Keep on Truckin'

SOLD - please e-mail us if you would like to know when we find another

This is brilliantly colored silkscreen is an officially licensed Personality Poster from late 1967. It has a “R Crumb © 1967” credit in the lower right corner. Personality Poster distributed it with the credit “Authorized Licensee Personality Poster 222 Lake Ave Yonkers NY 10701” in the lower left corner. Any poster with this image but without those credits, or from the first printing “© 1967 R. Crumb”, is an unauthorized copy.

The Keep on Truckin’  image is part of a one-page cartoon by Robert Crumb, published in the first issue of Zap Comix in early 1968. A visual burlesque of the lyrics of the Blind Boy Fuller song, "Truckin' My Blues Away", the cartoon consists of an assortment of men, drawn in Crumb's distinctive style, strutting across various landscapes.

The perpetually tortured Crumb discusses the piece here:

“I became acutely self-conscious about what I was doing. Was I now a "spokesman" for the hippies or what? I had no idea how to handle my new position in society! ... Take Keep on Truckin... for example. Keep on Truckin'... is the curse of my life. This stupid little cartoon caught on hugely. There was a D.J. on the radio in the seventies who would yell out every ten minutes: "And don't forget to KEEP ON TR-R-RUCKIN'!" Boy, was that obnoxious! Big feet equals collective optimism. You're a walkin' boy! You're movin' on down the line! It's proletarian. It's populist. I was thrown off track! I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn't want to do 'shtick'—the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That's when I started to let out all of my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being ‘America's Best Loved Hippy Cartoonist’”