LiberPress Camins Award 2011

Gilbert Shelton is a famous cartoonist born in Houston, Texas. With Robert Crumb (a close friend, with whom he often travels), he is one of the most important underground comic artists in America and the world. He is the creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy’s Cat and Wonder Wart-Hog. He studied at the University of Washington and the University of Texas, graduating in social sciences. In 1959 he published his first comic strips in The Texas Ranger magazine. He then moved to New York. In 1961 he parodied Superman with his Wonder Wart-Hog. A friend of Janis Joplin, he avoided military service alleging that he was a drug addict. He directed the graphic design of a rock club, the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin, and designed numerous psychedelic posters.

In 1968 Shelton drew his most famous characters, the Freak Brothers, and in 1969 he created Fat Freddy’s Cat. He founded the publishing house Rip Off Press, which was intended to produce comic strips and promotional posters for rock groups.

He designed the cover of the Grateful Dead album, Shakedown Street. The Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy’s Cat are published in many countries, including ours, as Shelton spent a couple of years in Barcelona in the early eighties, where he published El Víbora, and then Makoki. In the mid-eighties he moved to France.

In the 2000s, a project for a Freak Brothers film entitled Grass Roots was undertaken, with Shelton as the main scriptwriter.

Recently, he has worked with Denis Leliève, with whom he created the series Not Quite Dead, and with Gerhard Seyfried on Phineas’ Big Show, together with Paul Mavrides.

Since 2006 Gilbert Shelton has been singing and playing the piano with the writer and photographer Bruno Blum (guitar), in the Blum Brothers, with whom he used to perform at the Jockomo bar in Paris. He lives in Paris now, with his wife, Lora, and three cats, his great passions together with comics, music and cars.