Beck, Joel

Joel Beck 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. In 1961, he lived for several months in Manhattan before returning to the West Coast. In the early 1960s, Beck moved into a converted closet in a housing unit on the Berkeley campus known as "Haste House" and continued to do cartoons for The Pelican. During that time he published three underground comic books, Lenny of Laredo, Marching Marvin and The Profit. In 1965, humor magazine editors voted to choose the Nation's Top College Cartoonist and gave the honor to Beck. In January 1966, the Pelican reprinted much of his previous work and labeled him "Man of the Decade." His cartoons also appeared in the Berkeley Barb.