Pekar and Brabner’s “cancer year” overlapped with the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. But after a challenging series of procedures, including three months of bi-weekly 48-hour-long chemotherapy sessions, five weeks of daily radiation treatments, and three major surgeries (two of which had complications that each kept me in the hospital for a month), I am cancer-free, with a fairly low chance of recurrence. Initially, the outlook wasn’t great, and I pretty much expected to die. In 2020, I was diagnosed with Stage IV rectal cancer that had spread to my liver. “ It’s also a story about marriage, work, friends, family and buying a house.” Maybe doing more than you thought you could and not knowing what to do next.” It’s a story about feeling powerless, and trying to do too much. “ This is a story about a year when someone was sick, about a time when it seemed that the rest of the world was sick too. The first panel hit me as hard as anything I’ve read. Our Cancer Year, a 1994 comics memoir by Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner and Frank Stack, chronicles Pekar and Brabner’s lives as Pekar, a legend in the history of underground and independent comics, was being treated for lymphoma. It’s not often that a comics panel will make me put a book down to catch my breath.
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