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.
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.
“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.
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.