Shelton and Jack Jackson packed themselves and a couple boxes of Feds ‘n’ Heads into Shelton’s garishly painted 1956 Plymouth and started the long crawl across west Texas. When they weren’t having car trouble, they were providing amusement for cops, said Jackson. “Highway patrolmen out there would see that damn car and say, hot dog, we got us some dope smoking hippies.  It was a nightmare going through that southern trip, El Paso and onward.” They finally limped into San Francisco, where the car broke down for good. Shelton traded Gary Arlington, owner of the San Francisco Comic Book Company, a box of Feds ‘n’ Heads for a 1959 Chevrolet, which he later used to drive to and from New York. He sold most of the remaining comic books to Print Mint.  “When I first moved to San Francisco I immediately started doing stuff for the Print Mint’s Yellow Dog,” said Shelton.

By the end of that summer there were two issues of Zap in print.  Shelton was invited to contribute a story to Zap #3, so he resurrected his porcine superhero for the occasion.  In his first Zap appearance, Wonder Wart-Hog gets his head stuck in a toilet, and walks around bare-assed.  In Zap #4, Shelton gave the world its first view of Wonder Wart-Hog’s private parts, when he locked Lois Lamebrain in the stockroom, stripped her down, and prepared to help himself “to the proverbial pleasures of the flesh.” Longtime Wonder Wart-Hog readers were aware of his tendency to overreact to petty criminals by tearing off their arms and legs and wringing their necks, but this was the first time he added sexual violation to his repertoire.   

Many of Shelton’s old Austin buddies were already in San Francisco when he arrived, including Fred Todd and Dave Moriaty. Shelton had made a distribution deal with Print Mint for Feds ‘n’ Heads to reprint it when the first edition sold out. Now Jackson wanted to get his homemade comic book God Nose back into print. Todd had a full-time job as a computer programmer downtown that was getting tiresome, and was receptive to radical ideas, he remembered. “Moriaty was living in my flat in the space where a washing machine would have been if I could have afforded a washing machine. He had decided that the key to the universe was a printing press.”

“We got together and pooled our money and bought a printing press,” recalled Shelton.  “I don’t know why, since none of us knew how to run one at the time.” They each chipped in $75 and went to the Printer’s Exchange and put a down payment on a used printing press and dragged it back to the city. “At first, we were doing posters for the Avalon Ballroom for Soundproof Productions, which was run by people from Texas including Bob Simmons and Gary Scanlan, after Chet Helms and Family Dog Productions had lost their lease there,” said Shelton. Then we started printing comics after the Avalon Ballroom shut down for good in ’69.” 

Rip Off’s first project was a reprint of God Nose, which took them several months to complete.  Shelton was recruited by Paul Buhle, editor of the SDS magazine, Radical America, to round up cartoonists for an all-comics issue. Shelton edited the book, drew the cover, and printed it. It was officially volume 3, number 1 of Radical America series, but Radical America Komiks was also distributed through comic book channels and outsold any previous issue. By the time the artwork for Motor City Comics #1 and Big Ass Comics #1 arrived in the mail from Crumb, they were ready to crank out comic books.  They also published Hydrogen Bomb and Biochemical Warfare Funnies #1, Mother Oats #1, and Happy Endings, and reprinted The New Adventures of Jesus. Rip Off Press was off and running.  

Shelton continued to draw Furry Freak Brothers pages for the weekly LA Free Press, and by 1971, had accumulated enough strips to make a full comic book. Publication of the Freak Brothers was all the excuse necessary for a rip-snorting Rip Off Press party. “That big old warehouse was a good place to have parties,” said Shelton. “We had a bunch of them, with live bands and hundreds of people. There was one where the police came because of the noise and they spotted a box of marijuana in the front hall and so they took Fred Todd away because he was the only responsible person they could find. We never knew what was going to happen,” said Shelton. “We were just trying to keep our heads above water.” 

The following summer the partners saw signs that business at Rip Off Press wasn’t as hot as it once was.  No one placed blanket orders for everything in the whole catalog anymore.  Their direct mailing campaigns weren’t bringing in new orders like they used to. Several of their accounts were going out of business, and many of their comic titles just sat on the shelves going nowhere.  

“The head shops started having trouble and they were forced to choose between selling cigarette papers and pipes and the Freak Brothers comics,” said Shelton. “They couldn’t sell both in the same store because the police would testify that the Freak Brothers comics were an instruction manual on how to use papers and pipes to smoke marijuana and not tobacco. If the store owner didn’t have these comic books in the store, he could legitimately say he was selling these papers and pipes to smoke tobacco in. That forced a lot of head shops to make this choice.  As a result, the underground comix lost a lot of their distributors.” Shipments of comic books were sent back to the warehouse. No returns was the policy at Rip Off Press, said Todd, but what could he do? Almost every small distributor they worked with was shipping them back.

“We soon owed a potful of money to all the paper companies in town,” said Todd. “The sheriff came and repossessed the Webb press and it took two days to get it out of the building.” The hardware wasn’t the only thing to go, he added. “We went from 15 people to 3 when our print shop died. We were 15 to 20 grand in the red, underground comix sales were falling and the phone was ringing off the wall -- guys demanding their money yesterday. The only thing selling for us then was the first two issues of the Freak Brothers comics. We’d print ten or twenty thousand at a time, as many as we could convince some printer we could pay for. We’d truck ‘em to our warehouse and sell ‘em and wait for the money. Then we’d do it again. We very carefully did nothing but that for two years.”

It became lonesome around Rip Off Press.  During that winter, they burned comic books in the wood stove to keep warm, recalled Todd. “Somewhere in the darkest of all that, Gilbert came in one morning, pulled a stool up to a light table and began drawing a Freak Brothers strip, “he recalled.  “There had been some talk about him being tired of drawing the brothers and we all thought maybe the world had seen the last of those hairy dudes. But what he started that morning became Freak Brothers Comix #3.”

Shelton’s hairy heroes were translated and published in three foreign editions in 1975, in Actuel in France, in JYMY in Finland, and from Arcana Editrice in Italy, and those were just the authorized editions. Remnants of the Underground Press Syndicate still reprinted the strips freely around the world. The fourth Rip Off Press edition, Brother Can you Spare 75¢ for the Freak Brothers was a collaboration between Shelton and Dave Sheridan, who teamed up again for Freak Brothers #5 in 1977, and Six Snappy Sockeroos from the Archives of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers two years later, adding cartoonist Paul Mavrides to the creative team.  

ROP began publishing their own twice-yearly anthology series, Rip Off Comix in 1977, which contained new and recycled material in a 52-page format, including time tested Wonder Wart-Hog stories. The seventh issue of their popular comic series, Several Short Stories from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers was published in 1982, the year of Sheridan’s death. Shelton moved to Spain, then returned to San Francisco in 1984 to publish the first installment of the Freak Brother’s full color saga, “The Idiots Abroad.” Mavrides continued to work as Shelton’s partner on many other Freak Brothers comic stories, sharing writing, penciling, and inking responsibilities.  

Gilbert Shelton’s whole career’s worth of work, drawn from 1964 to the present continues to generate chortles and chuckles from each new generation. The oldest Wonder Wart-Hog comics are still available at bookshops, sitting right next to his latest hard cover Freak Brothers anthologies from Fantagraphic Books. His hirsute heroes also star in a streaming animated series on the Tubi network.

Written by Patrick Rosenkranz