RIP Writer, Editor, & Activist Joyce Brabner — Another Great Gone From Comics

RIP – Joyce Brabner 1/3/52 -1/8/24…

Many of you won’t know Joyce Brabner’s name, but she was another great comics maker that we’ve lost to cancer at the age of 72.

You may know her as the wife and foil of Harvey Pekar in the ground-breaking and brilliant American Splendor comics – you may well have seen the movie.

I grew to know her reading her and Pekar’s American Splendor. And make no mistake about it, whilst Harvey wrote his incredibly honest autobiographical stories, Brabner was vitally important to the making of this excellent comic. It was her involvement, her promotion of the comic that turned a loss-maker into a profitable comic series, a 1986 collection, and the start of a series of guest slots on Late Night With David Letterman, where Harvey would become famous outside of comics thanks to his funny, eccentric appearances.

Indeed, the most affecting and powerful of all the American Splendor works, My Cancer Year, dealing with Harvey’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, was co-written by Brabner.

But her work in comics went well beyond that. She had a hand in many projects, carving out a particular path in non-fiction comics, in a time when such things were practically non-existent in American comics.

She edited, and wrote for Real War Stories, a comic produced in conjunction the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and Citizen Soldier. Telling true stories of warfare, it married an underground comix sensibility with many big comic book names, and pushed the boundaries of comics of the time, even falling foul of the DOJ and DOD that led to a court case with Brabner successfully defending the authenticity of the comic’s stories.

Perhaps her most well-known work was for Brought to Light, published in 1989 by Eclipse. Featuring two radically different tales, one by Brabner and Tom Yeates, the other by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, Brought to Light was an investigation into CIA involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. It was a huge deal at the time, and a highly controversial book, yet Brabner, as she always seemed to, took it on and made it a success.

Pekar passed away in 2010, soon after being diagnosed with cancer a third time.

Brabner would go on to produce, edit, write, publish, and generally be involved with many more comics over the years, winning a Harvey Award, Inkpot Award, and Lambda Literary Award along the way. One of her later works that is well worth a look is 2014’s Second Avenue Caper: When Goodfellas, Divas, and Dealers Plotted Against the Plague, about the New York residents at the frontline of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s…

So, perhaps not a huge comics name, but a hugely important piece of a certain part of comics history and someone who’ll be much missed.

For a wonderful, career-spanning interview, go and read this interview over at Hyperallergic, from which this perfect image to end on…