Gilbert Shelton (born May 31, 1940) is an American cartoonist and a key member of the underground comix movement. He is the creator of the iconic underground characters The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog.
Shelton was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 31, 1940. His father, George Shelton, worked for Firestone, which moved the family around the southeast during the 1940s. They settled in Houston, Texas, where he graduated from Lamar High School. 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 graduation, Shelton moved to New York City and got a job editing automotive magazines, where he would sneak his drawings into print. Early work of his was published in Warren Publishing's Help! 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. That same year, he published (in zine form) Frank Stack's The Adventures of Jesus, one of the first underground comix; Stack wrote and drew the comic strip under the name Foolbert Sturgeon.
Shelton 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 Pat Brown (another UT alum) was studying at the Cleveland Institute of Art. 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.
The period of 1965–1968 was an itinerant one for Shelton: he moved to New York to work for the underground paper East Village Other, and to Los Angeles to work for the Los Angeles Free Press. Then Shelton became art director for the Vulcan Gas Company, a rock music venue in Austin, Texas, where he worked with Jim Franklin. 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 1968, hopeful that being closer to the action would enable him to do more poster work.
That same year, Millar Publishing Company, who had been publishing regular Wonder Wart-Hog stories since 1966, published two issues of Wonder Wart-Hog. 140,000 copies of each were printed, but distributors did not pick up the magazine, and only 40,000 of each were sold.
Also in 1968 Shelton self-published Feds 'n' Heads, a collection of strips first published in the Austin underground paper The Rag. The comic featured Wonder Wart-Hog and what became his most famous strip, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The first edition of Feds 'N' Heads was hand-collated, folded, and stapled by Shelton in his garage, with an initial print run of 5,000 copies; it proved so popular that it was later re-issued multiple times by the San Francisco-based publisher the Print Mint, selling over 200,000 total copies by 1980.
In 1969, Shelton co-founded Rip Off Press with three fellow "expatriate" Texans: Fred Todd, Dave Moriaty, and cartoonist Jack Jackson. Rip Off Comix published 13 issues of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic from 1971 to 1997, with many issues undergoing multiple printings. Shelton created a spin-off strip, Fat Freddy's Cat, in 1969.
During this period, Shelton was also a regular contributor to Zap Comix and other underground titles, including Bijou Funnies, Yellow Dog, Arcade, The Rip Off Review of Western Culture, and Anarchy Comics. Along with R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, "Spain" Rodriguez, and two artists with reputations as psychedelic poster designers, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin, Shelton became part of the "Zap collective," which remained mostly constant throughout the nearly 50-year history of Zap.
In the 1970s, Shelton managed the Rip Off Press Syndicate, which sold weekly content, including Shelton's own strips, to alternative newspapers and student publications. Much of the material produced for the syndicate was eventually published in the company's long-running anthology Rip Off Comix, which had debuted in 1977.
Shelton designed the cover art for the 1973 album Doug Sahm and Band, as well as The Grateful Dead's 1978 album, Shakedown Street.
He also illustrated the cover of the early classic computer magazine compilation The Best of Creative Computing Volume 2 in 1977.
In 1979, Universal Studios paid Shelton and Rip Off Press $250,000 for the rights to make a live-action Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers film. Shelton used his share (which was the bulk of the money) to finance repeated trips to Europe, and to eventually settle down in France. Meanwhile, the Universal-produced Freak Brothers film never made it to production.
Shelton's Not Quite Dead, done in collaboration with French cartoonist Pic, appeared in Rip Off Comix #25 (Winter 1989) and in six Not Quite Dead comic books (1993–1996).
A new Wonder Wart-Hog story appeared in Zap Comix #15 (Last Gasp, 2005), as well as The Complete Zap boxed set (Fantagraphics, 2014) which contained Zap #16; and a new Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers story appeared in Zap #16 as well.
Fifty Freakin' Years with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers was published in 2017 by Knockabout Comics. It contains new strips by Shelton, as well as his written introduction.
In 1966 Shelton formed the Gilbert Shelton Ensemble and released a 45 record on ESP Records, "If I Was A Hells Angel," b/w "Southern Stock Car Man," backed by members of the Austin psychedelic rock band The Conqueroo, consisting of Tom Bright, Bob Brown and Ed Guinn.