Shelton and his friend Tony Bell became the editors of The Texas Ranger in the 1962-3 academic year and produced monthly editions of the college humor magazine. “The Ranger had a tradition of having a big party every month with the staff’s share of the cash sales,” recalled Shelton. College humor magazines were precursors to the underground press, and often the center of academic and social agitation on American campuses. The Pelican at the University of California at Berkeley printed some of Joel Beck’s and John Thompson’s early cartoons and became a focal point for the developing free speech movement. Other humor magazines included Voo Doo at M.I.T., Sundial at Ohio State, The Record at Yale, Chaparral at Stanford, Satyr at UCLA, The Bachelor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Occidental College Fang, edited by Terry Gilliam in Los Angeles, and The Harvard Lampoon at Harvard, some of whose contributors later founded the National Lampoon.   

In June 1963 Shelton retired as Ranger editor but was reluctant to leave his academic refuge. The next fall he began his studies all over again, enrolling as a freshman in the art department, favoring the student life to an army hitch, he said. Abstract impressionism was the only visual art considered legitimate, he soon discovered, and anything realistic was dismissed as mere illustration. “They used to teach us in art school that you had to rid yourself completely of any meaning in your visual work, or else you couldn’t be ‘pure,’” said Shelton. In his second year, he dropped out. When his deferment expired, Uncle Sam finally called him up, but only kept him a couple of days, he said. “They said I was medically unfit. Maybe they didn’t like the fact that I admitted taking drugs like peyote and LSD. I was glad to get off the hook. Vietnam was really heating up by this time. I thought I was doomed.” After this close call, he was now free to pursue his dream of an independent humor publication. He and a few friends started The Austin Iconoclastic, which sampled several formats during its short life.  

There wasn’t much holding Shelton to Austin, so he also took to the road, traveling between Austin and New York City, and Cleveland, Ohio, where his girlfriend, Pat Brown, another ex-Ranger staffer, attended the Cleveland Art Institute. There he met some other young art students, including future collaborator Dave Sheridan, who was majoring in painting and graphic design.  Shelton liked to hang out with the Cleveland Gooses, a motorcycle club who shared his interest in beer drinking and bikes. In Cleveland, Shelton applied for a job at American Greeting Cards, where Robert Crumb was then working, but he wasn’t hired. Fame was teasing Shelton; fortune was eluding him.  

In 1967, Pete Millar took a great leap of faith and published the first of a quarterly 64-page magazine called the Fearless, Fighting, Foulmouthed Wonder Wart-Hog, the Hog of Steel. They used a similar format as James Warren’s Creepy magazine, which had slick color covers and black and white newsprint guts. Millar printed a mountain of them and watched most of them sit quietly in boxes in his warehouse, said Shelton. Three months later, a second issue of Wonder Wart-Hog followed. It included three pages of avid Wart-Hog fan mail, which included a letter of praise from Harvey Kurtzman, but alas, sales were slow, and returns were quick. “One of the reasons that Millar Publishing Company went bust, maybe, was the publication of two issues of Wonder Wart-Hog Quarterly,” said Shelton. “Millar had 140,000 copies of each printed, and he had to sell half of them to break even. But the thing was too weird for the distributors and most of the copies stayed in the warehouses. Only 40,000 of each number were sold.”

By 1967 there was new work to be had in Austin drawing rock concert posters. Houston White and a few friends opened a dance and concert hall on Congress Avenue called the Vulcan Gas Company, said Shelton, and he went to work as their art director, in charge of producing the posters for the weekly concerts. Dance posters from San Francisco ballrooms had their predictable psychedelic impact on local artists. “I did a number of posters, in a style influenced by the California poster artists,” he said. “These posters for the Vulcan Gas Company were similar in style to the California ones, but larger, since this was Texas. They were printed by an Austin printer named Johnny Mercer, and some of them were beautiful, with split-fount inking. Only about 100 copies of each of these posters were printed, so they’re quite rare now. I did this for about a year, until I moved to San Francisco in the summer of ‘68.  Jim Franklin then became art director for the Vulcan Gas Company, and then for Eddie Wilson’s Armadillo World Headquarters, which was more successful.  A whole art and music scene grew up around the Armadillo World Headquarters, which I missed.”

Shelton also drew counterculture comic strips for the local underground newspaper, the Austin Rag, including the earliest appearance in 1968 of the gleesome threesome that would make him famous, Those Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. “Grass will carry you through times of no money better than money will carry you through times of no grass,” said Freewheeling Franklin, for the first of many times, as he sent Fat Freddy out to score a kilo. “Don’t get burned,” he advised in vain. Along the bottom of the strip it read, “Watch for the Fabulous Freak Brothers movie: ‘The Freak Brothers march on the Capitol’ coming soon to the Vulcan Gas Company.” This postscript referred to a short film starring Joe Brown, that Shelton and Renee Tooley, a film student made together. “The only copy of our five-minute film is long lost, though, and anyway everyone liked the comic strip better.  So that was the end of my film-directing career,” said Shelton.

In 1968, Shelton bought a copy of R. Crumb’s Head Comix and discovered Zap Comics #1. “When Crumb did Zap that was a surprise to me. I’d never thought of doing a comic book, I just thought of doing pages for newspapers. I didn’t like comic books.” Nevertheless, he decided to try it out for himself, and collected his newspaper strips and some new work into a 24-page comic book called Feds ‘n’ Heads Comics. The first printing was done on a multilith press in the garage of Terry Raines in Austin, and Shelton collated and stapled several thousand copies by hand.