Review by Booklist Review
Brainard (1942-94) arrived in New York a few years after the pop-art movement brought comics imagery onto the high-art scene. Thus, his comics-appropriation at first blush seems Johnny-come-lately. But he was using comics differently from how the famous pop artists did, not for aesthetic philosophizing but for self-exploration. Brainard was gay, and he often placed the little girl star of Ernie Bushmiller's graphically bare-bones comic strip Nancy, an embodiment of innocence nonpareil, in graphic heterosexual situations for never-specified motives that might have included dissipating the power of what he wasn't attracted by. He also subverted high-art seriousness and cultural solemnity with Nancy by placing her smiling-bulb face on, say, all the nudes descending a staircase in Duchamp's cubist icon, or in Teddy Roosevelt's niche on Mount Rushmore. He wrote Dadaist stories in which he and Nancy interacted, two of which appear with the 53 Nancy artworks in an album that also attests Brainard's wit and humility. This is hilarious, not however personal self-referential, stuff.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
