La Zona Muerta

I spent a fair part of my Sunday evening laboring over the following:

Help me, my hands no longer work…

Yeah, I know there’s a modern Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers cartoon and I suppose it’s worked on by people that love the Bros. but nnnnnyeah. I only care about the comic, ably created by Gilbert Shelton, sometimes with the help of Paul Mavrides and Dave Sheridan, sometimes some other folks. The strip isn’t remotely as violent as this splash would make it appear; they’re scumbag hippies, not hardened criminals. This strip, “Shootout at the County Slammer,” is probably the most violent FFFB strip ever (I suppose there are a couple where an orgy of violence is the punchline), but it’s all a dream so relax.

Anyway, the cartooning isn’t the hard part to try to replicate. It’s the obsessive crosshatching and the weird noodle-ly tick marks everywhere for texture (something I find VERY difficult to do in Procreate, personally). It wasn’t so much the crosshatching on the sleeves… it was the texture on the insides of Fat Freddy and Freewheelin’ Franklin’s coats that about killed me. Sure, I could have found a crosshatch texture in Procreate but… this needed to be drawn this way.

My exposure to the FFFB began with my mom and dad’s stash of underground comix. They had a couple issues of ZAP comix, a Tales from the Leather Nun, and a big pile of FFFB and the weird sized spinoff, Fat Freddy’s Cat. I was lucky in that one of the issues they had was a square bound collected edition (WELL before such things were the norm) that collected my favorite and, in my opinion, the best FFFB story, “Grass Roots,” in which the titular Bros. bring the cat, their girlfriends, a camper full of supplies and buy a farm, only to find out they were a bit too high and bought the world’s biggest pig in a poke.

Speaking of the “high” thing… what’s really funny is, I generally don’t care for stoner humor or drug stuff. Sure, I like Cheech and Chong and such… but like, only in small doses. FFFB is somehow so inoffensive in it’s relentless drug humor that it feels fairly benign. There’s also a LOT of humor about classism and friendship and food and a general “fuck the government” vibe that all feel pretty timeless. Some of the later strips even work out to be bizarre adventure stories!

Anyway, enjoy my meager recreation and tribute to Shelton and his talented friends.