C COMICS (Part 3)

Although the comics work that Joe Brainard did with his poet friends will give any reader the immediate sense that both artist and the various writers were having an awful lot of fun, a closer examination of Brainard and Kenward Elmslie’s “Bab’s First Smile” (originally published in Elmslie’s book, Album, Kulchur Press, 1969), reveals a relatively complex work in comics that is as satisfying in its resonances as any avant-garde poetry of the time.

Rather than appropriate images from a single source, as in “Red Rydler,” Brainard here uses a set of icons from religion, popular art, and advertising. The visual content, and the way that Brainard plays with it on the page, turns the comic into a meditation of the art form, and further, an inquiry into the nature of expression itself.



On the first page (above) Brainard introduces the two primary images that will be repeated throughout the comic’s five remaining pages: a large-eyed girl associated with the kitsch art of Margaret Keane. (At the time, however, Keane’s work was being sold under the name of her husband, Walter Keane—a fact that, as we’ll see, gives added resonance to this comic, albeit unintended.)

An interesting rhythm is set up on the next page between the two iconographic images: while there is only one cross, this time it has been subdivided into panels, creating a kind of visual rhyme with the repeated images of the doe-eyed girl on the earlier page. There is an attention here to the idea of the icon—any icon—as existing as icon at the moment of repetition:



Brainard also adds an element to the Keane girl on this second page that sets this particular example of appropriation apart from his earlier work: He adds, beneath her, a copyright symbol and Keane’s name. There are numerous possible reasons for this. One might be that, unlike Bushmiller’s Nancy, Brainard feels no particular affinity for Keane’s style.

A more compelling reason, however, might be to signal the self-conscious nature of this comic—it is not simply appropriated, but a meditation on appropriation. This seems a likely possibility, given the ensuing pages.



On this third page, Brainard sets all of the iconographic elements into play: the Pepsi logo, the cross, the doe-eyed girl, the thought balloon, and even the illustration of the flowering cactus, which in its unfinished state—it’s more of a sketch than a full-blown rendering—calls attention to its iconographic status.



And, here, on page four, Brainard again repeats the copyright symbol and Keane’s name, suggesting that it functions in the comic as something more than a one-time joke. The language here, from Elmslie, takes the comic into a new direction: “When Babs married—engulfed by husband—‘how strange these legs are.’” On first reading, this seems simply a comment about Babs, who may have sublimated her own life and desires into that of her husband. But as the comic continues:



and Babs’ thoughts seem to emanate from the head of a cat, Elmslie begins to raise larger questions about the self: “Where am I? Who am I? There is no me. How strange these legs are.” This is funny in its exaggerated existential angst, especially married up with the incongruous image of the cat. But more is going on here, as becomes evident on the final page:



Where the language, “Where am I? Who am I? There is no me,” is repeated, just before the near-complete void of the final panel.

Reading the whole comic again, it veers slightly from its initial playfulness and opens itself to allow for a richer play of meanings. Where, indeed, is the self to be located in any act of symbolic and/or appropriated expression? Language, the comic seems to be suddenly cognizant of, is not unique to any of its users, is in fact symbolic. The comic becomes an inquiry into the nature of all symbolic expression, including language, that is as sophisticated as any of the later inquiries into language made by poets associated with the Language Writing movement who came into prominence a few years later in the 1970s and 80s.

[Check back in the next couple of days for readings of two Brainard collaborations with Ron Padgett, and a later collaboration with the late Robert Creeley.]