C COMICS (Part 2)


Joe Brainard's loft and workspace

Joe Brainard worked in a variety of media--he was a gifted illustrator and terrific painter--but he had a particularly exceptional gift for collage and assemblage. The use of popular and iconographic imagery had been explored by British and American artists since the 1950s, and Brainard was an avowed fan of a number of so-called pop-artists, especially Andy Warhol. But, as many who have written on Brainard's work have noted, his relationship with the material tended to lack the ironic edge with respect to popular culture associated with Warhol, Lichtenstein, or Rosenquist.

It was as though Brainard, according to many of his friends and critics, was literally infatuated with his material. Especially Ernie Bushmiller's character Nancy, whom Brainard repurposed so many times, it is as though he wanted her for himself.

In a very real sense, he got her. There is hardly anything written about Joe Brainard--nothing that takes his visual art into account--that does not mention Nancy.



His front and back covers of the ARTnews Annual from 1968, "The Avant-Garde," feature Bushmiller's happy-go-lucky character popping out of famous canvases by heavy-weight artists on the order of Matisse, Mondrian, Duchamp, etc. This is neither an indictment of Bushmiller nor his readers. It isn't exactly an indictment of the fine artists whose works he appropriated, either; though if the point is that Nancy is far more vivid, lively, even memorable, as icon, than even, say, the Mona Lisa--he's pretty much nailed it.

Not surprisingly, given Brainard's genuine attraction to pop-culture imagery, most of the work in C Comics 1 and 2 involved some form appropriation from pre-existing work in the medium. Brainard cut out and rearranged panels from Nancy, Archie, Dick Tracy and others, then redrew them, leaving empty text boxes and thought and speech balloons for his poet friends to fill in.

His collaboration with Frank O'Hara, "Red Rydler," [sic] was more or less typical.





Panels from Stephen Slesinger and Fred Harman's Red Ryder are rearranged and slightly manipulated. An added "L" in the title gives us the sonic equivalent of "Red Riddler." The face of Ryder's dog--referred to by Brainard in the title as "DOG"--has been blotted out with frenetic scribbling. A couple of arrows on the second page highlight, in the first instance, DOG standing on hind legs, in the second, a box containing the names of the collaborators.

One might argue that Brainard and O'Hara's comic has, finally, more to do with a kind of light-hearted parody than poetry. But, while it's true that "Red Rydler" retains at least the ghost of some narrative arc, and certainly does not take the sentiment of the original seriously on its own terms, it tends to remind one less of a Saturday Night Live skit than of a camped-up dadaist or surrealist play in cartoon form.

That said, other examples from Brainard's C Comics series do have more of the feel of poetry. For instance, this setting of one of Brainard's own poems:



or this rather abstract excerpt from a collaboration with John Ashbery:



Though Brainard never revived C Comics after the second issue in 1965, he continued to work with poets to produce lively and increasingly various comics.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at a Brainard-Elmslie collaboration from 1968-9. Stay tuned.