The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: In the 21st Century and Other Follies

LUME VO

6

SHELTON & MAVRIDES

THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS

THE IDIOTS ABROAD

INTRODUCTION By 1979, Gilbert Shelton had been living in San Francisco and telling stories of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers for a decade.

A two-year sabbatical in Europe led to a permanent relocation to France and to a change in Shelton’s creative outlook. He and his collaborators had worked hundreds of gags and setups from the premise of three stoned doofuses (of varying levels of doofitude) looking for the easiest way to stay high and keep vibing in the world locus of hippiedom.

Now looking at a new Reaganized America from the perspective of an expatriate, Shelton began using the picaresque naiveté of the Freak Brothers for sharper satire. Many of the stories in this volume throw them into events, situations, and elements of culture that clearly mark the early 1980s as a harsher, more antagonistic time.

The Brothers innate optimism (and cannabistic discombobulation) keeps their Candide-like spirits up, and the stories are no less hilarious and rollicking, but the settings and situations bite harder. Paul Mavrides’s increasing involvement as a co-author and co-artist helps tighten the satire.

by Kit Brash

Even so, there’s still plenty of domestic humor, cheap verbal gags, and kitty-related comedy.

This volume also features an exact reproduction of Fat Freddy’s Comics & Stories #1. Shelton assembled an all-star squad of his fellow underground comix pioneers to pastiche, parody, and mock the popular genres of commercial comics.

(The title itself is a riff on Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories.) There are horror and sci-fi shorts based on 1950s EC Comics (see The Fantagraphics EC Artists’ Library series if you’re not familiar with EC), takes on the perennials of romance and superheroes (the latter a field also tilled by Shelton in his Wonder Wart-Hog series), and two of Marvel Comics’ 1970s attempts at black-andwhite magazines for “adult” audiences: Robert E. Howard’s Conan, and that company’s sad attempt at continuing Howard the Duck without his creator and writer, Steve Gerber.

The Freak Brothers’ globetrotting epic The Idiots Abroad was created contemporaneously with the strips, shorts, and comics in this volume and is available in Volume 6 of this series. j

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