The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #1, Feb. 1971. Artwork by Gilbert Shelton
Publication information
Publisher	Rip Off Press
Format	Ongoing series
Publication date	February 1971 - 1997
Number of issues	14
Creative team
Creator(s)	Gilbert Shelton

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.

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 issue's 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 the series until 1992, in collaboration with Dave Sheridan (1974–1982) and Paul Mavrides (since 1978). The works enjoy a sizable cult following and the magazines are widely available in comic stores.