Gilbert Shelton: Countercultural cartooning with a touch of rock ’n’ roll

Underground comix hero and creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton is set to visit Galway Cartoon Festival

Gilbert Shelton and his Harvey award

TRUE American comics hero, Gilbert Shelton is synonymous with his greatest and most-loved creation, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers — a trio of hippie-era San Francisco dissolutes whose collective mental well-being was dependent on a healthy supply of dope.

While very much of its era, their antics and misadventures have transcended their time in a way few other contemporary underground comic creations have. 

Despite there being only 14 issues of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic book published, worldwide sales of the title have long surpassed the 40 million mark. 

They serve as a reminder of what seems like a long-lost time when comic books could be laugh-out-loud funny, a sharp contrast to the increasingly sombre nature of contemporary comics.

When invited to account for the Freak’s enduring appeal, Shelton’s response feels throwaway. “It’s just a traditional humour comic,” he suggests, before paying respect to the artists who inspired him as a youth in Texas. 

Masters of their craft such as Chester Gould, the creator of lantern-jawed detective Dick Tracy, and a largely unknown-in-his-lifetime Walt Disney comics artist who created Uncle Scrooge.

“I learned to read reading Walt Disney’s comics and stories, Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck,” Shelton explains. 

“They had an artist named Carl Barks, who was a genius of a storywriter. Disney didn’t allow the artists or the writers to put their names on the strips; they were anonymous.” But later it came out.

“Any cartoonist, any humourist, would tell you Carl Barks was an influence on us all,” he adds.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, by Gilbert Shelton

Two other great American comedy trios, the wisecracking Marx Brothers and the slapstick Three Stooges, would also prove inspirational: “I thought, ‘I can write as funny as that’.”

Shelton created other memorable characters, such as Superman parody Wonder Wart-Hog and Freak Brothers spin-off Fat Freddy’s Cat, but his legendary status in the comics pantheon is cemented by his being at the forefront of underground comics, or comix, the small press and self-publishing scene that emerged in America in the 1960s. 

Robert Crumb, the creator of Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and the flagship publication, Zap Comix, may be the figurehead of that scene, but Shelton appeared in what is regarded as the very first underground comic, Frank Stack’s The Adventures of J, which sprung from his time as an editor at a student magazine at the University of Texas in Austin.

Born in Houston in 1940, Shelton found the more culturally open atmosphere that greeted him there liberating: “The university was a big change. I don’t think I knew any liberal people in Houston. Not that they were all necessarily hard right-wingers, but Austin was a different place.”

History was his subject, but he found his real education at the Texas Ranger, the student humour magazine where his career in cartooning and publishing began.

Moving to San Francisco in 1968, Shelton found himself among an interesting coterie of countercultural cartoonists such as Crumb, S Clay Wilson, and ‘Spain’ Rodriguez.

“Oh, those were fun times,” he declares, clearly warming to the memory. “I and some friends from Texas had our own publishing company and we would have a big party once a month. We had a big warehouse of 8,000sq ft and we could have hundreds and hundreds of people come to our monthly parties. And we would have live music and the police would come, and so on,” he reminiscences fondly, as if it wouldn’t be the same without a visit from the boys in blue.

“It was big fun,” he concludes.

Gilbert Shelton and his offspring at Marihuana Museum, Barcelona

Rip Off Press was the publishing company Shelton founded. 

He recalls one particular occasion when the police arrived, although he adds that he had already left the party by this time: “We were making so much noise and there were noise complaints. And there was a big shoebox full of marijuana by the front door, and the police saw that. They’d found the president of Rip Off Press, Fred Todd, waiting in line for the toilet and they let him go to the head of the line and they took him down to the police station, where he spent the night talking to the police. But they didn’t charge him with anything. San Francisco was very tolerant of marijuana. In fact, I’ve heard the story several times, that police would arrest someone for some traffic offence, and they’d say, ‘there’s a warrant out for your arrest for a speeding ticket. We’re going to have to take you down to the station. If you have any marijuana, would you please step around the corner and get rid of it. We don’t want to have to deal with that’.”

Sensible policing! “Yes,” he agrees. “In contrast to Los Angeles, which was much more conservative than San Francisco.”

With those parties, it sounds like the cartoonists were more rock ’n’ roll than the rock bands of the time.

“There was, of course, a big music scene in San Francisco,” he offers, citing the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and The Fish. “But I wasn’t really a great fan of rock and psychedelic music. I’m a jazz fan myself.”

Not unlike Crumb, as it happens. And like Crumb, Shelton calls France his home, although he made the move before his illustrious peer. Declaring himself semi-retired, Shelton moved to Europe in 1985 along with his publisher wife.

These days he must be especially happy to find himself on this side of the Atlantic. This elicits a rueful chuckle. “Yeah,” he drawls. “Americans are going through a crisis, it sounds like.” 

He could never, even in his most fevered imaginings, have envisaged that America would have taken such a dark turn? “And it still can go any number of directions,” he says cautiously.

• This Saturday Shelton will be in conversation at Galway Cartoon Festival with genius cartoonist and doyen of the British comics underground, Hunt Emerson.
• galwaycartoonfestival.ie

GALWAY CARTOON FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

· Known by his pseudonym, Tignous, Bernard Jean-Charles Verlhac was one of eight staff members of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo murdered by Islamic terrorists in 2015.

As well as presenting an exhibition of his work, the festival will host his widow Chloé Verlhac for a talk on his life and work.

· Every year the festival pays special tribute to one great Irish cartoonist. This year it’s Ian Knox. The political cartoonist for the Irish News since 1989, the veteran Belfast artist has had a colourful career, contributing extensively to children’s comics like Buster, Whizzer and Chips, and Krazy from 1975 to 1988.

· 2000AD fans will gravitate to Judge Dredd artists Brendan McCarthy and John McCrae. Best known for his collaborations with Peter Milligan ( Rogan Gosh, Skin), McCarthy co-wrote and designed Mad Max Fury Road.

A regular collaborator with Garth Ennis, McCrae has drawn for DC, Marvel and Dark Horse.

· Celebrating the role of the free press, the Freedom Wall project has one wall featuring contributions from cartooning professionals from around the world celebrating important freedoms. There is also a wall featuring illustrations from children from around Ireland.