Joyce Brabner, you are missed.
Joyce Brabner passed this week, one of the most important progenitors of rethinking comics and a very influential person in my personal life for decades.
I watched her struggle for name recognition despite innumerable accomplishments of her own, seemingly because she didn’t take the famous surname of her husband, Harvey Pekar. I cannot tell you how many times I watched her ask “Are you familiar with me?” in a clarifying sense. Indeed, in 2009 when she called our office, she didn’t recognize my voice and asked “This is Joyce Brabner, do you know who that is?” We hadn’t talked in a few years so I was rather startled and it took me a minute to return to that time in my life.
Joyce had no shortage of personal accomplishments on her own, dating back to before I was born. She created prison literacy programs and used the power of comic books to impart what was going on in the real world in a way that was less threatening. She collaborated with Alan Moore and did activist work around AIDS, animal rights, and child abuse. If she was here she’d be insisting on clarifying many of the finer points of each of these things before we moved along the presentation. To most people, she is Hope Davis’ version of her in the film American Splendor. Fear not, upon first mention, she will tell you each and everything that she finds inaccurate about that depiction. And it always made me smile.
Later that day, when I said “I spent three hours on the phone with Joyce Brabner,” Elly’s mind exploded. “How do you know Joyce Brabner?” Burying the lede just like Joyce taught me, I said “We go back” and left it at that. To many, when Hollywood makes a film about your family, you enter the limelight in a new way.
I remember in 2001, she called to say “They’re making a movie about us. You should invite us to the Portland Zine Symposium. HBO will pay. We don’t need money. Just an invitation.” I didn’t believe it. Why would HBO make a movie about the most normal family on Earth? But it was great, because after that I really got to see Joyce shine for the next five years. Their family was everywhere, with Joyce in front, negotiating the deal, Harvey standing behind her right shoulder, and young Dani behind Harvey’s right knee. It was almost like a defensive position while Joyce made things happen and made sure that they were treated fairly in all of their dealings. In the classic lineup, Joyce was the one that I related with the most. We have both been painted as difficult because we’re the ones that the logistics hang on and other people rely upon us to be resolute and firm. The last time that I saw them in that era was at the Wisconsin Book Festival in 2006 and then we lost touch for a few years, perhaps because they faded from the limelight. Harvey had struggled a bit on stage that night. We didn’t talk for two years afterwards.
Joyce was of course much more than the movie cartoon character. She was a masterful conversationalist and remains a very important inspiration in so many aspects of my life. She believed sturdily that if someone was in need of help and willing to give 50%, she would give the other 50%. It was a powerful lesson as a young person, in a city that yet felt hopeless, where people were willing to turn the other blind eye to suffering. But I made an effort to ring her up when we were in Cleveland. She taught me to aim higher and be more ambitious.
It didn’t even occur to me until writing this that she is likely where I got the idea not to have kids because I am busy raising other people’s kids. She would have a better way to package that sentiment, but the ideas are the same. And it’s a powerful one that I still carry with me until today. We were peas in a pod in many ways. During one lunch, we both had someone else on-hand to write down notes for us to have later. Once we both noticed this, we realized how funny it was.
When people in the comics industry were dismissive of me, she would call them up and tell them to feature me. And they would listen. She told Publishers Weekly to do a feature about Microcosm in 2011. And they did. She told Diamond Comics to give us another chance. And they did too.
In 2014, she called me as she walked out of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux offices in NYC. “I don’t want to work with them anymore. I want to work with you.” She dedicated her 2014 book, Second Avenue Caper, to me. She sewed and sent me a custom Harvey doll with the Microcosm logo as the chest piece instead of American Splendor. Ten years later it lives in my window, next to my Henry & Glenn dolls. In 2015, she wrote the foreword for my memoir and said very kind things about me publicly at times when I was struggling.
When we hung out in 2019, it was the first time that I really saw Joyce struggling. She had always been so unbelievably unstoppable and powerful. Joyce was younger than my parents, but time was as much a constant as the trials and tribulations and her ability to overcome. She got better, and we resumed our jovial banter.
We published her book, Courage Party, minutes after COVID began in 2020. It is a powerful book for kids about how to navigate life after violence. We were largely reliant upon library sales just as their budgets shriveled up for the pandemic. Courage Party, while not commercially successful, brought us another one of Joyce’s gifts in artist Gerta O. Egy, who we have gone on to do many books, decks, and comics with.
Undaunted by one unsuccessful title, Joyce began proposing new books to us. She wanted to write a history of gangs. And then years later, she called her editor and suggested that the story of gangs wasn’t her story to tell. Joyce was capable of changing her perspective too. She had innumerable children’s books in the wings. She saw her greatest work ahead of her.
When I discovered that Our Cancer Year was out of print, I called her and she was shocked to learn this. I looked it up on Bookscan and I swear that the sales were over 200,000 but when I looked again years later, after NPD turned it into DecisionKey, the numbers dropped 95%. We spent the past few years creating a situation where she would give me power of attorney to leverage all of the out of print books back from the Big Five publishers who had the rights but took the books out of print. She liked the idea that, unlike a lawyer, she didn’t have to pay me. I did it because I cared about the people; the work; the legacy. In many cases, the publishers didn’t know that Harvey Pekar had died in 2010.
I followed up with her a dozen times. For years, we have been on the brink of reissuing quite a few books that are maddeningly out of print and it was “I just need to conquer this cancer first and then we’ll deal with that.”
Most recently she got excited about a deal to publish the first four American Splendor comics in Brazil for the first time. She called me to ask if we’d re-issue the same book in English simultaneously. Of course, I heartily agreed. She said that she would connect me with the other publisher to work out the details. I waited.
I talked to her on the phone a few weeks ago and we made some plans to have lunch in October. She closed our phone call to say “Get all of the time with me now that you can. I don’t have much left. I’m just joking. But not really.” I wasn’t sure how to take it. Joyce had a dark and heavy humor. And like all good humor, it’s couched in reality. It resonates because it’s very real, revealing a greater truth that we cannot say in other language.
I knew something was wrong when Joyce still hadn’t connected me to the Brazilian publisher a week later. She doesn’t leave loose ends, even at the worst of times. She doesn’t leave money on the table. I figured that I’d give her a little more time. Turns out that we didn’t have it.
To the very end, she was worried about setting up each project to benefit other people. She taught me so much about mutual aid as a young person. She built a nation of imitators but there can only be one.
