The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus

One sentence summary: Some hits and some misses, but for the price well worth it to read these darlings of the old underground.

I am not an expert in the underground comix of the '60s-70s. A large reason for this is how generally unsuitable for modern-style reprinting is the original material, if quality copies are even available. That's part of what makes this (and the Complete Crumb collection, for that matter) such a treasure: these are gen-u-ine cultural artifacts.

That being said, it's not like reading this is similar to, say, reading Piers the Plowman or some other Medieval writing suitable only for historical perusal. These are vibrant characters in hilarious situations, most of which manage to deal with drugs.

What struck me when reading these, particularly the first couple of hundred pages, is that the joke of a page would be straight from a newspaper funny: a mistaken identity, a hilarious inversion, etc. These managed (and still do!) to have an edge by making these situations darker and about material never printable in a newspaper funny. An example is when one of the trio, off-panel, shoves a cop out of a third story window thinking it's Fat Freddy in costume, leaving the brothers in the last panel dots on a mountain, hiding out in the wilderness until the heat dies down. The punchline is so old it's vaudevillian, but it manages to twang a new chord by adding the darker element.

That said, shockingly, not all 40-year old hippie comics have aged well. In particular, the mega-arc that takes up over 1/6th of the book, "Innocents Abroad," manages to be over-serious and silly at the same time, and not really in a good way. Despite having the best art of the entire set, and being the best-preserved (some of the black-and-white scans are fairly blotchy, though certainly readable), it reads the most out-of-date -- clearly a product of the cynical '80s.

I love having read this book. When one reads a great novel, or something almost entirely uncorrelated with the times (such as the typical superhero comic), there's a timelessness about it, a disconnection from its own history. For good and for bad, the Freak Brothers are a product of their times, and more importantly a snapshot of those times. Shelton has no way to turn off his writing from being a reflection of his concerns at that moment; the Freak Brothers are the hippocampus of the comix brain, spitting out whatever's most current, and in many ways this is as fascinating to me as any number of pot-jokes.

All said, if you can still find it at the retail price, it's a steal. It's recently gone out of print, which is a shame, though I have no idea if there's enough of a demand to keep prices high (I'm looking at you, X-Statix trades).