this anorexic punk with a blue mohawk and a bad attitude who got paid as a test subject. He would just sit in a chair all day while they shot him up and now he’s even more f—ed up than he was before.
Do we use people in comas they’re not going to return from, people who are brain dead? Why don’t more people list themselves as organ donors? Every day, healthy people die suddenly. Why pursue an entire line of experiments that end with killing a baboon for a heart transplant?
Ottaviani: Did experimental drugs figure into Our Cancer Year?
Brabner: Harvey’s doctor was interviewed about the book in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute where she was “outed” as Dr. Ruth Streeter. We called her “Dr. Rhodes.” She told the writer Harvey was treated before they started using a drug that would have done a lot to minimize the suffering he experienced during immunosuppression, when he was blistered all over and trying to sleep on the palms of his hands and on his knees.
He felt so bad, he wanted to die and would have swallowed anything on the chance that it might help. But, it’s usually the people who face worse odds than Harvey did who go right into clinical trials for cancer.
Getting into clinical trials can be competitive. Mark’s still waiting. A lot of times, that has to do with manufacturing costs or legal costs. And then there’s how important we think people like AIDS patients are.
In Our Cancer Year we have two queer (and nameless) friends who sort of turned their apartment into a shelter for AIDS patients. In the early ’80s, they organized a bunch of gay potheads and med students who made trips in and out of the country through Mexico, smuggling in drugs patients couldn’t get here until much later, when it became clear AIDS wasn’t just a “gay” disease.
I can’t sit here and say that Harvey’s alive because this rat died, or . . . [laughter] The real reason that Harvey’s alive is because we’re educated people with access to good health care. We know how to ask questions, when to get help, and how to follow instructions. We had very good health insurance because Harvey is a VA hospital file clerk. Everything, except for the costs of the visiting nurse that were picked up by Harvey’s brother, cost us only a couple hundred dollars each year because our benefits made all doctor visits free.
Steve Lieber: So you didn’t have a crippling deductible or anything attached to all this?
Brabner: No. The crippling deductible is the stub on his paycheck. It’s what they take out or underpay him. Harvey’s been earning the second-lowest government pay rate for, like, 30 years, Harv?
Pekar: Uh, it’ll be 30 years at the end of January.
Brabner: The big thing is that we knew we had to take that lump in his groin seriously. When we talked to doctors, we believed that we were entitled to treatment. And when you think you’re entitled to good treatment, then you fight for it. You know, a lot of other patients are just paralyzed with fear or not sure what to do. Sometimes it’s a class thing. An education thing.
Some people think doctors are better than they are. I mean, to Harvey doctors are f— -ups who lose the file charts he’s paid to find and shelve [laughter].
Lieber: How difficult was it to get past that doctor aura and summon up what it takes to fight with them?
Pekar: I work with them, and, I mean, I don’t say I have contempt for them or anything like that. But there are varying levels of competence and varying levels of humanity, obviously.
Brabner: And obviously negotiation was much better than combat. I mean, you can’t negotiate with some people, like the nurse who just stepped right over us when Harvey was on the floor, crying and screaming. But, his oncologist was always open to any ideas about what might make things better. And she was willing to admit when she made mistakes and learn from us. That’s why we trusted her.
She used to tell patients like Harvey that his particular combination of drugs for chemotherapy was “a 12-week treatment.” She now calls it a “12-part treatment” because no one gets through it that fast. It’s too hard on your body. But when Harvey felt he was behind schedule, he panicked. He thought he would never get well.
Ottaviani: Harvey, you’ve done American Splendor since 1976, to a whole lot of acclaim. But both you and Joyce have written quite a lot of straight prose. Did you have to choose or negotiate the medium, or was it obvious that you wanted to tell this story in the comics format, or did you think about straight text?
Pekar: I never did. I don’t think Joyce did either.
Brabner: No, and I wasn’t even going to be involved with this until Harvey began working on it.
Pekar: No, I mean I look at comics as my main medium, and I don’t look at various art forms as being ranked in a kind of hierarchy. I think comics are as good a medium as any other, and they are particularly interesting to me, and I never considered using any other medium.
Ottaviani: You do write in other media. You write essays, and . . .
Pekar: Yeah, I write essays, and I write a lot of music criticism, and I write a lot of book reviews.
Ottaviani: When did you decide to do the book?
Pekar: Myself, I figured if I got through it I was going to do it. I mean, I’m writing a continuing autobiography.
Ottaviani: How different did the book become once Joyce got involved?
Pekar: I initially thought I would write Our Cancer Year by myself, but I wanted to include Joyce’s point of view. The result wound up being richer than it would’ve been if I’d done it alone.
Brabner: He had a lot of memory loss because of the medication and the stress.
Pekar: So I asked her about it and she suggested that she write part of it, and . . .
