Gilbert Shelton
American cartoonist
Gilbert Shelton (born May 31, 1940) is an American cartoonist and a key member of the underground comix movement. He is the creator of the iconic underground characters The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog.
Biography
Early life and education
Shelton was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 31, 1940. His father, George Shelton, worked for Firestone, which moved the family around the southeast during the 1940s. They settled in Houston, Texas, where he graduated from Lamar High School. He attended Washington and Lee University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his bachelor's degree in the social sciences in 1961. His early cartoons were published in the University of Texas humor magazine The Texas Ranger.
Early career
Directly after graduation, Shelton moved to New York City and got a job editing automotive magazines, where he would sneak his drawings into print. Early work of his was published in Warren Publishing's Help! The idea for the character of Wonder Wart-Hog, a porcine parody of Superman, came to him in 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gilbert Shelton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.