COLT 49.09: Graphic Medicine

Our Cancer Year shows the lives of Harvey Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, over the course of a year in which Harvey1 is diagnosed with and treated for lymphoma, a form of cancer. Frank Stack’s illustration of the work can best be described as murky. Seemingly at random, darkness envelops characters and backgrounds, forcing the reader to sort through scenes with extra effort. This design choice seems too intentional to be just stylistic. More likely, it is an attempt to illustrate how Harvey and Joyce remember this year—an unusually dark and especially difficult time in their lives to sort through. We can defend this claim by studying how shadow (particularly silhouette) is used to elucidate traumatic memory: as a force which drives Harvey and Joyce apart, and as vehicle for Harvey to try and escape from his cancer.

In the beginning, before Harvey’s diagnosis, scenes are dramatic and moody. Yet characters themselves are almost always illustrated with minimal shading in the foreground as they speak. When figures do appear in silhouette, it is only to highlight other elements of the scene. On page 202, we look over a shadowed group’s shoulders to highlight Joyce taking a photo, which sets up the following panel in which they are illuminated by the flash of the camera. On pages 11, 16, or 23-24, that shadow is consistently used to draw the reader’s attention towards whoever’s speaking by simply blacking out the other characters in the scene. But things change when Harvey and Joyce’s relationship is strained, originally by the challenges of buying a house. Page 27, a house showing, is the first time both speakers of a panel are shown almost completely in darkness. Joyce’s shadow grows behind her as she becomes increasingly upset. “Wow. Thanks for being so supportive.” she grumbles to Harvey sarcastically; in the next panel; she becomes a full silhouette while Harvey remains completely illuminated. This pattern repeats almost exactly on page 34, and is consistent through the rest of the book (most prominently on page 173). Light and dark visually strain our eyes to mirror the strain put on the protagonists’ relationship.

In “Materializing Memory”, Hillary Chute analyzes the works of Lynda Barry as episodic portrayals of trauma. The way in which narratives of pain are illustrated, Chute suggests, is not simply to show that pain but as a means for the author to process it, or demonstrate how they process it. “Barry continually works with the absences the form of comics provides”, Chute writes; in Our Cancer Year, perhaps we would consider these to be the absences of clarity; literally, enlightenment (282). Chute continues: “[Barry] does not display trauma so much as work in the edges of events, unsettling readers by leaving us to imagine the incidents whose aftereffects she plumbs. And Barry is deeply engaged with theorizing memory” (282). Barry’s work is more cartoonish and abstract than Stack’s, and her abstraction of characters and settings naturally leaves more holes for the reader to close. Yet both her work and Our Cancer Year play with darkness in the way that interests Chute. When we shift from viewing the novel as a narrative to a sequence of memories associated with pain, some of the most confusing illustrative choices become clear. On pages 27 or 34, the angle of the sun is not rapidly changing, and the rooms are not unevenly lit. Stack, like Barry, uses the balance of light/dark not to show us how the room is, but rather how it was remembered.

Creating contrast, along with a variety of other line and shading techniques, enables Stack to alter scenes without changing their overall composition, since Our Cancer Year obeys a constraint that Barry’s work does not—it largely obeys perspective space. Chute cites psychiatrist-researcher Lenore Terr in explaining the episodic nature of traumatic memory—even though Our Cancer Year has confusing lapses in time, there is a strong consistency in how Pekar, Brabner, and Stack represent locations associated with strong emotion or pain (Chute 293). Therefore, it is not necessarily as important to analyze the spaces as it is to identify how Harvey and Joyce are “placing themselves in space”, a process which serves to “create a peculiar entry point for representing experience” (Chute 293). Shadow is an immediate way to do accomplish this, and is most clearly demonstrated by how Harvey presents himself.

Up until his diagnosis, unlike how Joyce is drawn, Pekar remembers Harvey very clearly. He’s soft-spoken and often exists in the background, but presented recognizably and almost always in bright light. But when he visits the doctor for the first time in the work, Harvey transforms. On the upper-left panel of page 87, Harvey is no longer Harvey—he is a silhouette, a black form which has been largely pushed out of the frame by a clearly-lit nurse. One immediate interpretation of this representation is that Harvey no longer wants to associate with his body. He has abruptly shifted from being in control and comfortable with himself (or comfortable ignoring his condition) to being trapped in a form covered in sickness. All that is left of Harvey is the white of his right eye, as though peering out from behind a mask. Chute investigates how Barry places herself (as the character Lynda) in “autobifictionalographical” spaces (289). Here, Harvey seems to be trying his hardest to not be placed in the scene. Following Chute, we might consider this to be a visual representation of disassociation, or a subconscious attempt by Harvey to separate his self from his body or role in the scene he remembers. Harvey is in shadow because he does not want to be perceived, by other characters or by the reader. Even though he cannot forget these traumatic moments, Harvey can separate himself as much as possible from them. In Barry’s work, Chute identifies the “deconstitution”, or traumatic decentralization, of the self into fragments (304). This doesn’t resonate so well with Our Cancer Year, where Harvey and Joyce are reflecting upon their own lives directly and not telling them through the veils of metaphor, or non-narratively, as Barry might. So, Harvey’s only option is to escape.

