The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is
an underground comic about a fictional trio of stoner characters,
created by the American artist Gilbert Shelton. The Freak Brothers first
appeared in The Rag, an underground newspaper published
in Austin, Texas, beginning in May 1968, and were regularly reprinted in
underground papers around the United States and in other parts of the world.
Later their adventures were published in a series of comic books.
The lives of the Freak Brothers revolve
around the procurement and enjoyment of recreational drugs,
particularly marijuana. The comics present a critique of the
establishment, while satirizing counterculture.
Fat Freddy's Cat appears in many of
the stories, spinning off his own cartoon strip (which appeared as part of the
Freak Brothers comic page, in the manner of older comic strip double features)
and later some full-length episodes.
An animated version, The Freak
Brothers, was released in 2020
Comic Strips
The Freak Brothers first appeared
in The Rag, an underground newspaper published in Austin,
Texas, beginning in May 1968. Their debut was in an advertising flyer for a
winter 1968 film short called The Texas Hippies March on the
Capitol. Freak Brothers strips soon became popular and were regularly
reprinted in underground papers around the United States and in other parts of
the world.
The Freak Brothers' first comic book
appearance was in Feds 'n' Heads, self-published by Shelton in the
spring of 1968 (and later re-issued in multiple printings by Berkeley's
the Print Mint). They also appeared in the first two issues of Jay
Lynch's Bijou Funnies. In 1969 Shelton and three friends from Texas
founded Rip Off Press in San Francisco, which took over publication
of all subsequent Freak Brothers comics. The first compilation of their
adventures, The Collected Adventures of the Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers, had its first printing in 1971 and has been continually in print
ever since. In addition to underground and college weekly newspapers, new
adventures appeared in magazines such as Playboy, High
Times, and Rip Off Comix; these too were collected in comic
book form. Shelton continued to write and draw the series until 1992, in
collaboration with Dave Sheridan (1974–1982, his death) and Paul
Mavrides (1978-1992).
The majority of the comic books consist
of one or more multi-page stories together with a number of one-page strips;
many of the latter have a one-row skit featuring Fat Freddy's Cat at
the bottom of the page. Issues #8-10 contained only the long-form story
"The Idiots Abroad", which The Comics Journal listed
as #44 of the "100 Greatest Comics of the Century." The UK
newspaper The Guardian said of a 2003 reprint of the story
that, "The graphic quality is, even in slightly muddy reproduction,
astonishing. Depictions of various European cities recall Hergé in their
accuracy and detail ... As for the subject matter, considering the dates of composition,
it has hardly dated.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Brothers
No comments:
Post a Comment