Brabner: It wasn’t quite that polite [laughter]. It was like, “Look, I’m not writing this for you so you can put it in your book.”
Pekar: But you have to admit I capitulated in a hurry.
Brabner: Yeah. Yeah . . .
Pekar: Discretion being the better part of valor . . .
Brabner: We only did that once before, and it was again with a story I didn’t want him to get away with owning completely, the peculiar story of how we met and got married. We decided to get married the day we met. On our second date, we bought rings, and the third was when we tied the knot.
Ottaviani: I remember that panel! You’re just about to meet each other and you’ve got all these R. Crumb and Gerry Shamray, and . . . [laughter]
Brabner: Yeah, I didn’t know if he would turn out to be this hairy, sweating, stinking Crumb thing or Shamray’s Marlon Brandoesque guy with a high forehead. Which I later discovered was a receding hairline.
The idea of opening Our Cancer Year up to what was going on the rest of the year—the Persian Gulf war, the kids I was working with, the comic book that I didn’t do—that was something that I pushed in to the mix. Harvey agreed very quickly, but other people attacked that. It started when an artist—not Frank Stack—looked at the script and said, “It’s a shame more girls don’t read comics, Harvey. This is a girl book.” And there were snide comments about “Joyce’s third-world politics” tainting Harvey’s magnum opus.
Pekar: Well, they’re my politics, too, and I wanted the book to be multi-themed. Initially I guess, I wanted to filter Joyce’s experiences through me. That’s how I thought I’d write it because I’ve written stuff like that before, you know, where I would interview people or talk to people and say, “How did you feel about this? How did you feel about that?”
Brabner: You’ve got to remember the nature of what went on with Harvey’s illness. A lot of the same stuff kept happening over and over again. Days blurred together. And Harvey’s already done these odes to boredom, about just being eroded by dailiness. Whereas I was mobile, I was able to walk, to go places, to react.
I think our publisher expected some kind of to-the-bone survival story, where Harvey rips the scab off cancer to expose the pain beneath. And these days, the honest-to-God truth is that while cancer is a pretty horrible experience, and for most people the worst thing that could happen to you, it’s not the worst thing that happens to other people. Like, we never would’ve for a minute traded places with Dana while she waited for Scuds to fall, with her gas mask on. Or what Khim and Saroeum experienced under the Khmer Rouge.
Pekar: What’s the worst thing that could happen to you, though? Cancer can kill you. So, I think most people would think that.
Brabner: Harvey’s got one more year to go until he’s pronounced “cured.” Then his chances of having cancer will be the same as everyone else. Trouble is, one out of three people today will die of cancer.
Ottaviani: It’s not very heartening to move it back to one in three.
Brabner: Yeah, he’s working his way up to those odds.
Pekar: I don’t want to depress you, Jim.
Ottaviani:: Since you just mentioned Frank Stack, that leads to one of my next questions. How did it come about that you chose him? I don’t think R. Crumb would have been appropriate for this, but he’s one of the many artists I’ve admired who have worked with you. I’m thinking of Sue Cavey, Sean Carroll and Val Mayerik, for instance. When I first heard you were going to do what became Our Cancer Year, the first name that came to mind was Gerry Shamray, for his really realistic style. But Steve has pointed out to me that this probably would have taken a lot of the humanity out of it.
Pekar: Well, I’ll tell you, Frank Stack was the best choice I could have made. He was considering a sabbatical and very much wanted to do something like this.
Brabner: Frank is a fantastic artist who doesn’t get a lot of credit.
Pekar: As a matter of fact, Robert Crumb told me that Frank was the best possible choice that we could have made. He and Pete Poplaski, I guess, were both talking about how good Frank is at sustaining visual interest. Jim Woodring said the same thing in a letter to us; they both really raved about his work.
Frank brings an intelligence, his own life experience to the book. Writing about sexuality, the loss of sexuality, losing body hair to chemotherapy . . . I used a myth. And Frank could draw that without making it look like some sword-and-sorcerer thing. He’s not someone who learned anatomy from Steve Ditko.
Brabner: The guy can do anything, detailed photorealism or something impressionistic. He can use humor.
Ottaviani: Talking to Frank, we started by discussing the cover, which I really liked for a number of reasons. Though vibrant, it subtly introduces the emphasis on the daily struggles, personalities, and setting—the house, the yellow ribbon—of the book. He said that it’s basically a pastel rough of what he intended to do over in, say, acrylics if you liked it. Apparently you liked it so much as is that he merely tightened up the figures a bit and went with it. Did you have something in mind before you saw Frank’s cover? Why did this one strike you so?
Pekar: Joyce wrote and sketched out the cover. It was her idea, her concept.
Brabner: And we cheated a bit, because the trees our neighbors tied yellow ribbons around are actually a few feet outside the frame. This is the first we’ve heard about it being a rough Frank intended to do over but, if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for us.
