- Frank Viviano Writes
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- What me worry ? Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers + Fritz the Cat + Fat Freddy's Cat.
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- By Frank Viviano
barganews staff reporter
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- PARIS - Farrrrr Out! Highbrow Europe marks its twentieth
anniversary as the home-in-exile of San Francisco's most famous
underground artists this year -- and both parties still regard
the arrangement as a honeymoon.
The first to settle in was cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, creator of such memorable
hippie-era Haight Ashbury characters as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Wonder
Warthog and Fat Freddy's Cat.
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- Gilbert Shelton,
creator of
- The Furry Freak Brothers
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Shelton and his wife, literary agent Lora Fountain, decamped
from the Haight two decades ago to take up residency in Spain,
then moved on to France, with frequent jaunts to the country
homes of fumettisti friends in central Italy. Shortly after them
arrived former San Francisco underground luminary Robert Crumb, who fathered Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural.
Shelton and Fountain are expected to make an appearance in Barga
later this year, according to barganews sources in the comic
book industry. |
- Another underground celebrity, longtime Mad Magazine caricaturist
and art director Sam Viviano, will be Barga's cartoonist-in-residence
in August.
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"You can't imagine how flattering it is that these people
have decided to live in Europe," Jean Terriere, an executive
at France Telecom, said. "For us, they are gods."
Terriere was part of a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of business
moguls,
socialites, motorcycle gang members, blues musicians and intellectuals
-- all
enthusiatic fans of San Francisco sixties comics -- who packed
the l'Art Modeste gallery in Paris's chic Marais district for
an exhibition of Shelton's fumetti.
Sam Viviano hard
at work drawing the people inside Aristos Bar
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- They stood in raptured silence before cartoon panels in which
the uninhibited Freak Brothers weaved their stoned way through
heavy traffic on California freeways and the autostrada del sole.
More recent works charted the evolution of Shelton's celebrated
streetwise feline into le Chat du Fat Freddy -- now a Parisien
boulevardier who liberates the lions and tigers of the Cirque
d'Hiver when local dogs try to muscle into his garbage-can racket.
The San Francisco underground scene of the 1960s and 1970s had
an enormous impact on this side of the Atlantic. Major European
cartoonists like Frank Margerin, Jano and Marcel Gottlieb
drew heavily on the work of Shelton, Crumb and other scions of
Northern California's Rip-Off Press.
"How about those crazy Italians!" Crumb said of his
legion of fans on the boot. Among many other translated works,
his "R. Crumb disegna il Blues" published in Tuscany
in 1993 by Franco Cosimo Panini, is now regarded as an Italian
classic.
A quarter century after Rip-Off cartoons first appeared in an
underground French publication called Actuel, hip conversation
in Paris still employs phrases like "c'est freaky"
or "vraiment cool" that mimic the argot and laid-back
manner of Bay Area comics.
"These California cartoonists showed us characters who lived
by their wits, never worked, squatted in apartments that were
a total mess, and didn't care about owning things," says
Terriere. "They did everything our parents hated, and everything
we dreamed of doing ourselves."
More recently, Shelton has been exploring another pop subject
that is dear to Italian hearts: San Francisco's musical legacy.
His latest strips, co-produced by the French artist Pic, feature
a rock group called the "Not Quite Dead."
Shelton and Fountain live in a rambling apartment near the winter
circus where Fat Freddy's Cat hangs out, and just a few blocks
from the Paris pied-a-terre of Crumb and his wife, cartoonist
Aline Kaminsky. The Crumbs spend most
of the year in a village in the south of France.
Why Europe? "Partly because the comic scene is real busy
here, a lot more active than it is in the States," says
Shelton.
It is also taken much more seriously in the old world. Intellectuals
are among Europe's most avid comics fans, and academic books
on the phenomenon are a minor industry. An exhibition was mounted
in a London museum that focused exclusively on Fat Freddy's Cat.
Yet neither Shelton nor Crumb relishes the spotlight, and both
men limit their appearances to protect their privacy. In his
southern village, Crumb told a barganews reporter, "the
older folks have figured out I must be somebody, but they're
not really sure who."
Rob Howe, former editor of the radical Berkeley Barb newspaper,
was also at the l'Art Modeste opening, chatting with Shelton
for the first time in 15 years. The Barb, one of the primary
journals of the sixties underground, was an early proponent of
Rip-Off strips.
Looking around at the crowd of art critics and collectors ogling
the walls, Howe said, "I remember when this stuff used to
arrive at our office in beat-up envelopes, straight from the
drawing board. Boy, do I wish I had held onto some of it.''
Prices of the Shelton drawings ranged up to $6,000.
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