Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: joyce brabner, rip
Friends of Joyce Brabner have reached out, asking me to share the sad news that she died yesterday, at the age of 72.
Friends of Joyce Brabner have reached out, asking me to share the sad news that she died yesterday, at the age of 72.
Joyce Brabner owned a comic book store as well as a costume store in the early eighties when she began to correspond with comic book writer and publisher Harvey Pekar over his small press, a slice-of-life comic American Splendor. Sometime later, she flew to meet him, and the next day, they got married. She started helping with the publishing and packaging of the comic book series, as well as creating marketing opportunities that saw the comic book picked up by multiple distributors and begin to be profitable.
Their story was told both in the comic and in the 2003 film American Splendor, where she was played by Hope Davis, while also appearing as herself.
Joyce Brabner also edited Eclipse Comics’ Real War Stories comic book series in the late eighties, working with Alan Moore, Mike W. Barr, Steve Bissette, Brian Bolland, Paul Mavrides, Dean Motter, Denny O’Neil and John Totleben and more, with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and Citizen Soldier, as an attempt to tell real stories of war away, from the propaganda.
Joyce Brabner also wrote the graphic novel Brought to Light with Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, which focused on the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement in the Iran–Contra affair with the Christic Institute. She continued to work on other comic book projects that were mostly activist in nature, but in 1994, she worked with her husband on the graphic novel Our Cancer Year as well as other subsequent projects, including writing and starring in an early internet-streamed live opera in 2009.
She finished and published two of Harvey Pekar’s works after he died, Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland in 2012 and Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me in 2014. She even got Alan Moore to appear in his first webchat to raise money for a statue of Harvey Pekar in Cleveland. She then continued to appear in storytelling and comedy shows.
There are some who say that there is no place for politics in comic books. For Joyce Brabner, there was no place for anything but.
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