If Joe Brainard (1942–1994) were alive, he would not take credit for creating a new comics genre. During the early 1960s, he was an an up-and-coming rebel artist and writer from Tulsa, OK, in the New York School art scene. In 1964 he started collaborating with downtown poets, including John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan and Frank O’Hara, among others, on making the experimental C Comics. It was the era before cheap offset newsprint, when mimeograph was the people’s printing machine. Everything printed on a desktop mimeograph had a smudged patina—but it was an accessible and effective communication platform that did not require (often prudish) union artisans.
C Comics was produced by Brainard and a repertory of friends just prior to the underground newspaper comics that emerged later in the 1960s. It was borne of a counter-art world, expressive and eccentric art and literary downtown experience at the time. Brainard collaborated with the cream of alternative lit, who routinely wrote copy precisely for the comics panels he would draw. In the new book The Complete C Comics (New York Review Books), poet and friend Ron Padgett writes, “we did the work for the pleasure and adventure of it, with little or no thought of how it might be received by the public.” He indicates that C Comics was a laboratory. “… It was happily free of theoretical ambitions, such as being avant-garde or radical or even funny. Perhaps helping Joe create comic strips, a medium few of us had ever worked in, let us poets feel free to play the way we did when we were children.”
To be published Dec. 2, The Complete C Comics “is a wild testament to the power of off-the-cuff collaboration. These lively pages, overflowing with puns, in-jokes, and oddball references, feel like an afternoon spent among (brilliant) friends, shooting the breeze, challenging one another to be more and more outrageous. Brainard’s drawings inspire O’Hara to pen a steamy farce about a gay cowboy, Koch to satirize Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ashbery to imagine the rude thoughts of Lady Liberty, and Berrigan to create a talking cigarette who complains about Robinson Jeffers, among other strips.”
The work is fascinating for what was on the minds of these soon-to-become established and cannonical writers. Also fascinating is the range of what was culturally important for Brainard. This included his frequent send-ups of Archie, Dick Tracy, Denis the Menace, Li’l Abner and Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy,” which Brainard also included in some of his more artful collages. C Comics was not without it tangles with the law. It was confiscated for being obscene during a police raid at a Cleveland bookstore and in 1960, when NYC police raided Ed Sanders’ Lower East Side Peace Eye Bookstore, home of Fuck You magazine (which featured a Brainard drawing police described as a “green colored headless Superman drawing with private parts exposed”). C Comics was not, however, singled out for censorship and is situated in the history of avant garde comics as a bridge linking the old to new alternative art cultures.
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