The New York Review of Books publication of the complete collection of Joe Brainard's legendary C Comics has arrived!  There were only two issues of C Comics published – in 1964 & 1965 – but that was still enough to create quite a splash.  Unsurprisingly, given their unprecedented – and somewhat abstruse – conflation of comics and poetry, they had low print runs and have been quite hard to come by (not to mention expensive) for years. But no longer!  

This hefty, oversize hardcover – with the accent on the vertical, measuring 8 1/2" x 14" – replicates the original dimensions of the first issue (the second issue was published in the standard 8 1/2" x 11" size and is also reproduced here at its original size, bracketed with 1 1/2" gray bars at top and bottom).  This edition also includes a foreword by Ron Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics.  200 pages in all.

While the underground comix makers that emerged a few years later are, rightly, associated with deliberate transgression against status quo society, often employing explicit in-your-face imagery that was blatantly sexual, the work contained in C Comics can be seen as being equally (and precociously) transgressive, just differently so, its modus operandi more subtly encoded, relying primarily on the textual elements and their juxtaposition with specific imagery.  

Initiated by the then twenty-two year old Brainard, C Comics works to fuse the energies of self-directed drawing with those of poetic composition – drawn from work of his friends in the poetry scene* – within the framework of comic book production to create a hybrid form of comics poetry, one that intriguingly evokes – and to some degree incorporates – then-current advertising line-art and advertising copy.  

Key to this modus operandi was a deliberate æstheticization of consumerism.  Here in the pages of C Comics, the manufacture of desire that is advertising’s raison d'être is inserted into the comics text and manifested in the cartooned forms.  Brainard’s comics bring cartooned characters into the advertising process and position them in such a way so as to leverage the detachment of the manufacture of desire from the goods and services that it was the designed function of the advertising to direct and/or entice the consumer towards – primarily through an adept use of irony.

Doing so allows that detached desire to escape into the reader/recipient’s own control via the variety of adjacent cartooned imagery which were (are) more or less free floating, not attached to any specific good or service other than themselves.  

This process provided – and continues to provide – readers with an opportunity to repurpose, shape, and direct this freed desire as they see fit, enabling it to be incorporated into a the individual reader’s personal self-reflexivity, bringing a liberation from (some) dictates of capitalism.

Notable among the cartooned characters so employed are Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, but also Wonder Woman, and the eternal triangle of Archie, Betty and Veronica – occasionally in overtly sexual and/or sexualized ways – as well as cartooned works of fine art.  

C Comics was, of course published at the outset of the ascendancy of Pop Art and clearly overlaps in places with Warhol's – and others’ – concerns and strategies, but its key differentiating factor is that while other artists incorporated comics, comic books and the characters that populated them into their own art practices involving painting, sculpture, etc. designed for display in galleries and museums, the work that makes up C Comics was actually comics and published as such and so provided material that was – and continues to be – more useful to the comics form.  Making its republication today a cause for celebration.

And, we've posted a hefty hallery of images from the book on the Copacetic Tumblr, HERE.

ISBN: 9781681379876

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*Largely those associated with what has come to be known as The New York School, notably Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest and Ron Padgett.