Meant to run this post on May 31st, but it’s been a busy day, and not just on the blog. Most of us probably remember Gilbert Shelton for the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but in the early 60s my dad introduced me to Help!, motorcycle magazines, and Wonder Wart Hog:
… The Hog of Steel was first published in Help! magazine, which is also where R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat got his start. Shortly afterward, he started appearing in Drag Cartoons, Cycle Toons, and other humor magazines aimed at motor hobbyists. (These stories are where it was established that Wonder sometimes rides a Fastass Sumbichi motorcycle.)… But it was when Shelton moved to San Francisco and got involved in underground comix that Wonder Warthog really started taking off…
Today, Shelton’s main creative outlet is Not Quite Dead, a comics series about an aging rock band, long available in various European countries but only recently in America. He still finds time for some work on the Freak Brothers, but little or none for Wonder Warthog. Still, many of Wonder’s adventures are kept in print by Rip Off Press, and such merchandise as T-shirts and coffee mugs can still be found. Even today, the Hog of Steel is capable of reaching out to new readers.
A little more biography of the artist as a young freak:
… After graduate school, Shelton returned to New York, where his work was published in Harvey Kurtzman’s humor magazine “Help!.”
“He published some of my gag cartoons from the University of Texas magazine and finally led me to write and draw nude Wonder Wart-Hog stories for ‘Help!.’ which I did a few of before ‘Help!’ went bankrupt,” Shelton said. “When I started, Gloria Steinem was the assistant editor at ‘Help!’ Then Terry Gilliam was his assistant, then Terry decided to go to England. Then Robert Crumb was supposed to be next, and when he reported to work, there was a dejected looking Harvey Kurtzman, because ‘Help!’ had gone bankrupt…
Shelton created the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in Austin, before he moved to San Francisco, when he saw a double feature of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. ” I thought I could do something like that, so I tried to do a little film,” Shelton said. “The first Freak Brothers strip was actually an advertisement for this film, but everyone liked the strip so much I gave up my ambition to be a filmmaker. Fat Freddy’s Cat was inspired by ‘Cicero’s Cat,’ a small strip at the bottom of the strip ‘Mutt and Jeff,’ by Bud Fisher. It was in the Sunday papers.”…
Although he occasionally draws for pleasure, Shelton said, “Drawing is still difficult for me, a matter of trial and error…. Robert Crumb draws all the time, and he has a big vocabulary of images. When he wants to draw something, he can draw from memory. Me, when I want to draw a picture of a hat, I have to look at a hat, take of my hat and look at it, because I can’t remember what a hat looks like.”
Recent interview, with photo, here in the Comics Journal. Mr. Shelton has been living in Paris for many years, but somehow he still looks Texan…
(Hat tip, commentor FridayNext.)
Just Some Fuckhead
lolwho
trollhattan
Tunch = Fat Freddie’s cat.
I know this is old information but helpful in understanding the blog host’s livin’ conditions.
Bog love the Freak Brothers! By co-ink-eye-dink I’m listening to the Rhino SF Nuggets collection so this topic fits better than perfect.
NotMax
While there have been only a baker’s dozen Freak Bros. comics, they have not been out of print for more than a scant few months at a time since created.
NotMax
Kind of surprising that the passing of Andrew Greeley has not been noted on the front page.
Fine columnist, writer and humanitarian.
PsiFighter37
Wooooooóöō
PF37 +7
Food poisoning is fucking overrated
Yatsuno
@PsiFighter37: There are much less hazardous methods of weight loss. Just sayin’.
I am way too fucking sober right now after the shit day I’ve had.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yatsuno:
There are ways to remedy that.
NotMax
@Yatsuno
Cybertini for you.
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NotMax
Crap. That didn’t come out at all the way it looked in pre-post.
Randy P
I remember Fritz the Cat, but what I remember is the animated movie by Ralph Bakshi, a guy who was creating a lot of buzz for awhile. Then he took on Lord of the Rings, and it was incoherent and awful, and then I don’t remember hearing about him anymore.
Yatsuno
@NotMax: They never do. But I appreciate the sentiment.
@Omnes Omnibus: The Laphroaig is for NYD time. But I have a nip of amaretto I might just crack into here in a bit. I need to throw away my eyes here anyway.
