Want fewer ads?

Joel Beck (May 7, 1943, Ross, California – September 14, 1999, Point Richmond, California) was a San Francisco Bay Area artist and cartoonist. His comic book, Lenny of Laredo, one of the earliest underground comic books of the 1960s, was the first underground comic book published on the West Coast.

Growing up in El Sobrante, California, Beck was an ill and bedridden child, who battled a combination of tuberculosis and spinal meningitis. In Richmond, California, while attending De Anza High School, he began visiting UC Berkeley and submitting cartoons to the campus newspaper, The Pelican. Soon he dropped out of high school and never graduated. In 1961, he lived for several months in Manhattan before returning to the West Coast.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Joel Beck", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0