Keep on Truckin'

1968

Date: February 1968 · Place: San Francisco, California · Figures: Robert Crumb, cartoonist · Don Donahue, Apex Novelties publisher · Blind Boy Fuller, original song source 1936 · Tags: Underground, Comix, BootlegEconomy 01. A One-Page Filler Robert Crumb draws the strip as a one-page filler for the first issue of Zap Comix, published by Don Donahue's Apex Novelties in San Francisco in February 1968. Five panels of long-legged men strutting forward in big shoes, the only text the title borrowed from a 1936 Blind Boy Fuller blues. Crumb sells issue one out of a baby carriage on Haight Street with his wife Dana. Print run: about five thousand. 02. The Bootleg Decade By 1970 the strutting figure is on T-shirts, mudflaps, decals, rolling papers, and back windows of vans from Vermont to Oregon. Crumb sees almost none of the money; he has not bothered to copyright the image and the underground press regards copyright as a square hang-up. In 1977 he registers the design and sues a Long Island bootlegger. A federal court rules the image is in the public domain because of years of uncontested reproduction. The lawsuit costs him more than he wins. "It became a curse. I'd see it on people's vans, on bumper stickers, and I'd just cringe." — Robert Crumb, interview with Terry Gilliam, 1988 Sources • Patrick Rosenkranz, 'Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975' (Fantagraphics, 2002) • Terry Zwigoff (dir.), 'Crumb' (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994) • Robert Crumb v. Aurelio Productions, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, 1977