HINCKLE. FREE AT LAST.

1985. Hinckle. Free At Last. Cardboard. 21 1/8" X 13 3/4". Signed "R. Crumb" lower right.

An unusual Crumb piece: a cardboard poster that slots into a
newspaper rack. Warren Hinckle was a San Francisco journalist who had a column in the Examiner. He had written a series of articles critical of the SF police and then mayor Dianne Feinstein. A few days after Hinckle penned an article about the arrest of porn star Marilyn Chambers during constant raids on the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Street Theater, he was arrested for walking his basset hound, Bentley, without a leash.

A humorous critique of excessive police force. Hinckle is dragged off by three big cops. He cuts an amusing character with his eye patch and long hair. The lines radiating from his head make a halo-like effect, creating a kind of St. Hinckle. His dog Bentley is also carried away. The drawing effectively expresses the ridiculousness of three beefy cops dragging away a harmless journalist and his dog, a microcosm of the widespread resentment felt by the counterculture against authority and the police.

For related information see the Wild Dog poster. 

Wild Dog

Robert Crumb and Victor Moscoso. 1985. Wild Dog. Poster. 18 x 24 inches.

“You've got it about right, those columns were in the Chronicle and the rack card was to herald my moving from the Chronicle to the rival Examiner. Crumb also did some editorial- cartoon type drawings for the Chronicle to accompany my columns about the absurdity of it it taking 30 cops to bust one naked woman. You should see the "Wild Dogs" poster Crumb did at the time in partnership with cartoonists Dan O'Neill and Victor Moscoso. The "Wild Dogs" poster was commissioned by the Mitchell Brothers, whose O'Farrell Street Theater, which Hunter Thompson called "The Carnegie Hall of sex in America," Feinstein was constantly raiding and where the Chambers bust occured. (Chambers before starring in the Mitchell's porn classic "Beyond the Green Door" was the cover girl model for the Ivory Snow "99 and 44/100 per cent pure" soapboxes. The poster portrays Feinstein as Little Bo Beep with a huge hoop skirt under which the porcine police are beating the shit out of everyone under her undies -- including me. The "Wild Dogs" poster was famously plastered on the marble stall walls of every bathroom, ladies and gents, in San Francisco City Hall...If you want a copy of the poster -- its included in a book I'm just completing called "Who Killed Hunter S. Thompsom" to be published by Last Gasp of San Francisco in June -- (Crumb drew the scene of copy mayhem under Feinstein's hoop skirt.)...

Cheers,

Warren Hinckle