Morning Paper, 1967

Print isn’t dead! Well, at least it wasn’t 57 years ago as seen in this poster, a rare collaboration by artists Rick Griffin and Stanley Mouse The work is referred to as "Morning Paper," but it’s really more of a take off of the comics pages.  Most of the art is by Griffin, featuring characters and references, often from commercial advertising art (Optimo cigars, Camel cigarettes, Mickey Mouse and Griffin’s own “Murph the Surf,” cartoon character) matched with actions or lettering that make no sense. This is a classic reinforcement of the sense of hippies as “tribe,” speaking their own language and understanding their own symbols.

This poster was a seminal work that launched Rick Griffin into orbit, announcing a stylistic change from his traditional pen and ink illustative style into something way more psychedelic including the famous Flying Eyeball poster 4 months later and Aoxomoxoa in January 1969.  This poster pre-dated the first issue of Zap Comics by about 6 months and it changed Zap founder Robert Crumb's notion of what a comic book could be. Indeed, soon Rick Griffin (and Victor Moscoso) were contributing regulalry to Zap.

Taj Mahal, (born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks in 1942), is an American blues musician who plays the guitar, piano, banjo, and harmonica, among many other instruments. He often incorporates elements of world music into his works and has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his almost 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, and the South Pacific.

In 1967-1968 he worked with Ry Cooder and the Rolling Stones, with whom he has performed at various times throughout his career. In 1968, he performed in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus after releasing his first solo album, called simply Taj Mahal.

Here's the story behind the poster, from the mouth of artist Rick Griffin!

"I got to San Francisco and I started doing posters, and I was concerned with a poster image. At one point, I got the idea -- not because I was particularly interested in comics, more than I was interested in finding a new way to do a poster -- to do this comic-strip poster. [FD 89] I had a flash to do it. I said, "Well, it wouldn't be important for it to have a story, because that's not the purpose of using a comic strip." The comic strip was only a format, like there's the title of the paper up here, and there's a panel-to-panel format and it was in color. It was a trip to have a poster and disguise it in a different format, and I thought it was irrelevant to have a storyline. I thought it would be better to just have images, because if it had a storyline, it might even take you too far; you'd forget it was a poster. I wanted it to function as a poster, but look like a comic strip.

So I got the idea and I thought it would be interesting, but I dismissed it because I thought there was something so basic about it, so obvious, that it almost seemed like too obvious a solution. I thought it would be corny, or something. I kept trying to think of a better idea and I couldn't. Finally, my deadline was catching up to me, and I hadn't thought of any type of image that was better, so I went ahead and did it. I just rattled the thing off, made three-color separations on it, took it to the printer and thought, "Well, I hope this doesn't go over like a lead balloon." I remember going down with Mouse and Kelley to the printer, to look at this thing. I didn't tell them anything about it. They were going down there to do some work on some of their posters. They saw it, and Kelley went, "Man!" and he really freaked out on it.

I remember going to the dance, and the announcer said, "Now listen, go out into the lobby and look at the poster for next week's dance, because it's by Rick Griffin and it looks like a comic strip, but it's the poster for next week's dance. It's really a trip." Everybody was fairly blown away by it, and I was amazed, because I thought it was a trite idea. Crumb saw it -- this is what he told me later -- he saw the panel breakdown, how there was no storyline. He was always concerned with story. At that time, he was working on Zap #1, and said he realized, by looking at that poster, that you could do that, and he took the liberty from that poster, to do it too.

-  "Ultra Modernistic Abstract Expressionist Cartoons." - Rick Griffin, Interview by Denis Wheary, Dec 2003, excerpted from The Comics Journal #257