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Lenny of Laredo by Joel Beck (1st Printing)


Lenny of Laredo by Joel Beck (1st Printing)
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    LENNY of LAREDO by Joel Beck. FIRST Printing (pale green cover) 1965.

    VERY SCARCE ITEM.

    Either 100 were printed (according to printer Phil Howe or 500 copies (according to Joel Beck). In either case, exceptionally few have survived since it is a slim (14 pages) hand-stapled publication with a fragile self-cover and it was published well before such ephemera was seriously collected. This particularly rare 1st edition simply never shows up for sale. It was valued at $500 in Jay Kennedy's Underground Comix Price Guide way back in 1982! By most accounts this is the second underground comic book (preceded only by Jaxon's God Nose).

    To put this in perspective, Joel Beck created Lenny of Laredo a full two years before R. Crumb's first Zap hit the scene. The potty-mouthed "Lenny" in Lenny of Laredo is inspired by '50s stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, whose monologues sprinkled with four-letter words shocked middle America. Beck, living in the San Francisco Bay area, was also inspired by Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement at the University of California--Berkeley in the mid-sixties. This is a cornerstone item in any serious underground comix collection.

    Condition: Very Good+. As the scan indicates, there is sun bleaching around the edges of the front cover and, to a lesser extent, the back cover. The cover's upper left corner has a quarter-inch tear and is creased about 1/2 inch diagonally, affecting other pages to a lesser extent. The original price (".50") is pencilled in the upper right corner. The internal pages are bright white. Dimensions: 8.5 x 11 inches.

    Provenance: Certified to be from the collection of a childhood friend of Joel Beck.

    One copy in stock. Adults only.