The only thing I’d change about the cover would be to indicate on the back what Our Cancer Year is about. I argued unsuccessfully with our publisher about tagging it as “health/autobiography” but we ended up in the graphic novels/sci-fi and humor ghetto again.
Pekar: I like it fine.
Brabner: He was comfortable for us to work with. He took a lot of pains, listened to ideas and made really intelligent choices. He paid attention to detail and worked with the reference materials we gave him.
Ottaviani: Did you take a lot of videotape while this was going on?
Pekar: No. Joyce had videos of some of the stuff that went on out of the country. Joe Sacco also helped with pictures from Palestine. Frank came and stayed with us for a while and we took over the hospital’s chemo ward (with the assistance of our oncologist) late at night and staged a lot of shots.
Brabner: That wasn’t too easy on us. They strapped Harvey into a chemo chair again and “hooked” him up to an IV. He started to get real green. Both our tempers were going. It was post-traumatic stress and Frank understood that. He’s got a light touch, and knew when to make us laugh and when to step back.
Pekar: Well, you know he’s been an art professor at the University of Missouri for many years. He used to be chairman of the department and has got an awful lot of, not only knowledge and intelligence, but talent and technical skill. When he wants to, he can draw real, real detailed photographically accurate portraits and landscapes.
His etchings, for instance, are great. But, on the other hand, his style’s influenced by Impressionism, where you very often substitute texture for line. And so, his drawing in some ways is pretty economical and spare. And I think—you can correct me if I’m wrong—Steve pointed out how good he is at highlighting essential things. That’s one of the things he did real well.
Lieber: Frank handled different sequences in very different manners. How much direction did you give him on the really subjective sequences?
Pekar: Not a lot. I’ve worked with Frank long enough to realize that he’s really a consummate artist. I’m sure that we included some instructions to him, about what people looked like and stuff like that, and what settings were like. And he came to Cleveland and we actually showed him the stuff so that he had an idea . . . But as far as what style of drawing . . . You’ll notice that he would draw more or less detailed panels. That was up to him.
Ottaviani: In the opening of Chapter 7 he goes from very realistic to very expressionistic from one panel to another, and it’s really striking.
Pekar: Yeah. There’s an awful lot of meat in that. A lot of stuff he does is real subtle, at least for somebody that’s not familiar with that kind of work. And unfortunately an awful lot of comic book fans aren’t. Their idea of a really great artist is a guy like Frank Frazetta, drawing people who have big muscles, showing lots of detail.
Ottaviani: You were speaking of memory loss earlier. There are no page numbers in the book, which makes it hard to refer or go back to a certain specific spot. Which is how memory, or at least my memory, works—you can’t just go right back and get a specific incident without getting other things close to and associated with it. Did you do this on purpose?
Pekar: No, Frank wrote page numbers on the pages. Our publisher didn’t use them. So, the first printing was all screwed up. Frank not only wrote the page numbers down, he said “page such and such facing page such and such.” But you know, whatever works I’ll take credit for [laughter].
Lieber: I was really impressed at the range of moods he was able to create with light.And also without overloading the reader. I thought if every picture was brought to a full level of rendering, the whole thing would be a visually exhausting experience.
When we’re interviewed about the book, Harvey gets the most ink because he was the patient. Then me, because I’m the other “real” person and people can identify with us. Frank’s often overlooked. Admittedly his research and development on the project wasn’t as arduous as ours [laughter], but he deserves more attention.
Brabner: When we started shaping the script, once we realized we were working with Frank we began to, in some ways, write for Frank. Stuff that we knew he could handle that other artists couldn’t. I always tell people that Our Cancer Year is more a book about marriage, not cancer. As three married people working together, I’m not going to say quite that it’s a “more mature” work, but . . .
Ottaviani: Do you read any of the current crop of writer/artists who do slice-of-life work?
Pekar: Yeah, any comics people send us.
Brabner: I like Mary Fleener’s stuff an awful lot. I always have. And another person I consider “current crop” who is getting overlooked is Colin Upton.I think his insomnia story was terrific. He’s got a great sense of humor. He knows history, confronts sexism and I get pretty angry because people like him or Joe Sacco can’t really make a living off of what they’re doing.
Pekar: Yeah, I get pretty angry when I think I can’t make a living off of it too. You know, I like a lot of the stuff I’ve seen by guys like Joe Matt, and Chester [Brown], and a lot of people. I like Ed Brubaker’s work . . .
Brabner: Generally speaking, though, we don’t buy comics. We only read what people give us. Some of that’s because we do so much reading anyway and a lot of books and records come into this house every week. But also, it’s just that we don’t really think to go into a comic book store for something to read. For me it gets back to a decision I made when I was 7. I realized that with 20 cents I could either buy two comics or get down to our library and back on the bus. And the Oz books were at the library . . .