PeakVT
@NotMax: FYWP says FY. (Though [code][/code] might help.)
NotMax
@Randy P
Bakshi’s been a busy, busy beaver all those years. Still is.
Don’t remember the flap over the scene of Mighty Mouse sniffing up a substance in the Bakshi series of cartoons?
Yatsuno
Note to self: get more amaretto.
Misterpuff
Introduced to the Warthog via a paperback reprint picked up at a yard sale in 1970.
Blew my mind.
First introduction to the concept of Republican RW = American Fascism and the nifty license plate joke AuH2O for their 1964 standard bearer.
Of course, I was prepped for it by hours of reading MAD magazine in my youth….the child is the father of the MAD man.
The Warthog prepped for The Fear and Loathing to come…..
The prophet Nostradumbass
When I was a kid, in the 70’s, my dad had some Freak Brothers, and some Zap Comix. He hid them in a night stand in my parents’ bedroom :-). I don’t know what happened to them, but I do have some boxes of his old issues of Ramparts and the LA Free Press.
ETA: and the Realist.
kdaug
This.
Fred
@Randy P: I’m a Robert Crumb fan and his inking style has influenced my pen drawings. I love the “Fritz the Cat” movie but Crumb claims he was so disgusted by it that he killed off Fritz in response. Seems rather extreem but artists are funny like that. I never heard what it was that so upset the man.
Check out the new set of blues artist trading cards by Willam Stout. They are inspired by Crumbs designs from gosh knows how long ago. Two of my favorite artists mining the same rich vein.
And Freak Bros is great too. I always think of the poster with the boys putting their clothes on in the debree of debauchery with a naked Gretta Groupie laying on the floor pointing to a pile of underground comix saying “Let’s read some more of those and do it all again.” YEAH, LET’S!
raven
Captain Pissgums rules!
COB
My favorite FFFB quote:
Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope
Followed by:
While you’re out there smashing the state, don’t forget to keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart!”
raven
@COB: I thought I said that!
Fred
@NotMax: Bakshi’s “Heavy Trafic” was a great and scarey movie. It’s a nightmare ride through the mid 20th century urban american jungle with a protagonist seeming to be Bakshi’s alterego. The main character’s twisted encounter with a geriatric Walt Disneyesque charachter is a priceless rip on the sterilized american culture of the era. It touches on the mob, street punks, drug culture and the grotesqueries of growing up in a city.
jayboat
@COB:
Words to live by. (I knew one of you old DFH’s would beat me to it.)
@Fred- that movie had a profound affect on me. To me, it was like an acid trip revelation- for the first time someone had captured the way I was feeling about the world in a medium I could relate to. Very groovy, man.
Thanks for the thread, AL.
Southern Beale
Liberal media alert ….
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Just saw Mnemosyne’s posts from last night about the Nekofly. I bought a kragonfly shortly after she mentioned it here the first time. Max is doing the same thing Charlotte does. I’m trying to work out how to give everyone their own time with it, which is nearly impossible with Maxie’s obsession.
I seriously want a large kittenator. Phydo had a demo out, but none in stock, and I loved the extra motion the hinge gave it.
Todd
OT – ALEC does a study, and rate America’s worst Third World hellhole as being the shizzle.
Neddie Jingo
Shelton taught the fourteen-year-old me a very important lesson in what would eventually become my chosen vocation.
I don’t remember the exact comic — fallible memory suggests that it was the same ish in which the famous “dope will get you through…” aphorism appeared. After a dry spell, Freddie gets hold of some primo weed and gets a junkie-level case of the munchies. He blasts his way through an entire grocery store, snarfing up everything in sight. Finally sated, he collapses, and lets out a gigantic…
BELCH!
But here is the genius of Shelton: That belch wasn’t just rendered in ordinary lettering; it was in huge, glorious Gothic type, filling the whole panel with curlicues and (for all I remember) putti blowing bugles. You could smell the thing right off the page.
This, of course, made the whole thing 650,000 times funnier. So this was the lesson: Typography, rather than a boring, dry aspect of graphic design, can actually lend enormous support to the purport of the design. It can be, you know, funny. Obvious now, but it wasn’t then. Thank you , Mr. Shelton.
(I’d already intuited this from Walt Kelly’s P. T. Bridgeport sometime earlier, but this was a really in-your-face lesson for me.)
