The Comics Journal

In the watershed winter of 1967-68 in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Shelton witnessed two movies, one about the Marx Brothers and the other about the Three Stooges, playing a fated double-bill at the Vulcan Gas Company, a theater for which he drew posters. Stunned by the Marx-Stooges experience, Shelton decided that he, too, could make movies. Enlisting the help of a friend in the film department of the University of Texas, he produced a five-minute movie, The Texas Hippies March on the Capitol. Shelton had been, in the early sixties, editor of Texas Ranger, the campus humor magazine at UT, wherein Shelton published, in the December 1961 issue, an early installment of Wonder Wart-Hog, featuring a protagonist he’d been fooling around with since high school; but that’s another story for another time. This time, the winter of 1967-68, Shelton was a moviemaker. And a cartoonist. As a cartoonist, Shelton decided the best way to promote his new film was to publish a flyer featuring a comic strip about three potheads. “Everyone liked the comic strip better than the film,” Shelton said, “so I abandoned my film-directing career and devoted my subsequent efforts to cartooning.”