Pekar: We got an advance copy of Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. It’s real good. I really haven’t had time to read the entire thing because we went on a signing tour, you know, so we were out of town and I had a lot of work back up on me. I do a real lot of freelance writing. I’m just starting to get caught up.
Brabner: The person whose work I miss the most would be Dori Seda. I think women pull off autobiographical comics much better than a lot of male writers do. Maybe because they’re writing about stuff that’s interesting to me. I once half-seriously said I think that because women’s comics aren’t published as often, they spend a lot more time per panel. Someone like Leslie Sternbergh, all that detail!
It really bothers me when good people are not even acknowledged by the so-called independent-comics press and have to worry, “Can I afford to keep doing this? Can I afford to print my own stuff?” That makes me damn mad.
Ottaviani: This may be an economic artifact, but almost all these biographical/slice-of-life work has been in black and white. Given your druthers, would you rather work in color?
Pekar: No.
Brabner: I’ve worked in color. It influences storytelling, and I prefer to use color for shorter stories. I would always prefer to publish a longer book in black and white rather than spend the money on color processing.
Ottaviani: Why do you think self-publishing is good in comics, but perceived as bad in the prose, book-publishing industry? I mean, you probably don’t give much thought to, or even receive, prose from the vanity presses. Is it perhaps the presence of ads for the rest of the line of books, making your work shill for other books, all in some house style of questionable artistic merit?
Pekar: Self-published comics, especially those viewed as artistically successful, are welcomed by some as striking a blow against the comic-book oligopoly of Marvel and DC. Plus, they’re frequently alternative comics and appeal to alternative comic fans who have no use for superhero comics. By contrast there are more viable small-press “prose” publishers who don’t really provide an alternative to genre work.
Brabner: Are vanity publishers even still around, now that we have desktop publishing and paperless publishing on the Internet? The lady who paid someone to publish memoirs of her poodle can now do the job herself. Your “prose, book-publishing industry” doesn’t include art books, poetry chap books, etc., which are numbered and often prized because of their small print runs and where most self-published comics fit in.
I respect people who put their own money down and self-publish, because it means they respect their own work, they’ve crossed over past self-doubt, and they’re working instead of watching. That matters to me.
Labeling certain comics “alternative” implies some other kind of art and writing sets all standards. It’s also apologetic. People who say they read “alternative” comix-with-an-X are ashamed to be caught looking.
Lieber: I have a question about the structure of Our Cancer Year: Obviously the order in which things happened makes a lot of the decisions for you. But how much went into outlining things and deciding what goes in, what gets left out?
Brabner: Want me to take that one, Harv?
Pekar: Yeah, go ahead and take it.
Brabner: I get to explain this because it’s something I sort of invented when we got stuck. OK, Harvey writes all of his scripts as storyboards on photocopy paper that he divides into six squares. He lays the stuff out with little stick figures, but he also includes things like reflective pauses or reaction shots and stuff—he sort of choreographs. I write pretty conventional typed scripts.
Pekar: This wasn’t difficult to write because it was painful. It was difficult to write because it was a large project and I had to work with somebody else on it. Just getting the structure of it together, and dealing with Joyce, and her dealing with me. It wasn’t easy, and that’s what caused the most difficulty for me, not the writing about the painful experience.
Brabner: We had problems writing about events we experienced together but interpreted very differently. Harvey had memory loss because of all the drugs and radiation. We weren’t sure how to deal with that. And I think it was really hard to take all this in while still figuring out how to work together.
For instance, I didn’t have any idea what happened to him the night he thought he was dying, when he thought the clock was running backwards until I saw what Harvey wrote. He must have been having lots of little blackouts while looking at the dial—it’s digital. I thought maybe he took an overdose or something and that’s what set me off. I began punching him.
It was also very uncomfortable looking backwards when learning to live post-cancer meant we really should have been putting that stuff behind us, instead of ripping it apart for dramatic content. So, when it got difficult I got a deck of index cards and we began to go in any direction, after any kind of a topic or question that came up. We would prompt each other: “What happened the first day you had radiation?” “What happened when you talked to your cousin?” “Tell me about your dreams.”
Each card contained a sort of a beat: “Harvey’s buddy came over/and tried to tell Joyce how to take care of me/so Joyce got angry/she explained everything/she told him to go out and get some dope because she heard that helps with nausea and pain/Harvey couldn’t figure out how to use a bong.”
It was kind of like film, because a lot of movies are shot out of sequence. You just do all the scenes at one location. Then move to another set. Instead of film, we had cards we could put on the floor, like putting together a puzzle and there you’d see correspondences. Obviously it created a chronology, but there are different times when things are linked by theme. I guess the most obvious one is the baking soda and water—something that Harvey needed in his body at certain times to prepare him for chemotherapy. The same stuff Dana was told would save her if Saddam used poison gas and she was scared because all the kids knew that was bullshit although everyone had boxes of the stuff, just in case.
