Gilbert Shelton
Gilbert Shelton (born
May 31,
1940,
Houston, Texas) is an
American cartoonist and
underground comix artist. He is the creator of
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,
Fat Freddy's Cat,
Wonder Wart-Hog, and
Not Quite Dead.
He graduated from Lamar High School in Houston. He attended
Washington and Lee University,
Texas A&M University and the
University of Texas at Austin where he received his bachelor's degree in the social sciences in 1961. His early cartoons were published in the University of Texas' humor magazine
The Texas Ranger.
Directly after graduating, Shelton moved to
New York City and got a job editing automotive magazines where he would sneak his drawings into print. The idea for the character of
Wonder Wart-Hog, a porcine parody of
Superman, came to him in 1961. The following year, Shelton moved back to
Texas to enroll in graduate school and get a student deferment from the
draft. The first two
Wonder Wart-Hog stories appeared in
Bacchanal, a short-lived college humor magazine, in the spring of 1962. He then became editor of
The Texas Ranger and published more
Wonder Wart-Hog stories.
After switching from graduate school to art school (where he befriended singer
Janis Joplin) for two years, he was finally drafted, but army doctors declared him medically unfit after he admitted to taking
psychedelic drugs. After this, in 1964 and 1965 he spent some time in
Cleveland, where his girlfriend at the time was going to the Cleveland Art Institute. He applied for a job at the Cleveland-based
American Greeting Card Company (where a fellow
underground comic artist
Robert Crumb had worked) but was turned down.
Around this time Shelton became art director for the
Vulcan Gas Company, a rock
venue in
Austin, Texas. He created a number of posters in the style of contemporary California poster artists such as
Victor Moscoso and
Rick Griffin. After a year of this, he moved to
San Francisco in the summer of 1968 hoping that being closer to the action would enable him to do more posterwork; as it turned out, he finally got his break in the alternative comix business.
That same year, Millar Publishing Company, who had been publishing regular Wonder Wart-Hog stories since 1966, published two issues of
Wonder Wart-Hog Quarterly. 140,000 copies of each were printed, but distributors did not pick up the magazine and only 40,000 of each were sold.
After a strip named
Feds 'n' Heads (published by
Print Mint), Gilbert created his most famous strip,
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in 1968, and
Fat Freddy's Cat in 1969, when he also co-founded
Rip Off Press.
Shelton currently lives in
Paris,
France. His most recent work, in collaboration with French cartoonist
Pic, is
Not Quite Dead, which appeared in
Rip Off Comix #25 and in five
Not Quite Dead comic books. In addition to a new
Wonder Wart-Hog story in Zap Comix #15 (2005), his
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are currently being turned into a stop-motion animated film.
*"Gilbert Shelton Interviewed by Frank Stack".
The Comics Journal. Retrieved Sep. 23, 2004.
*
Freak Bros. movie on Ain't It Cool News*
Video Interview with Gilbert Shelton on oc-tv.net*
Rip Off Press, Inc., publishers of the Freak Brothers comics in the U.S.A.*
Knockabout Comics, publishers of the Freak Brothers comics in the U.K.*
Freaknet, a popular Freak Brothers fan site.
