#joyce brabner

[rubyvroom]

A pretty good appreciation of Joyce Brabner who made multiple contributions to indie comics throughout her life. As is always the case with artists married to more famous male artists, her own work was always overshadowed by Harvey Pekar. But Joyce did some fascinating stuff in her own right as a writer and editor.

[fourorfivemovements]

My Top 100 Favorite Movies:

95. American Splendor (2003) - Dir. Shari Springer Berman/Robert Pulcini

[graphicpolicy]

Around the Tubes

Some comic news from around the web to start the day #comics #comicbooks

It’s a new week and we’re still sifting through San Diego Comic-Con, Otakon, and Gen Con and looking ahead at more conventions. While we get all that sorted, here’s some comic news from around the web to start the day. The Beat – Writer Joyce Brabner passes away at age 72 – Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and fans. Boing Boing – Star Wars back in theaters (in Ojibwe) – This is pretty…

[tumbling-dyce]

Rest in peace, Joyce Brabner (March 1, 1952 – August 1, 2024)

Hope Davis as Joyce Brabner in American Splendor (2007).

Hope's five entries among my best 1001 movies are About Schmidt, The Matador, Infamous, Disconnect, and Rebel in the Rye.

[hold322]

544 WGCBP | License Renewed

This week on The World’s Greatest Comic Book Podcast™: We remember Joyce Brabner. There will be a Doctor Who – Star Trek crossover. A three day human trafficking sting operation was conducted at SDCC with 14 arrested and 10 victims rescued. In Tinsel Town: John Wick writer Derek Kolstad is adopting Ordained. Terry Matalas is the new showrunner for the Vision series. Deadpool and Wolverine…

[comicbookclub]

Colin Kaepernick AI Company Blasted By Comics Pros, Joe Quesada Launches Amazing Comics, Joyce Brabner Dies | Comic Book Club News For August 5, 2024

Colin Kaepernick's new company Lumi is being obliterated by comic book pros for utilizing AI. Joe Quesada has launched a new comics company, Amazing Comics. Joyce Brabner, co-star of American Splendor, has died at 72.

Colin Kaepernick’s new company Lumi is being obliterated by comic book pros for utilizing AI. Joe Quesada has launched a new comics company, Amazing Comics. Joyce Brabner, co-star of American Splendor, has died at 72. All on Comic Book Club News for August 5, 2024. SUBSCRIBE ON RSS, APPLE, ANDROID, SPOTIFY, OR THE APP OF YOUR CHOICE. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, TIKTOK, AND FACEBOOK. SUPPORT…

[comicbookclublive]

Colin Kaepernick AI Company Blasted By Comics Pros, Joe Quesada Launches Amazing Comics, Joyce Brabner Dies | Comic Book Club News For August 5, 2024

Colin Kaepernick's new company Lumi is being obliterated by comic book pros for utilizing AI. Joe Quesada has launched a new comics company, Amazing Comics. Joyce Brabner, co-star of American Splendor, has died at 72.

Colin Kaepernick’s new company Lumi is being obliterated by comic book pros for utilizing AI. Joe Quesada has launched a new comics company, Amazing Comics. Joyce Brabner, co-star of American Splendor, has died at 72. All on Comic Book Club News for August 5, 2024. SUBSCRIBE ON RSS, APPLE, ANDROID, SPOTIFY, OR THE APP OF YOUR CHOICE. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, TIKTOK, AND FACEBOOK. SUPPORT…

[thefugitivesaint]

Someone kindly digitized a pretty hard to find political graphic anthology called 'Brought to Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action' from 1988. I recommend giving them a read. "Shadowplay: The Secret Team written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz with an introduction by Daniel Sheehan (general counsel of TCI). It covers the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and its controversial involvement in the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra affair, and its relationship with figures like Augusto Pinochet and Manuel Noriega. The narrator of ‘Shadowplay’ is an aging anthropomorphic American Eagle, a bellicose retired CIA agent." .... "The story of ‘Shadowplay’ is of an unseen character (presumably representing the oblivious American public in first-person view of the reader) in a bar, where he is approached by a man-sized, walking, talking eagle. The eagle, from the emblem of the CIA, proceeds to drink alcohol and, in a drunken stupor, divulge all the bloody details of The Agency's sordid past. Early on a reference is made to the number of gallons an Olympic swimming pool can hold, and the fact that an adult human body has one gallon of blood; from then on, the victims of CIA activities (directly or indirectly) are quantified in swimming pools filled with blood, each pool representing 20,000 dead. Sienkiewicz's dark, erratic, and blurry images keep the mood of Moore's narration (through the boozing eagle) unnerving, and hazily nightmarish." .... "Flashpoint: The LA Penca Bombing is written by Joyce Brabner (and drawn by Thomas Yeates), as told to her by Christic Institute clients Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan. It deals with the La Penca bombing which happened during the civil war in Nicaragua in 1984."