With the cards, something we could both pick up and move around, we had a way to put together an outline, then fleshed out into scenarios . . .
Ottaviani: Did each card became a panel?
Brabner: No, they were “beats”: action or purpose. I’m not even sure people doing theater even say this anymore, I think it’s Stanislavski. Or Viola Spolin.
It turned out that my skill was in assembling and stitching things together, collecting and finding commonality. I can link. But Harvey’s the one who knows when to economize and he’s got a much better ear for dialogue than I have. I may have remembered more things or said, “This belongs with this,” but Harvey knows when to stop and when to start. Harvey knows when enough is enough.
Plus, there were things that happened to me that he had nothing to do with and vice versa. That’s where we wrote independently. It’s pretty clear in most of the book who wrote what, although from time to time I’ll pick up a paper and read about some brilliant “Pekaresque” this, that or the other and say, “Hey, I wrote that!” [laughter]
I’ll be able to pawn off all sorts of unpublished Pekar when you’re dead, hon.
Pekar: No doubt. You’re welcome to it.
Lieber: One of the things I really liked about it was the way things would interweave between the objective stuff—the two of you together at the doctor—to the much more subjective materials. We referred before to your Scottish legends part as an instance of Frank Stack not making it into sword and sorcery. Or the really nightmarish sequence where Harvey’s losing his sense of time. I imagined the placement of a lot of that was just trying to figure out where the rhythm of the story wanted it.
Brabner: Yeah. We paid attention to how we found ourselves telling other people about what happened. Which is kind of how Harvey started doingAmerican Splendor. He started out as kind of a street-corner comedian and would tell the same story over and over again, like the Harvey Pekar name story.
Most of my work is about making other people’s voices heard. So, I pay attention to when I hear them the first time. Then I watch other listeners. Work-in-progress readings of Our Cancer Year made most people nervous because of all the different story threads: “Where’s this going?” “What’s with these kids?” They drop off the page, you know, when we’re at our most self-centered. And then they show back up again. But, I think in the end it more or less all worked although it’s not all tied in a nice, neat knot.
Ottaviani: Well you do get a sense of closure with the end, because it has brought the two stories together there at the waterfall.
Brabner: Yeah, but there were arguments about where to end this, because Harvey had a whole different ending that he wanted to do.
Pekar: I didn’t want a whole different ending in terms of where to cut it off. I always wanted to cut it off, to end it, with the kids. But I’m much more pessimistic than Joyce. So, I forget exactly how, but that ending was like a compromise. I wanted to end it by just, you know, just me going out to door to work while the same old problems hit me.
Brabner: Yeah, and I said, “You’ve done that.” My take was that all of the kids had a really rough year, like us, but we were already friends who could talk to each other. Everyone knew each other except Ju and Harvey. They kind of stuck together, a little bit outside. She would help him with the stairs. They would talk.
One day I came home and all the other kids were at the beach while Harvey and Ju had this look on their faces. I knew they had done something, like two guilty little kids. It turned out that Harvey had taken the car and driven Ju out to Chagrin Falls.
Ju told me all about it. She was radiant while Harvey downplayed it, of course. But, I could tell they both had a great time and that he was finally able to think about someone besides himself. That meant he was getting well.
Our instructions to Frank were that it not be Victoria Falls; it’s a little bitty waterfall but big and important to Ju, because she doesn’t get out much. It was special because Harvey could be like her older brother or father that day. Both were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Ju saw that happen. It’s real important to Cambodian kids when an adult pays attention to them, anyway, because they honor their elders. Adult friendship is considered a really wonderful thing.
But Chagrin Falls isn’t some place where you’d want to sit and meditate. It really is just this dinky waterfall next to a bookstore and a popcorn and ice-cream shop. So we told Frank to make the passersby look ordinary, fat, whatever, let’s have a dog and some dog shit and it’ll be OK [laughter]. The dog shit was my idea [laughter]. Because we knew Frank did good dog shit.
Anyway, it gets down to what you choose to remember. Harvey, then, was much more depressed and in pain than he is now.
Pekar: Well, yeah, we discussed the ending, this is the conclusion we came to, and I think we’re both pretty happy.
Brabner: It’s who we are. I still kind of keep pulling up his spirits because cancer really does a number on your emotions. Harvey’s been profoundly depressed and sometimes really seriously disoriented—mentally ill, as a result of drugs, stress, trauma and everything else. He really did not know at one point if he was a “real person” or a character in a book.
Ottaviani: This brings to mind a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, that ties back into this “are you a person or a character?” question, and also to the autobio comic-book creators. To paraphrase, he said, “Don’t be a writer. Be something, then write.” And a lot autobio folks seem to write about the “writer/artist of autobio comic books” life. It seems that you’ve kept it pretty clear that you’re somebody who works at the VA. Do you consider yourself a writer who works at the VA, or a VA staffer who writes? This conversation comes up in one of the previous stories.
