‘A Cartoon Revival’

Two issues of C Comics appeared, in 1964 and 1966, as an offshoot of C, a poetry magazine edited by Ted Berrigan. All the art was by Joe Brainard, while the words were supplied by a roster of seventeen poets. Brainard, Berrigan, and the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, dubbed by John Ashbery the “soi-disant Tulsa School,” had precociously entered the world of poetry with Padgett’s White Dove Review (1959–1960) while three of them were in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then they all moved to New York City, where they joined the second generation of the New York School of poets (a name that has remained contentious since it was first used in the 1950s).

In a neat reversal of Apollinaire and Frank O’Hara—court poets to an array of painters—Brainard was the painter among the poets. (He also wrote himself, most famously his experimental 1970 memoir, I Remember.) In the 1950s the first New York Scholars (O’Hara, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler) had been surrounded by painters, from intimates such as Jane Freilicher and Michael Goldberg to the wider Cedar Tavern world of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Now, in the 1960s, the action had shifted to St. Marks Place and vicinity, where the accommodations were too small for painters and there was always one café that held poetry readings (the Tenth Street Coffeehouse, then Les Deux Mégots, then Le Metro, ultimately succeeded by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church). There were diverging schools of poetry at these venues (Beats, Black Mountain, Deep Image), but the two-generation New York School was remarkably cohesive and collaborative, all over one another’s lives, apartments, poems, and magazines.

Brainard (a bit later joined by George Schneeman) became the resident artist, drawing flyers for readings and covers for books and magazines, most of them mimeographed and side-stapled, issued in editions of a few hundred—what today would be called zines, although the term then was restricted to science fiction fandom. Brainard was astonishingly productive, making paintings, drawings, collages, assemblages, theater sets, Tiffany window displays (referred to the store by Andy Warhol). His style may have defined and unified the “New York School” idea more than any other factor. His cover for the epochal Anthology of New York Poets (1970), edited by Padgett and David Shapiro, is emblematic: a bold, clear line, in red, depicting pleasantly mundane things (jacks, a bowling ball, cherries, a butterfly), in a style that evokes midcentury grade school texts, and gently insists on making them the wonders we first saw them as.

That was in tune with the poets’ aesthetic: a taste for humor, historical reference, childhood touchstones, everyday business, out-of-context chitchat, ultracasual surrealism, and “I am guarding it from mess and message” (Berrigan paraphrasing O’Hara): a total ban on proselytizing of any sort. The poets could be seen as a sort of bastard lineage issuing from the French succession, from Nerval to maybe René Char, but expressing themselves in pure Americanese; they were also reacting against the Beats and their disheveled mysticism. The second generation were young and poor in the great city, which was beginning to look like a sinking ship just then, so they were naturally scavengers. Holding down low-intensity jobs (proofreading, housecleaning, data entry), they had loads of time to hang out, and everybody collaborated with everybody while they sat around smoking pot and drinking Pepsi, maybe speeding. Ron Padgett:

At that time we didn’t speak English, we spoke Poetry. Our conversation was studded with quotations from the poetry we idolized. If a supermarket were closing, we’d point and laugh and say, “The academy of the hamburger is closing its doors” (a variation on a John Ashbery line).

Brainard stands somewhere in the neighborhood of Pop Art, imagery-wise, although he was not seduced by the idea of mechanical reproduction. Warhol’s flowers were silk-screened from stencils; Brainard’s were individually painted, cut out, and glued to the panel. Brainard was a kid who loved to draw and learned to copy everything he saw in the popular culture of Tulsa before going on to absorb art history. His pictorial vocabulary had as its base the commercial art of the 1940s and 1950s, which triggered the memories of his contemporaries, but he transcended nostalgia through purity and simplicity. He was gentle, benevolent, quietly funny (even gentle in his sex drawings)—but he was not minor. With his profusion of work, always satisfyingly itself and immediately recognizable as his, expressing every kind of emotion through flowers or cigarette butts or Nancy or tattoos or comic strips, he made a world, and it endures, as vivid as ever.

The comics in C Comics range from one page in length to as many as thirteen, for Padgett and Brainard’s “The Nancy Book” (impressionistic single panels of the comic strip character Nancy amid the animal kingdom with a spontaneous poem running across them). Some of the collaborations look like genuinely two-handed affairs, and these are generally the pairings with close friends (Padgett, Berrigan, O’Hara); in other cases Brainard drew it all and left the invited poet to fill in the talk balloons. In the case of Edwin Denby’s contribution, a one-sentence poem done two ways on two pages, Brainard was (very likely) illustrating an existing text. Clearly made to measure were James Schuyler’s “ads”—many of them targeting Hilton Kramer, The New York Times’ chief art critic, whose lips were pursed in disgust at nearly everything contemporary—as pointed as Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons had been a decade earlier.

All the dialogue in Kenward Elmslie’s “Pay Dirt” is carried on by women’s shoes. The speakers in Ashbery’s “The Great Explosion Mystery” include the outlines of eight states and a variety of cattle brands. Schuyler’s “What to Do?” (after Georges Feydeau) is a three-handed play enacted by generic cartoon people in unchanging poses, anticipating the comics David Rees put out forty years later at the time of the Iraq War. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Fleur-Love Story” is spoken by flowers, simply but rapturously drawn by Brainard: “I am five forget-me-nots. I have five names. I am five times more ruthless than only one forget-me-not. Do you like to pick forget-me-nots? Don’t!!”

In a brief foreword, Padgett quotes a letter O’Hara wrote to Larry Rivers in 1964: “It is a cartoon revival because Joe Brainard is so astonishingly right in the drawing etc.” Brainard had the touch. He fought with self-doubt but his line never wavered. His mise-en-page was flawless. His applied works—nominally “commercial art,” though the commerce was so teensy—were always effective advertisements for whatever they were heralding. He was very social, loved having friends. So what could be more natural than to throw a party on the page? In C Comics he supplies the decor, the ambience, the dice, the game board; his invitees bring music and intoxicants. The party has been nonstop fun for sixty years.