Ally Knapp, Class of 2024, College of Arts and Sciences

Cartoonist Joel Beck’s Lenny of Laredo (1965) was a counterculture comic that he created while visiting UC Berkeley during the 1964 Free Speech Movement on campus, which emerged in the wake of university policies that limited student speech. He was inspired to produce a visual satire of comedian Lenny Bruce, a purveyor of radical free speech, and the movement he was witnessing.

Beck’s comic was part of the Underground Comix Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which emerged as an avenue for artists to explore provocative subjects and comment on culture/society in the midst of intense political change coupled with restrictive censorship. Ultimately, the creative freedom that the movement lent artists allowed uncensored work to thrive.

Although Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix is widely credited as the seminal model for the Comix Movement, Lenny of Laredo was released over two years before Zap Comix.

Lenny of Laredo serves as a satirical, thought-provoking commentary on free speech, which he examines through the lens of a young boy with a bad mouth. The story demonstrates the dramatic effect vulgar language has when prohibited versus when it becomes mainstream. Beck ends the story with a warning: “Keep Censorship Alive!” a conclusion that suggests censorship is ironically counterproductive.

In comix historian Patrick Rosenkranz’s book Rebel Visions, he explains that despite “repression,” work produced during the Comix Movement paved the way for graphic mediums/styles and products in the small-press market seen in contemporary society. According to Rosenkranz, artists who contributed to the movement, including Beck, elevated comics to a medium of self-expression and “unrestrained passion.”

Lenny of Laredo is not only emblematic of the Comix Movement and its impactful legacy. The piece emerged when it did partly out of the currents of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, thus also serving as an important, distinct work that, as an early commentary on free speech, identifies a link from the Free Speech Movement to the beginnings of the Underground Comix Movement.

Source

Revolting Lenny of Laredo, Joel Beck, 1965. Underground Comix Collection, #8644, Box 16, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/10320704

Bibliography

Barb, Berkeley. “Books: Lenny of Laredo!” Review of Lenny of Laredo, by Joel Beck. Berkeley Barb (Berkeley, CA), October 8, 1965, 2. Accessed October 3, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/community.28033059.pdf.

Rosenkranz, Patrick. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975. 2nd ed. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2008. Accessed October 3, 2021.