DID THE NEW YORK SCHOOL INVENT ALTERNATIVE COMICS?

Shades of Leah Hayes: A panel from Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett’s “Origin and History of Consciousness” (1970)

The history of underground or alternative comics usually begins with one of the following starting points:

1. Rick Griffin’s surfer comics from the early 1960s.

2. Gilbert Shelton publishes Frank Stack’s Jesus comics in early or mid 1964 in an edition of 50.

3. Jack Jackson self-publishes God Nose in the fall of 1964 in an edition of 1,000.

4. Robert Crumb publishes ZAP #1, considered to be the first “mass-produced” underground, in 1968.

No history of alternative or “adult” comics has yet included Joe Brainard’s C Comics #1 (1964) or C Comics #2 (1965), which he wrote and drew in collaboration with his New York School poet friends John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Kenward Elmslie, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, etc. (See samples in previous posts to this blog.)

While the edition number has not yet been documented, the run was likely somewhere between 300-1,000, which would be consistent with the general edition size of other mimeographed books published in the 1960s by poets associated with the New York School.

And, while the exact publication date of C Comics #1 has not yet surfaced, there is a very good chance it was published earlier than God Nose and a somewhat slimmer chance that it predates Jesus by a month or so.

Whatever the date, it is safe to say that the work in C Comics was far more advanced than Griffin's surfer comics or even Stack's first Jesus effort (Stack’s next Jesus comic would not even appear until 1969), and shows a wider range of material than Jackson’s God Nose, which, like Stack’s Jesus, focused on religious satire.(The second issue of C Comics alone offers a remarkable 96 pages of work.)

Even more to the point, Brainard’s first comics have far more to do with the then-burgeoning subculture of the 1960s than either Stack’s or Jackson’s. Individual comics in issues 1 and 2 dealt directly or indirectly with drug use, homosexuality, pacifism, and altered states of consciousness.

Brainard and his New York School friends rerouted popular comics characters like Nancy and Sluggo, Archie and Veronica, Dick Tracy, and Red Ryder in ways that would not be taken up until 1971 with the first issue of Dan O’Neill and co.’s Air Pirates Funnies.

In fact, Brainard and Bill Berkson’s notorious “Recent Visitors,” published in Bolinas the same year as Air Pirates Funnies #1, features six pages worth of images of Nancy and Sluggo copulating in various positions so graphic that I fear posting any of the images on Flickr would result in my account being pulled. Those who have seen both comics know that Brainard and Berkson’s goes much, much further than the Air Pirates. When the Boston-based literary magazine Pressed Wafer republished the whole comic in a special issue celebrating the work of Brainard in 2001, they had to hunt around a bit for a printer who would agree to do the job.

According to recent rumor, Brainard’s work using Nancy is scheduled to be published in a collected edition in early 2008. A collected Brainard comics can’t possibly be too far behind.

Brainard likely produced some 200-300 pages of comics from about 1962 to the early 1980s. When this work finally appears in a single volume, no one writing a history of the art that focuses on underground, alternative, and/or adult comics will have any further excuse for ignoring this early, original, various, and increasingly influential example.