Drawing conclusions

It took the Brits, of all people, to compile one of the great collections of late 20th-century American humor. And it may well be the Brits who finally capture that humor on film.

Both the compilation, the 624-page Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus, and its author, Gilbert Shelton, appeared in Prague recently as part of the Prague Writer's Festival. The lion's share of attention during the festival went to Shelton's fellow expat cartoonists, Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb. But Shelton arguably encompasses a broader range of the comics medium, from his role in helping establish Rip Off Press in San Francisco in 1969 to the remarkable breadth of his work, which reads like a compendium of a distinctly American art form.

Shelton's comedic genius has attracted an enduring international following. The Freak Brothers, which debuted in the underground comic Feds 'n' Heads in 1968, have been in print continuously ever since, translated into 15 languages. Drug-related capers have always been the common denominator, but Shelton also has a gift for situational humor that captures the zeitgeist, in particular the rebellious '60s counterculture that the freaks still embody.

"The Freak Brothers keeps selling; that's been a big surprise," Shelton says. "Younger people still apparently enjoy reading it. The British are big Freak Brothers fans. They seem able to identify with [the brothers], same as the Americans do - maybe even more so."

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus
By Gilbert Shelton
Knockabout Comics, London
624 pp.
$35

Because Freewheelin' Franklin, Phineas and Fat Freddy spend most of their time ingesting psychedelics, outwitting the law and subverting the established order, it comes as a bit of a shock to learn that they have wholesome, mainstream roots.

"My favorite comics when I was a kid were Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck by Carl Barks, and Little Lulu by John Stanley," Shelton says. "Stanley was a great storyteller, and Barks was a master of action and movement."

Shelton, who grew up in Texas, was mostly bored in school and never a good student, but he can talk about comic artists like a university professor, ranging across their work in decades of American newspapers, for mainstream comic publishers like DC and Marvel and in underground comix, which Rip Off Press made available to a national audience. Freak Brothers stories draw heavily on that body of work, starting with the slapstick humor and exaggerated reactions that were characteristic of Barks, the Popeye strips of E.C. Segar and Harvey Kurtzman's early Mad comics.

Iconic characters run wild through Freak Brothers stories. There's Little Orphan Amphetamine, criticizing Daddy Warbucks for being a capitalist pig, and Tricky Prickears, a wickedly funny blind, deaf cop drawn in a dead-on imitation of Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy. Fat Freddy's cat, one of Shelton's most popular creations, has three nephews who are straight knock-offs of Donald Duck's Huey, Dewey and Louie. Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace, Nancy (asking Santa for "a couple tabs of acid" for Christmas), Snuffy Smith and Krazy Kat have all made appearances. Another Shelton comic, Wonder Warthog, offers a porcine version of the standard superhero in tights.

Given that volume of work, it's also a bit of a shock to hear that Shelton is not particularly fond of drawing. "It looks like a lot when you put it all together, but I'm not that prolific," he says. "All that drawing is tedious and frustrating for me. Crumb says he has to draw, or he'd go crazy. I tend to be the opposite: It's something that I have to put up with in order to create comics strips. I'd rather be doing dolce far niente, as the Italians say - sweet doing nothing."

The Freak Brothers seems a natural for a movie, and indeed, Shelton has sold the film rights seven times. Not once did a film get made. The eighth time, however, may be the charm, with Bolex Brothers, an animation company based in Bristol, England, currently working on a madcap tale of genetically modified marijuana titled Grass Roots. (For a preview, check Grassrootsthemovie.com.)

"They're fans of the Freak Brothers and approached me about doing a movie," Shelton says. "It's stop-action animation, one-quarter scale. The puppets are foam rubber with metal skeletons, and, except for the big noses, very realistic. It's obsolete technology, but I think it's appropriate for the Freak Brothers."

Completing the project, however, will take more money. "We're planning to be at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, next year, doing some fundraising with test footage," Shelton says.

For now, the artist continues to live an unhurried life in Paris, where he settled with his wife, Laura, a literary agent, 25 years ago. He still turns out an occasional Wonder Warthog story, but his main work now is Not Quite Dead, the continuing tales of the world's least successful rock 'n' roll band, which he creates with the French cartoonist Denis Leliedre, who goes by the pen name Pic.

"We just finished a new story in which the CIA sends the unsuspecting rock band to the poorest country on earth, just to stir up trouble," says Shelton. "The country is Shangralig, formerly known as Shangri-La, and the story is called 'Last Gig in Shangralig.' Maybe they can make a movie out of that, too."

Shelton showed another side of himself in Prague that even Parisians don't get to see. He's an accomplished rhythm and blues piano player, and, on the closing night of the festival, he walked onto the stage at Laterna Magika and banged out a soulful version of "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out."

"Ask me any song from the early '50s!" he says proudly. "I grew up in Houston, where there were three black radio stations. My parents didn't want me to listen to that music, so I had to hide the radio under the covers at night.

"In Paris, I was playing with a group called the Blum Brothers. We were doing weekly gigs at a local bar in my neighborhood. But we're not doing that anymore, because we caused the bar to lose its license by making too much noise."

Sounds like a classic Freak Brothers moment.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at
fkuznik@praguepost.com