For a more detailed account of how this anthology was made and the actual history involved that this anthology is only skimming, go here. For a wider view of the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking and other illegal activities, see the wiki page ‘Allegations of CIA drug trafficking’ but consider it a primer on the subject rather than a comprehensive overview.  Not my usual posting fair, I know. 

[audiemurphy1945]

American Splendor(2003)

[addictivecontradiction]

American splendor, 2003

[faultyprojectorrecommends]

American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman/Robert Pulcini, 2003)

[thatgeekwiththeclipons]

American Splendor (2003)

Comic Book Movies

Written & Directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

Based on American Splendor by Harvey Pekar & Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner

Starring Paul Giamatti & Hope Davis with Judah Friedlander, James Urbaniak, Earl Billings, & Madylin Sweeten

Release Date: August 15, 2003

Running Time: 1hr 41min

Rating: R

Plot (Spoilers):Harvey Pekar (Giamatti) is a…

[1962dude420-blog]

Today we remember the passing of Harvey Pekar who Died: July 12, 2010 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Harvey Lawrence Pekar (October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010) was an American underground comic book writer, music critic, and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a well-received film adaptation of the same name.

Frequently described as the "poet laureate of Cleveland", Pekar "helped change the appreciation for, and perceptions of, the graphic novel, the drawn memoir, the autobiographical comic narrative." Pekar described his work as "autobiography written as it's happening. The theme is about staying alive, getting a job, finding a mate, having a place to live, finding a creative outlet. Life is a war of attrition. You have to stay active on all fronts. It's one thing after another. I've tried to control a chaotic universe. And it's a losing battle. But I can't let go. I've tried, but I can't."

Among the awards given to Pekar for his work were the Inkpot Award, the American Book Award, a Harvey Award, and his posthumous induction into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame.

Harvey Pekar and his younger brother Allen were born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Jewish family. Their parents were Saul and Dora Pekar, immigrants from Bialystok, Poland. Saul Pekar was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store on Kinsman Avenue, with the family living above the store. Although Pekar said he wasn't close to his parents due to their dissimilar backgrounds and because they worked all the time, he still "marveled at how devoted they were to each other. They had so much love and admiration for one another."

Pekar said he did not have friends for the first few years of his life. The neighborhood he lived in had once been all white but became mostly black by the 1940s. One of the only white kids still living there, Pekar was often beaten up. He later believed this instilled in him "a profound sense of inferiority." This experience, however, also taught him to become a "respected street scrapper."

Pekar graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1957. He then briefly served in the United States Navy. After being discharged he attended Case Western Reserve University, where he dropped out after a year. He worked odd jobs before he was hired as file clerk at the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1965. He held this job after becoming famous, refusing all promotions, until he retired in 2001.

Pekar's friendship with Robert Crumb led to the creation of the self-published, autobiographical comic book series American Splendor. Crumb and Pekar became friends through their mutual love of jazz records. It took Pekar a decade to do so: "I theorized for maybe ten years about doing comics." Pekar's influences from the literary world included James Joyce, Arthur Miller, George Ade, Henry Roth, and Daniel Fuchs.

Around 1972, Pekar laid out some stories with crude stick figures and showed them to Crumb and another artist, Robert Armstrong. Impressed, they both offered to illustrate. Pekar & Crumb's one-pager "Crazy Ed" was published as the back cover of Crumb's The People's Comics (Golden Gate Publishing Company, 1972), becoming Pekar's first published work of comics. Including "Crazy Ed" and before the publication of American Splendor #1, Pekar wrote a number of other comic stories that were published in a variety of outlets.

The first issue of Pekar's self-published American Splendor series appeared in May 1976, with stories illustrated by Crumb, Dumm, Budgett, and Brian Bram. Applying the "brutally frank autobiographical style of Henry Miller," American Splendor documented Pekar's daily life in the aging neighborhoods of his native Cleveland.

Pekar and his work came to greater prominence in 1986 when Doubleday collected much of the material from the first ten issues in American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, which was positively reviewed by, among others, The New York Times. (1986 was also the year Pekar began appearing on Late Night with David Letterman.)

Pekar self-published 15 issues of American Splendor from 1976 to 1991 (issue #16 was co-published with Tundra Publishing). Dark Horse Comics took on the publishing and distribution of Pekar's comics from 1993 to 2003.

In 2006, Pekar released a four-issue American Splendor miniseries through the DC Comics imprint Vertigo. This was collected in the American Splendor: Another Day paperback. In 2008 Vertigo released a second four-issue "season" of American Splendor that was later collected in the American Splendor: Another Dollar paperback.

