C COMICS (Part 6)


Title page of Joe Brainard and Robert Creeley’s “Class of ’47”

In 1973, Joe Brainard collaborated on a single comic with the poet Robert Creeley. Not part of Brainard’s immediate New York circle of poet friends, Creeley was however one of the most beloved non-mainstream poets of his time.

Creeley, born in 1926, entered Harvard University in 1943, leaving the following year to enlist as an ambulance driver in Burma during World War II. Brainard, who had earned a scholarship to the Dayton Art Institute in 1960, left about a month later for New York City to make his living as an artist.

Documentation describing Brainard and Creeley’s process creating “Class of ’47,” which was originally published in a limited edition by Bouwerie Editions in 1973 and then republished in Chain 8: Comics, has not yet surfaced.

Whether or not Creeley supplied the text first—which is my own best guess—the comic itself is clearly a satire on the kinds of posturing one finds in alumni newsletters. On its most basic level, given that both Creeley and Brainard were drop-outs, the comic becomes a kind of “there but for the grace of God go I.”



The text itself is made up of sentences most likely lifted from Harvard’s alumni magazine, Harvard Monthly. Brainard supplies iconic imagery—mostly of either popular characters from comics or, a bit later on, comics-inspired icons used in advertising for Laundromats and drycleaners, gas stations, and so on.



Brainard repeatedly employs trompe-l'œil tears in the page through which some of these characters emerge. The effect is especially funny, contrasting the excited bursts of enthusiastic cartoons with the pompous alumni language—which is almost heartbreakingly mundane in its content. The Mickey Mouse-King of Spades character is particularly pointed—one thinks not only of the derogatory use of “mickey mouse” as descriptor, but of Alice in Wonderland’s “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

The inevitable “I’m working on a novel,” which follows this, is particularly devastating.



One of Brainard’s last comics—Brainard stopped producing art of any kind in the early to mid-1980s—“Class of ’47” includes many of Brainard’s signature traits: the appropriation of popular culture iconography (including his beloved Nancy, who appears on the second to last page), the use of arrows to highlight things he finds particularly funny (including his own “accidental” ink smudges); and page layouts that show him playing with the traditional function of the panel to delineate specific moments and/or events in time. Here are the final three pages:







In the next day or two we’ll look at a final Brainard and Padgett collaboration, and begin to catalog some of the techniques specific to Brainard’s examples, and to storyless comics in general.