The Complete C Comics V. 1 by Joe Brainard (and many more). Essay by Bill Kartalopoulos, Foreword by Ron Padgett. $45. 200 pages, hardcover. 

Do not make your Best of The Year list selections until you've read this book. Without a doubt, one of the most important comic book releases of 2025. We are extremely thankful to Bill Kartalopoulos for pushing this project ahead and writing an extremely valuable essay, a book so many people in comics have waited for for so long.

Here are some of my thoughts:

Looking at this new C Comics collection brought up some thoughts. Since the early 00s, poetry comics DID happen, but they did NOT happen in publications like Ink Brick. There is the famous Jean Cocteau quote about a child prodigy poet, Minou Drouet. When asked what he thought of her, Cocteau said 'all children are poets, except Minou Drouet.' That's how I feel about Ink Brick. All comics [have the potential to be] poetic, except those published in Ink Brick, comics that just graft cartooning onto outdated and conservative poetic forms. What's happening now, at the heart of comics fringes, is something different than simply breaking up a sentence over many panels and calling it 'comics poetry.' Instead, many young artists focus on publishing work that is a short exploration of a thought or a feeling, and this exploration unifies text and imagery in the pursuit of eliciting feeling from the reader. Instead of naturalistic fiction (which dominated alternative comic spaces in the 80s and 90s) we begin to see less and less focus on characters. Even auto bio seems to be disintegrating. Self publishing art cartoonists now often begin with an unnamed persons speaking directly to the reader, with great focus on how such a person poses on the page, how they carry their weight. We see, in these kinds of comics, an avoidance of epiphany and an avoidance of resolution, though (crucially) without an avoidance of feeling. If we attempt to trace the origins of this, I'd say Doucet looms large, though I'd narrow her influence to before her concessions to alt comic conventions got the better of her (New York Diary and everything that came after, until her return to form with Time Zone J). In an early Doucet strip, called 'Month of December', Doucet stands on a bridge and says 'Christmas is coming.' She sniffs her nose, 'it's cold....'. In the final panel, she hurls herself off the bridge: '...and I'm gonna die?' That is the entire strip. Is it about suicide? Depression? Maybe, but no simple prosaic judgement can contain the strips power. So many emerging cartoonists work in this way today. This makes sense, as pure comics get at the core of poetry better than poetry itself could. Poetry strives to make expression new while working with an inherited set of symbols, the letters of the alphabet you write your poetry in. A comic like Doucet's goes farther, she does not write 'I stood on the bridge and began to speak to you.' She draws the bridge, her description of this specific bridge is already charged with a poetry that the letters themselves could never contain, no matter how you place them or rearrange them (all the tortured word placement of modernist poetry could have been solved, it seems, with drawing). Traditional cartoonists worked hard to make the bridge disappear. If Milton Caniff's story required him to draw a bridge, he'd do it perfectly, but so perfectly that you would not notice it or linger on it, the bridge merely a prosaic detail to connect point A to point B, no matter how proudly he drew it. Doucet allows the charge of her expression to be seen in every line, you ignore nothing, it's all part of the whole, just as nothing can be discarded or ignored in poetry. Doucet, and the generation that embraces her approach, is not like the group of avant garde poets who made C Comics. Joe Brainard and his ilk lived and breathed what poetry was and is, they devoted their life to it. When they sought to make comics, the tools of poetic expression were already on call within them, and the tools were finely honed. The work in C Comics feels mature and exact, work made by people conscious of what they were doing. Poetry comics circa 2025 are most often made by those with no (or little) interest in orthodox poetry, but instead in how comics can be used for self expression. This search for how to use comics in a mature way has been subverted and derailed for a century. When someone taps into the poetic potential of comics, you see it happen on the page, you feel the charge, 'finally, this is how it can be done!'. Lately, I see this moment of conception everywhere, all the parts coming into place organically and the thrill of artistic gestalt happening in a way that it has really never happened before, the absolute triumph of raw artistic discovery. You'd think C Comics would connect to this, but it feels oddly distant, not so much a relative to todays explosion as it is an acquaintance who, if you come to think of it, you never actually met, . And yet, despite this disconnect: as contemporary underground and fringe comics lean deeper into their poetic destiny, it is very important that this book is out now. C Comics is a tome that can now be corresponded with, there is enough strength in contemporary and organic poetic comics that the community making them won't be bulldozed by what is within this book ('it's already been done'). Instead it can act as a prophecy that you missed, and reading it now is exhilarating in its affirmation but not so influential as to change the flow of where we are already headed.

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