Pekar's best-known and longest-running collaborators include Crumb, Dumm, Budgett, Spain Rodriguez, Joe Zabel, Gerry Shamray, Frank Stack, Mark Zingarelli, and Joe Sacco. In the 2000s, he teamed regularly with artists Dean Haspiel and Josh Neufeld. Other cartoonists who worked with him include Jim Woodring, Chester Brown, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, David Collier, Drew Friedman, Ho Che Anderson, Rick Geary, Ed Piskor, Hunt Emerson, Bob Fingerman, and Alex Wald; as well as such non-traditional illustrators as Pekar's wife, Joyce Brabner, and comics writer Alan Moore.

In addition to his autobiographical work on American Splendor, Pekar wrote a number of biographies. The first of these, American Splendor: Unsung Hero (Dark Horse Comics, 2003), illustrated by David Collier, documented the Vietnam War experience of Robert McNeill, one of Pekar's African-American coworkers at Cleveland's VA hospital.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on July 12, 2010, Pekar's wife found Pekar dead in their Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home. No immediate cause was determined. In October the Cuyahoga County coroner's office ruled it was an accidental overdose of antidepressants fluoxetine and bupropion. Pekar had been diagnosed with cancer for the third time and was about to undergo treatment.

Pekar was interred at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. His headstone features one of his quotations as an epitaph: "Life is about women, gigs, an' bein' creative."

[kevrocksicehouse]

La Belle Noiseuse. D: Jacques Rivette (1991). Michel Piccoli as a legendary artist, blocked for years on a portrait of his wife, who starts to finish it with a woman who is not his wife. The audience watches for nearly four hours as he sketches and she models, and it never looks away.

American Splendor. D: Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. (2003). Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti) starts a great underground comic book career by taking inspiration from everything in his ordinary life – his shit job, his cancer diagnosis – but mostly the passionately mundane love story he shares with his wife, Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis). Every once in awhile the real Harvey and Joyce stop by to see how the actors playing them are doing.

Adaptation. D: Spike Jonze. (2002). Nicolas Cage as a tortured writer whose attempt to adapt an essay by Susan Orleans (Meryl Streep) turns into an abyss of self-hatred and anxiety. Nicolas Cage as his twin brother who doesn’t understand what’s so difficult about this whole writing thing, read an article about it and it doesn’t really seem that hard. Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant script winds up honoring both viewpoints.

Sid and Nancy. D: Alex Cox. (1986) Walking catastrophe Sid Vicious meets screeching apocalypse Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb who never topped her performance because how could anyone?). She inspires him not to rock and roll glory but to the murder/suicide that became the pathetic and horrible footnote to his life. The saddest funny movie you’ll ever see.

Ed Wood. D: Tim Burton. (1994). Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, the washed-up junkie who once played and defined the role of Dracula and who jump-starts Wood (Johnny Depp in what is still his best work) to make the Worst Movie of All Time or as he calls it “My Masterpiece.”

[frankenpagie]

1.17.17

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#10yrsago The Beats: A Graphic History -- unflinching and wonderful history of The Beats

The Beats: A Graphic History is everything a radical history should be: critical, admiring, quirky and apologetic. The Beats is largely written by Harvey Pekar and illustrated by Ed Piskor, with a concluding section of more critical, less biographical pieces written and illustrated by a variety of critics and artists, including Nancy J Peters, Tulu Kupferberg, Summer McClinton, Anne Timmons and others.

The opening section consists of Pekar's biographies of the canonical Beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and then onto the less-celebrated members of the scene, including Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, and so forth. These pieces are loving but harsh, sparing their subjects little sympathy for their misdeeds (which are many, ranging from murder and betrayal to vicious misogyny and naive, fleeting affairs with reactionary politics and mysticism). Pekar shows us that a mature person can admire the worthy deeds and art of historical heroes without glossing over their bad acts -- or throwing away their art with their sins.

The Beats of Pekar's work are often geniuses, are capable of great acts of charity and selflessness, and overcome great personal challenges with a great deal of style and perseverance. Pekar shows us where their character flaws took root, explains them -- and never excuses them. At the end of this section, I felt like I understood and appreciated the poetry and prose and music of these people better than I had beforehand.

But the last third of the book really puts it all into perspective. In this section a variety of writers take a much more critical run at the Beats. The best of these is Joyce Brabner's "Beatnik Chicks," a feminist critique of the Beats and a secret history of the women who made the scene without making history, sublimated in the service of the narrative of the tortured man-poet and his beautiful chela. Also fantastic is Jeffrey Lewis and Tuli Kupferberg's extraordinary history of The Fugs, one of the filthiest rock bands to ever levitate the Pentagon (both Lewis and Kupferberg were members of the band). The story told is engaging and wild, and the art is stellar.

From cover to cover, The Beats is a wonderful history of a complicated and misunderstood cultural movement -- its achievements, its place in history, its flaws and its brilliance. The graphic novel format is perfect for the subject -- straddling the line between respectability and disreputableness just as the Beats themselves did.

The Beats: A Graphic History

Publisher's site for The Beats

https://boingboing.net/2009/04/02/the-beats-a-graphic.html