Go back to Arts & Features pagePARIS -- Zut alors! Highbrow Paris collided with underground San Francisco this weekend, and was totally blown away by the experience.
The occasion was an exhibition of original works by cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, creator of such memorable Haight Ashbury characters as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Wonder Warthog and Fat Freddy's Cat.
Shelton and his wife, literary agent Lora Fountain, decamped from the Haight 10 years ago to take up residency here. France is also the home of former San Francisco underground luminary Robert Crumb, who fathered Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural.
"You can't imagine how flattering it is that these two have decided to live in our country," said Jean Terriere, an executive at France Telecom, the French eqivalent of AT&T. "For us, they are gods."
Terriere was part of a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of business moguls, socialites, motorcycle gang members, blues musicians and intellectuals -- all enthusiatic fans of San Francisco sixties comics -- who packed the l'Art Modeste gallery in Paris's chic Marais district.
They stood in raptured silence before cartoon panels in which the uninhibited Freak Brothers weaved their stoned way through heavy traffic on the Bayshore Freeway.
More recent works charted the evolution of Shelton's celebrated streetwise feline into le Chat du Fat Freddy -- now a Parisien boulevardier who liberates the lions and tigers of the Cirque d'Hiver when local dogs try to muscle into his garbage-can racket.
The San Francisco underground scene of the 1960s and 1970s had an enormous impact on France. Major French cartoonists like Frank Margerin, Jano and Marcel Gottlieb drew heavily on the work of Shelton, Crumb and other scions of Northern California's Rip-Off Press.
A quarter century after Rip-Off cartoons first appeared in an underground French publication called Actuel, hip conversation in Paris still employs phrases like "c'est freaky" or "vraiment cool" that mimic the argot and laid- back manner of Bay Area comics.
"These California cartoonists showed us characters who lived by their wits, never worked, squatted in apartments that were a total mess, and didn't care about owning things," says Terriere. "They did everything our parents hated, and everything we dreamed of doing ourselves."
More recently, Shelton has been exploring another pop subject that is dear to French hearts: San Francisco's musical legacy. His latest strips, co-produced by the French artist Pic, feature a rock group called the "Not Quite Dead."
Shelton and Fountain live in a rambling apartment near the winter circus where Fat Freddy's Cat hangs out, and just a few blocks from the Paris pied-a-terre of Crumb and his wife, cartoonist Aline Kaminsky. The Crumbs spend most of the year in a village in the south of France.
Why France? "Partly because the comic scene is real busy here, a lot more active than it is in the States," says Shelton.
As the exhibition turnout suggested, it is also taken much more seriously on this side of the Atlantic. Intellectuals are among Europe's most avid comics fans, and academic books on the phenomenon are a minor industry. Next week, an exhbition opens in London's Museum of Cartoon Art that focuses exclusively on Fat Freddy's Cat.
Yet neither Shelton nor Crumb relishes the spotlight, and both men limit their appearances to protect their privacy. In his southern village, Crumb told the Free Press, "the older folks have figured out I must be somebody, but they're not really sure who."
Former Berkeley Barb editor Rob Howe -- yet another Bay Area expat in Paris, finishing up a novel -- was also at the l'Art Modeste opening, chatting with Shelton for the first time in 15 years. The Barb, one of the primary journals of the sixties underground, was an early proponent of Rip-Off strips.
Looking around at the crowd of art critics and collectors ogling the walls, Howe said, "I remember when this stuff used to arrive at our office in beat-up envelopes, straight from the drawing board. Boy, do I wish I had held onto some of it.''
Prices of the Shelton drawings ranged up to 30,000 francs, about $6,000.
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