Pekar: Issue #9, yeah . . . I guess a lot of it has to do with what other people consider you, maybe. You just go out and you do things and you’re judged by people. For most of the time that I’ve been writing comics my work hasn’t been very well known, especially by people in Cleveland. I was known to thousands of people, but that was as a file clerk at the VA. We have a real big hospital here—a teaching hospital which is tied in with Case Western Reserve medical school. It has hundreds of beds and everything like that. I spend eight hours a day working there, interacting with all these patients that came in because my job was to get their charts and very often the chart would be lost and I’d have to go and talk to them, and that way I got to know a lot of them. So, you know, I got really well known to a lot of people, like maybe the guy who sells peanuts next to the biggest building in town does or something. Anyway, I was sort of like a landmark figure there. So I guess I did for a really long time, and maybe still do, think of myself as a file clerk.
Brabner: We’ve been on tour and the further away we are from Cleveland, the bigger the audience is, more or less. In Minneapolis we met more than 100 people. In Oberlin, Ohio, maybe 45. At Bookseller’s in Shaker Square, which is next to Cleveland Heights, where we live: 20. By the time we get up to our own door and inside the house, even we’ve forgotten that we’re writers.
Pekar: Well, you know, I make the majority of my income as a file clerk.
Brabner: At the same time, you know what I thought when I married him. I still say the same the thing. “Why do you tell everybody you don’t make your living as a writer? I married a writer.”
The other really odd thing about being comic-book characters is that we keep meeting these people who know a lot more about us than most of our relatives and neighbors. People have very definite ideas about what we must be like. But, if they’ve missed a couple issues . . . [laughter] A reporter from Detroit came to interview us. He looked up and said, “Inky!” when this little black cat runs into the room. But Inky died in an issue he hasn’t read yet. That’s a new little black cat—and a much nicer one, too!
Or they have the idea that Harvey’s going to be a meat-and-potatoes, working-class kinda guy they’re going to take down to a bar and drink some beer with. They got “working-class” right, but they forgot he’s a middle-age Jew . . . and they don’t know he isn’t eating meat any more. Or Spaghetti-O’s.
Weird things happen when people come here looking for “authentic America.” Remember in A Step Out of the Nest [published by Dark Horse Comics]? Good Morning America wanted Harvey to be a guest host on a show about working-class heroes . . . until they actually read some American Splendor.
Pekar: It didn’t happen. They said my stuff was “too dark” and “too real.”
Brabner: They told us it’s their job to get America up and off to work with a smile on their face but, if people read Harvey’s stuff, they might not want to get out of bed [laughter] . . .
Pekar: I didn’t want to be responsible for bringing the economy to a grinding halt.
Lieber: I’d like to go back a bit further and ask more about the involved peoples’ reactions. Essentially, for the past 17 years we’ve been getting a look at Harvey’s diary. For instance, have the other characters in Our Cancer Year seen the work?
Pekar: Sure. We’ve given them copies. A lot of them already knew they were going to be in it.
Ottaviani: Even “Nurse Ratched”?
Pekar: No. Not her. Not the people we didn’t like. The people we liked, which were a lot of people, knew about it and we gave copies of it to them.
Brabner: I went over the script with most of the kids. Dana insisted that we not show her the book until it was published. She said, “It’s not my book. It’s the way you saw it. Put down anything you want and spell my name right.”
“Uri” and “Zamir” are pseudonyms. They’ve grown up a lot since I first met them, but telling their stories to reporters was not healthy for them four years ago and I’m not so sure they really need to know what’s in an obscure little book published in English, seven time zones away. “Uri” just e-mailed me about visiting us next month. If he makes it over here, we’ll talk.
Ottaviani: How is Our Cancer Year relevant? How would you like people’s behavior to change after having read it? How did it change yours?
Pekar: Well, I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things, and often because few or no people have written about them before. I hope that in reading them people can identify with the character and in some cases take comfort from what I write or know that maybe they’re not the only person in the world that’s had this experience, so they shouldn’t feel so weird about it or something.
As far as Our Cancer Year goes, I guess I wanted to show people, among other things, that you don’t have to be a hero to get through cancer. You can be a craven coward and get through. You have to stay on your medication and take your treatments, that’s all. A lot of cancer stories that people have written have made themselves out to look real heroic and stuff . . .
Brabner: Patients are either role models of courage who die, teaching us “left behinds” the meaning of love, or they’re somehow transformed and today make every moment count.
I was nervous about showing the book to cancer patients in the beginning because we had it really easy compared to a lot of people, or so we thought . . .