So yes, a hearty Many Harry Returns to ye, Gilbert. And thanks.
FridayNext
Wow. I have been hat tipped. That is totally going on my cv.
For those interested in Bakshi, he just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise money for The Last Days of Coney Island a project that died a decade ago.
I also read somewhere there was talk of a Wizards sequel, which would be kinda cool.
edited to add link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ralphbakshi/last-days-of-coney-island-0?ref=live
RepubAnon
“Dope will get you through times of no money…”
Who knew that George W thought it said “Dope will get you to times of no money”, and behaved accordingly?
Southern Beale
LOL. Here’s the USA Today story:
Methinks the cards have been stacked in this deck. I get the strong feeling that our strengthening economy is causing all sorts of butthurt in conservative circles, putting a crimp in their 2014 talking points (which is why we’re hearing so much about BENGHAZI and IRS TEA PARTY and less about SOLYNDRA and JOBS).
You know, California is trying to figure out what to do with its budget surplus. Don’t hear ALEC talking about that one, now do ya?
aimai
I saw the documentary, Crumb, and was astonished, moved, and disgusted all at the same time. This stuff was too old for me even when I was young. I found it contentless and vapid and (in general) it seemed dated, an OCD druggie representation of (in Crumb’s case certainly) women as nothing more than a fetishized mobile vag–scary one minute, hypersexed the other.
aimai
@Southern Beale: Nice catch, btw, Southern Beale.
raven
@aimai: You had to be there.
aimai
@raven: Yeah, no doubt. I get that its a Proustian, formative, memory for a lot of people.
the Conster
NewsMax: Trump, Reagan Say Prepare With Obamacare Guide
I can just imagine zombie Reagan and Donald Trump collaborating on an Obummercare guide, complete with hair grooming tips and recipes for BRAAAAAINZ.
ETA: Romney says Obama “disappoints”. That’s gonna leave a mark.
Todd
@Southern Beale:
I spotted it over at FReakville, via some MS paper (the one I linked up a little higher. ;). Anyway, you should see the parade of stupid on that thread.
COB
@jayboat: Thanks Jayboat, I appreciate the recognition. I actually am an oldish DFH, but not first wave. And Raven, I’m sure you did say that – haven’t many of us at one time or another – but the FFFBs get the first attribution in alternative press I think.
Elizabelle
Never heard of Mr. Shelton previously.
Cool guy.
LOL re the French wear too much black. You cannot see them at night.
Walker
@FridayNext:
That psychedelic movie is such a product of the 70s that I am not sure you could pull that off in this day and age.
Jay in Oregon
Some light reading for the weekend: https://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/
Chris
@the Conster:
Well, Romney WOULD know all about disappointment.
gbear
‘Hee hee hee! You must mean Munder Marthog! Haw haw haw!’
I’ve still got my Zap Comix #3.
Neddie Jingo
@aimai:
Yeah, that’s Crumb all over. But of course he knows this even better than you, and when you read his cartoons, he’s giving you access to the deepest recesses of his id. It’s like watching psychotherapy in real time. Troubled guy, poor Crumb. The movie was just unbearable, and I’ve only made it through once.
On the other hand, Zippy the Pinhead is the finest, sanest, most spiritually balanced underground comic ever drawn, and I never miss it. I feel the world is a saner place with Zippy in it.
JWL
The funniest Freak Brother cartoon I ever read showed the brothers shooting their way through a police station to get to the drug locker. They made it, too, over a trail of corpses, only to find themselves cornered and the cops beating down the locker’s door in the second to last panel.
The last panel showed one of the brothers smacking the unconscious third with a rolled up newspaper (as brother # 2 looked on) and screaming: “He ate all the hash brownies we made for the party”!
joel hanes
@raven:
Cap’t Pissgums
Who can forget the Captain’s epic battle with Ruby the Dyke?
And The Checkered Demon was deliciously twisted — I’ve always wanted to name a Unix process after him, but haven’t yet written anything worthy.
“Nice day for something”
joel hanes
R. Crumb’s best rises above his neuroses; for example, this. Or the front cover of “Cheap Thrills”. Or Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont.
joel hanes
Psst! Dan O’Neill’s legendary “Air Pirates” as .pdf here