Joyce Brabner, Comic Book Writer and Wife of Late Harvey Pekar, Dies at 72

Joyce Brabner Credit: Legacy.com/Facebook

Joyce Brabner, the comic book writer who helped, with late husband and fellow author Harvey Pekar, bring everyday Cleveland life to the world, died last week after a lengthy battle with cancer, a Facebook post from her partner of 14 years, Lee Batdorf, confirmed. She was 72.

Long seen as Pekar’s rock and confidante in the comic book world, a relationship which was immortalized in the 2003 film American Splendor, Brabner spent a good deal of the second half of her life carving out her own career in alternative comics, publishing graphic novels tackling everything from the Iran-Contra Affair to the AIDS epidemic.

“She was a human rights individual,” friend and business owner Steve Presser told Scene. “She was a feminist. She was a business supporter. She was a supporter of those who were incarcerated.

“She just loved working with the underdog,” he added. “And I think that has to make it tough on all the different levels.”

With Pekar’s cynical investigation into the self and Brabner’s examination of the world’s illnesses, the two made one of the most influential pairs in the anti-superhero comic book genre in the past century.

Man to Brabner, like her late husband, was more intriguing than Superman.

They “have tenaciously pursued a path dedicated to the truths of the human condition,” writer Stanley Wieter wrote, “contrary to the lurid escapist fantasies that fuel main engines of the comic book industry.”

But despite her successes in the 1990s and aughts, Brabner’s career often took a backseat to the wiles and neurotic character of Pekar, whose American Splendor, a regularly published anthology of Pekar’s life in Cleveland, launched him to national fame and recognition.

Brabner and Pekar in 2009 Credit: Beth Rankin/FlickrCC

Born March 1, 1952, Brabner grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, where she latched onto libraries and comics as a teenager. In her twenties, Brabner divided her time working at a local theater — the Rondo Hatton Center for the Deforming Arts — and teaching creative writing and carpentry in a nearby detention center.

This almost obsessive need to fill her time with creative pursuit is what, eventually, led Brabner to Pekar in the mid-1980s. She had come to co-own a store called Xanadu Comics & Collectibles, and had regularly stocked American Splendor. And one day, as portrayed in the 2003 film, Brabner runs out. She writes Pekar. The two begin a serious but curious correspondence.

In 1985, Pekar invited Brabner to visit him in Cleveland. Both had been married before, so caution played into the invitation. Brabner accepted, and two—now famously—sped up their relationship after a night in Pekar’s apartment in Cleveland Heights.

“Harvey,” Brabner’s character, played by Hope Davis, says in American Splendor scene. “I think we should skip the whole courtship thing and just get married.” They did, in Delaware, about a week later.

Almost immediately, Brabner became a fixture in both Pekar’s life and—naturally—the path of his work. “Harvey’s Latest Crapshoot,” a cover of American Splendor read that year. “His Third Marriage to a Sweetie From Delaware and How His Substandard Dishwashing Strains Their Relationship.”

As is both framed in the movies and comics, Brabner sort of became Pekar’s Sharon Osbourne. She helped secure Pekar’s infamous runs on David Letterman in the late 1980s. When American Splendor‘s returns were mild, she crafted Harvey collectible doll toys to aid the distribution. (It worked.) And Pekar’s first battle against lymphoma was chronicled in 1996’s Our Cancer Year as indefatigable both from his and Brabner’s perspective.

By the early 2000s, after nearly two decades of entertaining propositions from Hollywood to obtain rights to Pekar’s life, Brabner watched as her and her husband’s life in Cleveland Heights was brought to the big screen. The film, which starred Paul Giamatti as Pekar, was a critical success.

But Brabner never really bought into the spoils of fame.

“Celebrity is only good if it gets you your next job and lets you get your buddy hired,” she told Hyperallergic in 2016. (Pekar’s gravestone in Lakeview Cemetery says: “Life is about gigs, women and bein’ creative.”) “Otherwise it just means a bunch of assholes know your name. It doesn’t mean money. Money doesn’t mean power. It doesn’t really mean security.”

Regardless, Brabner held onto a recurring sense of disbelief. “I don’t know how I got to be somebody who people can look up and see a picture of me and my name.”

Both before and after Pekar’s death in 2010, from a third bout of cancer, Brabner worked earnestly to tell the stories of the disenfranchised in her own style. She edited Real War Stories, a collection of Cold War counterpropaganda that riled the U.S. Department of Defense, for four years. In 1989, she dug into the CIA’s involvement with the Iran-Contra Affair with Brought to Light.

In the years after Pekar’s death, Brabner balanced works on New York’s AIDS epidemic and operettas with serious efforts to preserve her late husband’s legacy. She helped curate and actualize a memorial in the Cleveland Heights Lee Road library, where she and Pekar spent loads of time. She worked to publish Pekar’s posthumous works—a biographical take on Cleveland, an adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working.

“I think anybody who met Joyce understood that she was her own person. She had her own agenda—I mean, she supported Harvey,” Suzanne DaGaetano, the owner of Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry and friend to Brabner over the years, told Scene. “But she was not in his shadow.”

By 2016, Brabner, who had won a Lambda Literary Award the year before and was doing comedy shows outside Boston, seemed to be at peace regarding how the world saw her. Both as a feminist and a key living link to Pekar’s ghost.

“’Look, it’s the new millennium, you have to leave the seat down, you have to give the women credit,” she said that year. “If you’re having trouble with this, talk to your wife or girlfriend.”

“It’s part of being the handmaiden to the Great Man,” she said, referring to Pekar. “I’m going to tell what it’s like.”

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