The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #1
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeWhen Fat Freddy hits a junk food crisis and can’t afford his usual stash, the Freak Brothers’ desperation takes a wild turn—leading them to plan a grocery store heist just to satisfy his cravings. With the Grocery Store Clerk on the other side of the counter, things get chaotic, hilarious, and more than a little unpredictable.
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We Buy Collections ▸Trivia · 8 facts
- Issue #1 is formally titled 'The Collected Adventures of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers' and was the first comic book published by Rip Off Press dedicated solely to the Freak Brothers characters.
- All story, cover, and art credits for this issue belong to Gilbert Shelton, who was the sole creative hand on the series at launch — collaborators Dave Sheridan and Paul Mavrides did not join the title until issues #4 and #6, respectively.
- The contents of issue #1 were largely drawn from Freak Brothers strips Shelton had syndicated to the Los Angeles Free Press, making it the first time those strips appeared collected in comic-book form under one cover.
- Fat Freddy's Cat appears in the issue in small 'topper' strips at the bottom of full-page Freak Brothers pages — a format Shelton consciously modeled on the classic newspaper Sunday comic layout (large strip above, smaller related strip below), as seen historically with Krazy Kat.
- The first printing is distinguished by a purple 50¢ cover price and a grey tire on the front cover illustration, plus a printing error on the back cover in which the portion of the American flag that should be blue was incorrectly colored black.
- The issue went through at least 15 documented printings by Rip Off Press, with each printing identifiable by specific variations in cover color, tire color, fence/barrel/boot coloring, and interior paper stock — making printing identification a sub-hobby within underground comix collecting.
- A special '20th Anniversary Edition' of Freak Brothers #1 was issued by Rip Off Press in 1991, featuring an inset commemorative seal on the cover.
- Norbert the Nark — the series' bumbling DEA antagonist — and Tricky Prickears — a blind, deaf Dick Tracy parody drawn by Shelton in a Chester Gould pastiche style — are recurring characters in the Freak Brothers universe who appear across the series beginning in its early strips; Dealer McDope, though often name-checked in the series, was originally a character created by Dave Sheridan for the separate Rip Off Press title Mother's Oats Comix.
Cast · 12 characters
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Reprints
↩ Reprints Yellow Dog #7 (1968), Radical America #1 (1969), Yellow Dog #8 (1969), Yellow Dog #2 (09/10) (1969), Gothic Blimp Works #6 (1969), Hydrogen Bomb Funnies #1 (1970)
Reprinted in Original US-Comix #[nn] (1970), Die gesammelten Abenteuer der Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #[nn] (1971), Gung Ho! #[nn] (1971), El Perfecto Comics #[nn] (1973), The Best of The Rip Off Press #1 (1973), The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics #[nn] (1974), U-Comix Sammelband #1 (1974), Fat Freddy's Cat #1 (1977), The Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat #[nn] (1977), Comic-Telegraf #9 (1980), De negen levens van Fat Freddy's kat #[nn] (1981), More Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat #[nn] (1981), The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics / The Best of Bijou Funnies #[nn] (1981), The Best of The Rip Off Press #2 (1981), U-Comix #5 (1981), U-Comix #9 (1981), Les fabuleux Freak Brothers #3 (1983), U-Comix #35 (1983), U-Comix #43 (1984), U-Comix #44 (1984), U-Comix #45 (1984), U-Comix #46 (1984), U-Comix #49 (1984), Fat Freddy's Cat #4 [Revised Fifth Printing] (1988) + 6 more
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