Joyce Brabner, writer, editor, and activist, likely best known for her longtime role in the American Splendor comic books written by her late husband, Harvey Pekar, has passed away at the age of 72.

Brabner had been a comic book reader as a child, but she wasn’t a devoted comic book reader later on in life. She worked in Delaware at a non-profit helping prisoners and their families. She explained her work in a wonderful career-spanning interview with Jillian Steinhauer:

I was doing cultural programming in support of treatment objectives. I started using theater and some other stuff. If a guard said to me, “We have a problem because these older guys are getting pushed off the basketball court by the young jitterbug,” that was time for the master’s chess championship with prizes. The women’s prison was unfit to live in, so I had a two-year grant to redesign the prison by creating collapsible furniture out of cardboard and things they had — a stray cubby, a desk, a chair. In the women’s prison we did stuff like introduce carpentry and pave the way for women getting ready for hard-hat occupations when they got out.

She noted that the work, while important, began to leave her burned out:

I felt myself burning out. When I burned out, I joined my friend who was into comics, Tom Watkins, and I made monster costumes and ran a cinematheque and did costumes for John Waters and all this other creative stuff to let that other side of my brain relax. When I’m not doing the writing stuff, I’m making arts or pictures or things.

During this period, she became the co-owner of a comic book store in Wilmington, Delaware. She became a regular reader of American Splendor, the classic autobiographical comic book series by writer Harvey Pekar, working with a variety of different artists drawing stories from Pekar’s life. When she missed an issue, she wrote a postcard to Pekar to try to get the missing issue. They began corresponding, and soon, were married. She then, naturally, became a character in Pekar’s American Splendor…

Brabner was key to helping to promote American Splendor, and what had been a money-losing operation when Brabner met Pekar soon became a profitable series, and a 1986 collection of his work led to Pekar appearing on Late Night With David Letterman, where Pekar soon became famous beyond the world of comics due to his hilariously offbeat appearances on Letterman’s talk show.

Brabner then got involved in editing and publishing an acclaimed anti-war comic, Real War Stories, and then a comic book that involved legendary creators, Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, Brought to Light, about Iran/Contra…

Pekar was then diagnosed with cancer, and their travails with Pekaer’s illness eventually became the graphic novel, Our Cancer Year, which Brabner co-wrote with Pekar (and drawn by Frank Stack)…

That graphic novel, and Pekar’s life, in general, was adapted into a motion picture, American Splendor, in 2003 (written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini), starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar, and Hope Davis as Brabner…

Pekar passed away in 2010, soon after being diagnosed with cancer a third time.

In 2014, Brabner and Mark Zingarelli (one of the American Splendor artists) released the graphic novel, Second Avenue Caper: When Goodfellas, Divas, and Dealers Plotted Against the Plague, about the New York residents at the frontline of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s…

Brabner passed away on August 1 at the age of 72.

CBR shares its condolences with her friends and family.