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 Oct 10, 2008 10:43am (4 reviews) stumblers, cartoon, drawing, art, painting http://foolbert.stumbleupon.com/- Frank is one of my oldest friends, and is certainly my oldest painting pal. He's the finest working watercolorist in America today, and one of the cornerstones of underground comics internationally. I strongly urge anyone interested in painting, cartooning, or art history to make a bee-line to his pages. I'm proud to have had him as a teacher, friend, and Missouri river-roust-a-bout for as long as I've been putting color to the pad.
Frank has a new comic just released this past week, "The New Adventures of Jesus", with forwards by his friends Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton
From Publishers Weekly
After nearly 40 years, Stack's wry and hilarious strips featuring the Savior have been collected into a tome certain to polarize readers. Considered the first underground comic strip, Stack's take on Jesus offers readers a messiah who is every bit the Old Testament superhero of Sunday school fame, only his human side is what truly shines out. This Jesus is very much a modern man in disposition, resurrected to do his holy thing, yet irritated by such hassles as the police, military idiocy, horny collegiate groupies, Jerry Bruckheimeresque Hollywood blockbusters that distort his story and blacks who are disgusted to find out that he's not a "brutha." The collection drips with the uncertainty and disillusionment common to '60s-era undergrounds, and as the stories move on through the decades it becomes readily apparent that Jesus' second coming has had little-to-no-effect upon the population, and nobody knows that better than he does. Depending on how the individual reacts to a world-weary depiction of the figurehead of the most influential religion of the past two millennia, Stack (Our Cancer Year) wrote a fascinating work for the open-minded. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Jesus is back in this collection of groundbreaking collection from Harvey Pekar's Our Cancer Year collaborator.
Underground comics were known for their satirical assaults on beliefs held dear by middle America. None was more witty or biting than the very first underground comic ever published--Frank Stack's The Adventures of Jesus. Stack's controversial strip first saw print in the Texas counterculture publications, The Charlatan and The Austin Iconoclastic, and the University of Texas humor magazine, The Texas Ranger. In 1964, Texas Ranger editor Gilbert Shelton (who would later go on to create the little known Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) made 50 photocopies of about a dozen strips, stapled and collated the pages, designed a cover and distributed it to friends around campus.
Stack used the pseudonym Foolbert Sturgeon for his Jesus comics, fearful of being ostracized from the university (or killed) in his pursuit of a bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After receiving hate mail addressed to Sturgeon containing threats of death and other forms of religious retribution, he decided it best to retain the alias. "I suppose at first, in the foolish idealism of the satirist, I hoped to reform the world just a little bit, but I underestimated the power of ignorant fundamentalism in this country, a power which is, if anything, more militant and dangerous today than when I began drawing the cartoons."
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