The Complete C Comics

In the mid-1960s, legendary artist and writer Joe Brainard (I Remember) teamed with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and many more for these pioneering collaborative comic strips—unavailable for decades and collected here for the first time.

“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD… RELAX!”

In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry-reading flyers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two-year-old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others—all of them New York School poets—to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.

The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine more than sixty years ago. Brainard’s energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating O’Hara's recasting of a cowboy as a mash-note-writing lover, Padgett’s experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), cameos by Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.

This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard’s creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.

Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was a visual artist and writer. Among his books are the classic and widely loved I Remember, Collected Writings, and many shorter volumes. His paintings, assemblages, and collages are in many private and public collections, such as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bill Kartalopoulos is a comics scholar, educator, curator, and editor. He is the Programming Director for the MoCCA Arts Festival and is a member of the organizing committee for the New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium. He has worked as an assistant to Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman and as the Series Editor for the #1 New York Times–bestselling Best American Comics series. He teaches graduate level courses about comics at Washington University in St. Louis, the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France. He is currently finishing a book about comics, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Ron Padgett is a poet, teacher, editor, and translator. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Great Balls of Fire, Collected Poems, and Pink Dust (NYRB Poets). He has translated the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire (Zone: Selected Poems) and Blaise Cendrars (Complete Poems), and has authored memoirs of Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, and Dick Gallup, and a biography of his father, Wayne Padgett.