Chute identifies one element of Barry’s work that could be mapped directly onto Harvey’s self-image in Our Cancer Year: the effigy. In a prominent composition in One Hundred Demons, “Resilience”, Barry represents Lynda as a doll, inserting herself into an inert form. Through Chute’s eyes, Barry is depicting a scene of sexual assault, with an insectlike origami creature poised to physically violate the doll (297). “With her inanimate pose and vacated eyes,” explains Chute, the doll “is a figure for both dissociation and forgetting” (297). Such is Harvey’s indistinct silhouette identity—his inky form absorbs both light and pain.

Most of the time, Harvey’s silhouette body appears at the edges of scenes, begging to be passed over—in many panels, blending in so effectively, it is only truly noticed on a second close reading (examples on pages 142, 152, 164, 174). But in other situations, subjected to direct scrutiny, even Harvey’s shadow form is unable to escape his discomfort. On page 124, a friend asks Harvey “So how’re ya doing, man?” This is clearly a question Harvey would like to avoid. But his dark form is pushed back into the scene by a bright aura, which seems to represent the friend’s gaze and deeper meaning behind his prying question. Later (page 158), when Harvey is at his most desperate, he tries to stand up for himself in front of his wife and doctor and asks to be admitted to the hospital—the one place he would have liked to avoid the most at any earlier point in the story. Again, that aura of light blasts Harvey’s indistinct shape into the foreground, even “overexposing” the other characters to emphasize how objectified he feels.

By hiding in shadow, Harvey’s form becomes, on some level, synonymous with his cancer. His body is a constant reminder of his inability to return to the simple life and regularity he craves, and as a consequence he disassociates from it in his memories to avoid uncomfortable truths. His body is represented as less than real—an effigy which can withstand the pain he cannot escape. However, over the course of the work, Harvey finds he can no longer hide from his cancer.

Page 184 of Our Cancer Year rests at the end of Harvey and Joyce’s emotional abyss. Harvey emerges from a chaotic hallucination scene, in which the reader is subjected to an unsettling breakdown in linear framing and perspective which emulates the dissolution of Harvey’s own ego as he flickers between light and shadow. Mired in darkness, his face halfway out of the frame, Harvey ponders to himself: “I keep blinking in and out of consciousness. Who am I?” (184). Then, zooming in, Harvey’s next thought bubble depicts the logo of American Splendor, the autobiographical work for which Pekar is known. This sudden change in style reflects a similar shift in Harvey’s perspective. “Tell me the truth,” shadow-Harvey asks Joyce, “am I some guy who writes about himself in a comic book called American Splendor? / …or am I a character in that book?” (184). The logo acts as a device of dramatic irony—Stack affirms that Harvey is a character, but Harvey and Joyce can’t observe that as the reader can. As Harvey comes to terms with the drama of his situation, finishing his question, he is finally brought into light in a panel which resembles a lens, “focusing” on his full emaciated nude body. Even though Harvey is at his most broken down, this scene represents an important shift in his perspective and a turning point in the plot. From this point forward, Harvey appears in silhouette with less frequency and more agency, receding into shadow mostly to reflect.

Throughout Our Cancer Year, shadow acts as a negative driving force—straining the relationships between characters (particularly Harvey and Joyce), and acting as a way for Harvey to disassociate from emotional and physical pain. But it also comes to highlight Harvey’s relationship with his cancer, and the changing lens through which Pekar and Bramber frame their traumatic memories in the work.

Works Cited

Chute, Hillary, and Michael A. Chaney. “Materializing Memory.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, U of Wisconsin P, 2011, pp. 282-309, Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/2457.Pekar, Harvey, and Joyce Brabner. Our Cancer Year. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994, archive.org/details/ourcanceryear00brab.

  1. Following Chute, I will refer to the authors by last name (“Pekar”, “Brabner”), and to the protagonists by their first names (“Harvey” and “Joyce”). ↩︎
  2.  For consistency, this essay cites page numbers of Our Cancer Year as they have been digitized on the Internet Archive. ↩︎