The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
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 publications 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 the counterculture.
Fat Freddy's Cat appears in many of the stories, spinning off his own cartoon strip and later some full-length episodes.
An animated TV series adaptation, The Freak Brothers, was released on Tubi on November 14, 2021.
Publication history
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, thanks to the Underground Press Syndicate, 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. 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.
A weekly Freak Brothers comic strip was syndicated by Rip Off Press to underground and student publications in the 1970s, along with the related strip Fat Freddy's Cat. In addition to those strips, 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 and Paul Mavrides.
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."
Characters
The Freak Brothers are not siblings. They are a threesome of freaks from San Francisco.- Freewheelin' Franklin Freek, although laid-back, is the most street-smart of the trio. Apparently he has always been on the streets and it appears that he is several years older than the others. In one story he reveals that he grew up in an orphanage and never knew his parents. Tall and skinny, he has a big bulbous nose, a waterfall mustache and a ponytail. He wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. In one strip, he runs into an ex-girlfriend who has a child that bears a striking resemblance to him. He does his best to evade them and is relieved when she does not recognize him. In another strip, when he meets his own father, the same plot is inverted. Depending on the level of colorization used in the strip in question, Franklin's hair is red, blonde, or light brown.
- Phineas T. Phreak is the intellectual and idealist of the group. He has enough mastery of chemistry to create new drugs and takes an avid interest in politics. Of the three, he is the most committed to social change and environmental issues. He is from Texas and while his mother is relaxed and open-minded, his father is a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society. He is the hairiest of the brothers—tall and skinny with a thick bush of black hair, a beard, a nose bearing more than a passing resemblance to a joint, and glasses. He is the stereotypical left-wing radical, bearing a superficial resemblance to Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.
- Fat Freddy Freekowtski is the least intelligent of the trio and is most likely to be preoccupied with food. He has curly yellow hair and a mustache. His compulsion to eat is the subject of several of the adventures of the group. Fat Freddy frequently gets "burned" during drug transactions; when he does "score" he typically manages to lose the drugs in various ways, such as by dumping them out of a shopping bag in front of a cooling fan, which then blows them out the window onto a police car. Fat Freddy comes from an unexceptional large family in Cleveland. In The Idiots Abroad, Freddy visits the Polish village of Gfatsk, where everybody happens to look like him. He is driven away by an angry mob as soon as they hear the name Freekowtski.
- Dealer McDope, one of the trio's dealers. He is often mentioned in the strips but rarely appears in person. The character was initially created by Dave Sheridan for the Rip Off Press title Mother's Oats Comix.
- Hiram "Country" Cowfreak, a hippy who grows vast quantities of marijuana at his isolated farmstead. He is referred to as the Freak Brothers' "cousin".
- Norbert the Nark, an inept DEA agent who is continually trying, and failing, to arrest the Freak Brothers.
- Tricky Prickears, the star of a comic book within the comic that the Freak Brothers enjoy reading. He is billed as "The Freak Brothers' favorite law enforcement officer". Tricky is a blind, deaf and reactionary detective and the character is a parody of Dick Tracy, to the extent that Shelton drew his stories in a different style, resembling that of Tracy's creator Chester Gould.
- Governor Rodney Richpigge, a stereotypically rich, corrupt politician whom the Freak Brothers hold in general contempt. The governor's son is a cocaine dealer.
Fat Freddy's Cat
While the cat is usually featured in a small 'topper' strip below a Freak Brothers strip, he has had independent appearances and storylines of his own. His two running jokes are Fat Freddy is too lazy to name him, and he suffers neglect and abuse from the Brothers' lifestyle.
Single line segments appeared in student newspapers in Australia in the 1970s.
Fat Freddy's Cat first appeared in 1969 in underground newspapers as a character in The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip. He soon gained his own small spin-off topper strip, in imitation of the early Krazy Kat strips below The Family Upstairs by George Herriman. Some full-size stories also featured Fat Freddy's Cat.
Many of these strips have been collected in comic book form by Rip Off Press in a series of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers compilations and later The Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat, which ran for four small size issues in the 1970s. Fat Freddy's Comics and Stories also included several stories about the Cat.
The Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat were reprinted and expanded in six comic book size issues in the 1980s. They included new longer stories about the Cat. A seventh edition was released in 1993. After the demise of the underground newspaper, the Cat continued to appear in various comic books. His last appearance to date was in a 1990 strip reprinted in The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #12.
The Cat is much smarter than Freddy, and while sharing many of his preoccupations such as drugs, food, sleep and sex, his stories also feature a fair amount of defecation. Like Garfield he is laid back, but in his personal habits and outlook he is more like the Freak Brothers. However he tends to regard the Freak Brothers with amused contempt, frequently expressed by defecating in inappropriate and inconvenient places, such as stereo headphones.
Like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes he has a fertile imagination. He is apt to tell tall stories to his three "nephews". One storyline features him playing the role of "F. Frederick Skitty", an undercover agent sworn to stop the distribution of "Tee Hee Hee", a drug that turns people into homosexuals. Another story involves a scheme by Fat Freddy to replicate Dick Whittington's success and sell the Cat to the small, oil-rich nation of Pootweet to deal with mice.
The New Zealand band Fat Freddy's Drop, whose debut album won the 2005 Gilles Peterson Worldwide Winners Award, were named after the comic. The band's debut single was recorded under the influence of LSD that had been printed with blotter art of Fat Freddy's Cat, and the band liked the name.
The popular 8-bit computer game Jet Set Willy has a room named "We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg" in honour of this strip.
Fat Freddy's Restaurant in Galway, Ireland, described as "Galway's favourite restaurant", is extensively decked out with arcana and other memorabilia relating to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy's Cat.
The science fiction novel Scam Artists of the Galaxy contains a location named Fat Freddy's Restaurant with a supercilious mostly orange cat. This novel's sequel, Election Matters: Life on Universityworld, sees the cat and one of its kittens appear.
Fat Freddy's Cat is voiced by Tiffany Haddish in the animated series The Freak Brothers, which debuted in 2020, and is commonly called Kitty by Fat Freddy. This version of the character is female and is capable of conversing directly with the Freaks whom she once again has a habit of insulting and belittling. She can apparently handle weed much better than them, though this did not prevent her from having the ultimate high that sent them from 1969 to 2020.