Crumb Products
Haight & Ashbury limited giclée print
Haight & Ashbury limited giclée print
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$80.00 USD
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In 1992, Crumb sketched a drawing in his sketchbook illustrating the myth that he and his exwife Dana sold his first underground comic book from their baby carriage on the corner of Haight & Ashbury in San Francisco. That occurred, supposedly, in 1968. In fact, Crumb never really sold them for a baby carriage. Rather, Dana and her friend peddled the comics from store to store trying sell them wholesale. But it did start out as a very small scale operation from the hippie epicenter of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which would soon include Berkeley.
It may seem odd that Crumb decided to illustrate something that he's pretty sure never happened, but he was very amused with the story. It somehow seemed to capture the spirit of his fledgling enterprise perfectly, so he decided to illustrate it. Also, because Crumb was taking so much LSD and smoking so much marijhauna at that time, there's the possibility that he might not be able to remember something that actually did happen.
Thirty years later, in 2022, Crumb reworked that sketch and placed the real buildings on that corner of Haight & Ashbury in the background. He then colored the illustration with watercolors. We enlarged the drawing to a 14" x 18" size and printed it on white Somerset Velvet archival paper in a standard frame size of 18" x 24." The entire giclée edition of 300 prints is printed with Epson Ultrachrome inks, which are archival inks. Each print is numbered in pencil. It's been a long and winding road with this image and the convoluted history of the origin of underground comics, but, as the Greatful Dead say, "What a long, strange trip it's been!"
