C COMICS


Joe Brainard

[This is the first part of a work-in-progress, “The Poetics of Comics.” Read the introduction here.]

If storyless or non-narrative comics have any traceable history at all, the first English-language example of someone fully engaged with their production might be artist, writer, and poet Joe Brainard.

Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942; shortly afterward, the Brainards moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up. In his mid-teens he met Dick Gallup and Ron Padgett; and through them, Ted Berrigan. In the 60s they would all leave Tulsa for New York City, where they would more-or-less form the core of a loose social group of poets and artists generally referred to as the second generation of the New York School.

A talented and prolific visual artist, Brainard collaborated with poets associated with both generations of the New York School. These collaborations were various, including everything from book and record album covers to illustrations complementing works of poetry to more fully integrated poetry and art collaborations, including The Vermont Notebook (with John Ashbery) and a number of books with his lover and partner, Kenward Elmslie (e.g., Sung Sex, and The Champ).

Collaboration between poets and artists was neither original nor unique to Brainard and his friends, who likely took their cues from other mostly New York examples and, previous to that, European examples from the early 20th century. What was unique was their work in comics.

In 1964 Brainard self-published the first in what was to be a series of two issues of C Comics. While this large-format mimeographed magazine did not physically resemble other comic books of the time (e.g., shiny color cover, offset printing, saddle-stitched), there is no question that all of the collaborations inside are examples of comics as comics are generally understood.

Despite the fact that Brainard published C Comics four years before Robert Crumb would debut Zap, Brainard’s example has yet to be included in any history of comics intended for adults.

The absence, while regrettable, is hardly surprising. Brainard’s comics were published in small editions and generally distributed by hand, through the mail, in a few independent bookstores, and perhaps sold and/or given away at poetry readings. No distribution model for adult-intended comics existed in the United States in the early 60s—Crumb, remember, sold copies of the first Zap out of a baby carriage on Haight Street in San Francisco—and, even if one had existed, it is doubtful that Brainard would have been much interested in taking advantage of it.

Too, while Zap and the work of a good number of other comics artists who emerged in the 60s has been kept in print in one form or another, the work in C Comics was never republished as such. Individual collaborations appear in various poets’ books or festschrifts, the comics he did with Kenward Elmslie were collected along with other collaborations in Pay Dirt in 1992 by Bamberger Books, and a selected German edition of various comics collaborations was published in 1983. But there is currently no single book of Brainard’s various work in comics available in the United States. His official Web site, launched posthumously by Brainard's executor, Ron Padgett, and his son, who designed it, only mentions the comics work in passing. No examples of the work can be found online.

This does not, however, mean that we can or should—however convenient it may be to do so—dispense with Brainard’s significant body of work in comics. His work has not only been both directly and indirectly influential on a number of artists currently exploring non-narrative possibilities for the art, it was also as various as it was exceptional. Artists doing storyless comics, or anyone thinking generally about a poetics of the art, would do well to familiarize themselves with his example.

[Continued tomorrow, with examples of Brainard’s work.]