Poster by Beat-adjacent artist, poet, filmmaker, and Wichita native Bob Branaman. The same design, printed on a grey-blue ground, also appeared as the centerfold to Charles Plymell’s underground newspaper The Last Times, issue II, variant B, in 1967; and the Oakland Museum of California holds a poster apparently identical to this one, listed without an identified artist, under the title “Follow the Dotted Cross.” The detailed, dense image combines various mythological creatures and abstruse, arcane symbolism; the poster’s text reads, in part: “Come into our Game Room! The purpus of this kind of Learning / To show the newly inishuated the kind of “games” that are possable with there newly develoypd Powers, ovecourse they are under derection of skild mastars” [sic all].

Branaman’s work was prominently featured in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors”; one of his better known posters, also from 1966, was for the Monterey Dance Concert (“It was a trip…hanging with Janis Joplin and housing the Band, for 3 days. Her singing blew us all away. Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg were attendant.”) Charles Plymell later reminisced: “I moved to San Francisco about a year prior to the “Haight”…I had the famous party in 1963 where the beats met the hippies at the 1403 Gough St. pad. Later Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg moved in with me…Bob lived in S.F. and in Big Sur where he invited formative groups such as Big Brother to his drop out homestead in Big Sur. During this time, Bob did a lot of seminal art work and I published some of it at places where I worked as a printer and on the old Multilith I printed the first Zap Comix on a few years later.”

$375