We sent preview copies of the book out to people we didn’t know, cancer patients and cancer professionals. Some survivors found Our Cancer Year “too real” and said we brought back bad memories. At the same time, they called us honest. They liked that. We also found out, and this really surprised me, that a lot of cancer patients are angry about always being lectured about positive thinking. They say the world doesn’t want to see pain. In cancer movies, your skin doesn’t turn orange. You still have a neck, eyebrows and eyelashes. When your hair falls out, your skull is beautifully smooth and symmetrical. Maybe your cheeks appear a bit hollow but no ribs stick out. You don’t have sores all over your body. You never see puke, although you hear a few off-camera coughs.
Lieber: The Ali McGraw syndrome: as you get sicker you get more beautiful.
Brabner: Marshall Kragen, of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, said using comics made it uniquely possible for people to really see what cancer can do to your body. We showed something readers can’t infer from text and don’t see in movies or on television. You see a healthy Harvey, and then you see him wasting away.
Plus you also see other ugly stuff. You see that I’m not a warm, totally supportive, loving wife all the time. I get really burned-out and abuse him. I assume I can do more than I really can and end up in pretty bad shape. Movies and “inspirational” books don’t show that. We don’t see the bitching, the moaning, the fighting, the wrong turns, the mistakes that people make during something like this, only noble choices and maybe one long, hot-tempered speech, because that’s dramatic, but no day-to-day whining.
Some of Our Cancer Year is instructional. If readers didn’t know it before, they know now you can pull your files off someone’s desk and make doctors explain stuff to you. You can confront doctors. You can take the sides of a hospital bed down and climb in next to each other. You can do that. And people know now that non-Hodgkins lymphoma is treatable, especially if it’s caught early. There are people out there, in the middle of treatment, who want to know “If I’m doing so well, how come I don’t feel better?” And there are bystanders, friends or family members who want to know that, too. So, there’s a reason we called it Our Cancer Year. That lets people know that it’s a fixed period of time. There is an ending in sight. We didn’t want to tell readers, “Step into this hole and keep falling.”
Ottaviani: A while back you mentioned that there had been some major illnesses in both of your families. And your friends talk about AIDS early on in the book. Did you find yourself incorporating some of their experiences into Our Cancer Year? I guess I’m asking whether you fictionalized things.
Pekar: The book is factually accurate except for in some cases we disguise people’s identities by changing their name and/or occupations or appearance. But, for example, I talked about my cousin Norman who died of lymphoma. That’s true.
Brabner: When there are details that can be traced back and hurt somebody, we made changes. We renamed Harvey’s oncologist because, when we went to press, the awful nurse was still working for her. The nurse who posed for Frank as her character is actually a wonderful nurse—and a two-time cancer survivor herself, we found out later.
Ottaviani: In “An Every Day Horror Story,” Harvey, you worried about dealing with serious illness. Did you handle this the way you expected to? I mean, you wrote about it, and that’s one of the ways I would have expected you to handle it, but . . .
Pekar: Yeah, from that throat problem I extrapolated and I figured I was going to really react badly to something more serious, and I did. I didn’t disappoint myself: I fell apart [laughter].
Brabner: For almost all kinds of cancer, it’s like being parachuted into the middle of a war—bam! You don’t have time to get used to the idea. You’re forced to make fast decisions because tumors grow: 2 times 2 is 4; 4 times 4 is 16; 16 times 16 is . . .
Pekar: You’ve got to make a lot of decisions when you’re in shock and the next thing you know, they’re pumping poison into you that can screw up how you think and feel. And every time it can be different chemicals. And your body is changing.
Brabner: I don’t feel like Harvey let me down or anything. But, he made it hard on me when he said he was going to have chemo every week, instead of once a month. Stuff got very bad, fast, and we had no time to get used to that.
What pissed me off were people who said stuff like, “Well, I hear Harvey is sick but he’ll be OK because he has such a strong will to live. He’s tough.” And there’s Harvey crawling up our stairs on all fours because he’s so weak. And he can’t stop crying.
So many people panic when trouble happens. They whisper and disappear real fast. Then there are people you don’t even know who suddenly show up and do seemingly simple things that really count. Like the neighbor who drove us to the hospital when our car battery died.
Pekar: Yeah, Marge Petrone. Marge is wonderful.
Ottaviani: Is there another story “Bringing you up to date” [which appeared in American Splendor #17, which predated Our Cancer Year and gave away the book’s ending: that Pekar survives], or is it time to move on?
Pekar: What I have going for me are some new stories—I don’t know under what title they’re going to be published. Some of ’em deal with the avascular necrosis I developed after I had cancer as a result of the drugs I took during chemotherapy. The prednisone cut off the circulation to my hipbone, part of it died, turned to powder, so I went around limping for two and a half years, and then finally it got so bad that I had a hip replacement. So some of the stories will at least make reference to that. I’ve written them, actually, and they’re in the hands of the artists. I thought that since the cancer-year book has been so well received that Joyce, instead of writing a story with me, should just write one or two stories, whatever she feels is appropriate . . .
Brabner: I’m haggling with him over the page rate [laughter].
Pekar: . . . from her point of view.
