SOURCE: A review of Our Cancer Year, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 32, August 8, 1994, p. 420.

[Below, the critic offers a positive assessment of Our Cancer Year.]

[Joined by his wife and collaborator Joyce Brabner and illustrator Frank Stack, Harvey Pekar's] first book-length comics narrative [Our Cancer Year] is by turns amusing, frightening, moving and quietly entertaining. As always, Pekar's work records his apparently ordinary life as a hospital clerk in Cleveland while simultaneously capturing the epiphanic combination of mundanity and awkward, sporadic nobility of everyday life. In 1990, Pekar was diagnosed with lymphoma and needed chemotherapy. By the time the disease was discovered, the couple was in the midst of buying a house (a tremendous worry to Pekar, who fretted about both the money and corruptions of bourgeois creature comforts). Brabner, a self-described "comic book journalist," had to oversee both the new house and a sick and very difficult husband...