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The Revolving Door in the Undergrounds

While by sheer volume superhero matter dominates the comics medium - and will probably do so for the indefinite future - we need not consider the form and its vices to exist in complete isolation, with its flaws and follies kept close and never affecting other genres. On the one hand, some cartoonists follow material in genres in which they typically do not work; and on another hand, the human mind often follows well-trod paths, asking the same kinds of questions.

The death-and-return story, therefore, though mostly infesting spandexed crimefighter tales, does occasionally reach beyond and into other forms. Indeed, on at least one occasion, it managed to introduce a tentacle into the hoary world of the underground comics, in a tale in which one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers passed on to the Great Beyond.

The Death of Fat Freddy

Someone who reads more than a panel or two of a Freak Brothers comic will invariable confront the central role that the drug culture had in the concept. So, therefore, the manner of Fat Freddy's death seemed particularly fitting: He who lived by substance abuse died by it.

At the beginning of this morbid tale, Phineas encountered the stiff form of the obese Freak Brother, and the surviving brothers quickly realized some atrocious attempt at better living through chemistry had gone terribly, terribly, wrong.

Nor did things improve once the duo attempted to organize a funeral for the departed Frederick Freekowtski. An estate sale to raise money for a burial mainly brought out hordes of parasites claiming Freddy's worldly possessions for back debts; after the ill-fated sale brought in no proceeds, Phineas and Franklin realized that the freeloaders had also made away with most of their stuff as well.

Persevering, though, out of a loyalty borne of over a decade of Freak Brothers adventures, the remaining brothers managed to locate a California-style cleric to officiate over a clandestine nocturnal burial. They interred their third member in a coffin cobbled together of orange crates, and hit the road, attempting to continue with their lives.

Fat Richie and Obsolescence

The real world offers considerable opportunity for corruption, and the bereaved Phineas and Franklin find their grief undermined by the discovery of a younger, yet apt, substitute for the departed Freddy.

Fat Richie, a hitch-hiking punk rocker, steps into Freddie's role, albeit by accident, and Franklin and Phineas realize (with some uncomfortable self-consciousness) that they have found a complement that completes their triumvirate as well as Freddy did in his day.

In an Aristotelean sense, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers tended to fit the pattern of a tale in which the characters receive better than they deserve. Nonetheless, humor frequently deals in suffering turned upside-down, and some kind of karmic laws apply. Crimes of vice do not bring retribution from a justice-oriented universe, but disloyalty does.

Fat Richie, therefore, plays the role of both crime and vehicle of justice in the Freak Brothers' short-lived substitution of a younger, hipper model.

Resuscitation through Inebriation

If Fat Freddie died as he lived - yielding to an overdose on one of the many substances with which he regularly and recreationally mangled his ill-used central nervous system - we might see in this the potential for an ironic means to redeem him from his unliving state.

Indeed, the combination of Fat Richie's gluttony for food and intoxicants - amid a picnic atop Fat Freddy's grave - results in an accident with a spilled wine bottle. As the wine seeps into Freddy's body, he erupts from the ground, aflame with anger at the loose talk of replacing him with Fat Richie (and, of course, whatever toxic cocktail of chemicals his bloodstream must contain after decades of experimentation).

Fat Richie, having served his storytelling purpose, flees in terror at the vision of a Freak Brother erupting from his casket, and Freddy proceeds on a rampage, pummelling his fellow Freak Brothers senseless.

Later, in the car, away from the scene of a characteristic violent Freak Brothers story ending - for, frequently, Freak Brother did raise hand against one or more of his fellows as the ending of a tale - Freddy revealed that an overdose of ibogaine led to a trance-like state in which he could see and hear everything (including the manifest disloyalty of his fellows). The wine, fortunately enough, knocked him out of the coma.

In Apology

Shelton, in spite of trotting out a theme just becoming tiresome (recall that, circa 1980, dead characters did not return so often as they do circa 2001), nonetheless stands innocent of the crime of overuse.

First, since he tended to use, then discard attention-getting gimmicks (his fertile brow could produce them as the occasion demands), one did not often catch the man with the same cliche in his hands. Second, where he used a cliche, he did this with a precise awareness of the naughtiness involved in trotting out overused concepts; indeed, much of the humor depended on the reader's recognition of the graft of someone else's lameness into Shelton's homegrown milieu.

Parody frequently absolves talent of the onus involved with cliched concepts, inasmuch as satirical treatments do much to place such burdens on those who misuse overdone concepts in earnest. As well, some kind of destiny may have required that at least one Freak Brothers story would feature Fat Freddy bursting from his grave.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 216. Completed 25-JAN-2001.