Brabner: The story I think I want to write is sort of an “Oh, excuse me, I forgot you’re able to take care of yourself now” story. About relinquishing all of this decision making. Maybe that really belonged in Harvey’s story “Inky Dies” [from American Splendor #17]. Our cat was very old and very sick. I had to make another decision having to do with doctors, living and dying.
People said, “You’ve been through so much. Even though Inky is not in any pain at this minute, you should have him put to sleep now rather than cause yourself the agony of watching and waiting.” But I couldn’t do that and kept asking, “Can you give me stuff so I can euthanise him myself the moment he starts to hurt?” That was against the law, I think. So, I just kept watching him, which was too much like watching Harvey. This went on for weeks.
Inky was finally put to sleep at the animal hospital, while I held him. (Harvey was too upset to go in.) Driving home, I told Harvey to put the seat back because I felt sick. I threw up 17 times that night. I don’t know why I counted all the times, just that it was like throwing up the cancer, the anger, the fear, the decision making, all that shit. So I think I have to write something a little more like that, like a delayed-stress syndrome.
Ottaviani: Who do you see showing up at your signings? Comic-book fans? People who’ve written you in the past, talked to you before?
Pekar: Yeah, people who’ve written me in the past show up. I don’t have a large percentage of comic-book fans. The people who like my work most are readers of novels and short stories. There are also people, in this instance, who’ve had experience with cancer in one way or another, including doctors and nurses. Also patients and people who’ve had friends with cancer, or relatives of people who’ve had cancer.
There aren’t too many people who like mainstream comics interested in my work. And that’s to be expected. It’s just like assuming that just because a person likes one type of prose book that he’s going to like all types of prose books. There’s a variety of prose that you can write, and there also can be a vast variety of comic books you can write. Any subject you feel like writing about. It’s unfortunate that people haven’t availed themselves of the opportunities that comics offer.
Ottaviani:Have people approached you for new projects on the basis of this book? Artists, for instance?
Pekar: Do you mean have they been awakened to my work as a result of this book? No, most of the people that I’ve dealt with were familiar with my work. But that’s not to say . . . The most intriguing proposal that came to me going around doing book signings was that a woman who painted murals on walls suggested that maybe I write something for her that she could do a mural of. But even in her case she knew my earlier work.
Lieber: This is more a question that applies to your whole body of work: There’s a lot of places, particularly in Our Cancer Year, that feel like pure literary moments. The part where you lost your wedding ring, for instance. Reading a novel you’d immediately look at that as an important symbolic moment in the story. Do you find your brain double-tracking at times like that—looking at your life for symbolism or reading your life like the book?
Pekar: I don’t know. Yeah, I guess I’m conscious of what I’m doing, but . . . I don’t know that you specifically asked this, but the primary influences on me have been fiction writers. I don’t know how much fiction is contained in certain novels. Having written what I’ve written I look at novels that I read and wonder if the novels aren’t really just true accounts of things with the names changed. For example, if I’d written all these stories about a character and named him something besides Harvey Pekar, I wonder if maybe there wouldn’t be some people that didn’t realize that I was a real person. Especially if I didn’t give out details of my life and they didn’t know anything about me.
In terms of using symbolism, I don’t use it a lot. I use it occasionally, but I don’t try to use it very much—not consciously anyway. There have been a few occasions when I have done it deliberately, though.
Lieber: I’m thinking of the story with the bat trapped in the room [from American Splendor #16].
Pekar: That’s right. There was one whole story that was like an allegory that I wrote in my sixth book about junk shopping, about going to a rummage sale in a church and I found a whole lot of objects at the sale that most people would’ve thought of as garbage, and I found some very useful things there. It’s sort of like, you know, look at your own life. You may be underrating the richness of it, the interest that people might have in it. It goes along with my notion that every life is the subject of a potentially great novel.
Ottaviani: Having lived it, then written about it, Our Cancer Year is another step removed because you had Frank Stack interpret it. Which part of the book works best for you, now that you’ve read it?
Pekar: I can’t speak for Joyce, but in terms of what I wrote, I guess the part I’m proudest of is probably the sequence where I’m so weakened that I collapse at home and then I’m brought to the hospital, stay in the hospital a couple days, and then have the hallucinatory experience, and then the next day. That would probably be my own favorite part of the book. That’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done.
Brabner: I like tying things together, like the business with the baking soda and water. Or how Harvey’s wedding ring was too big for my finger then, later, too big for him and losing it and finding it. The part where the new scar on Harvey’s forehead nearly matches the scar his brother has when they see each other again, after so many years. Another part of tying things together was blending voices and deciding whose narration is heard: “Joyce Now?” “Harvey Then?” “Us-in-Agreement Today?” “Third Person Omniscient?” “Fourth Person Confused?” What’s best about the book is not having to write “In Memory of” on the first page. Everyone made it.