Notes from the undergrounds: The Adventures of Jesus

[alicemacher]

What was the first underground comic? Historians differ on this question, but some say it was a photocopied, somewhat irreverent (blasphemous?) 1962 collection of strips about a certain Galilean preacher, cautiously credited to one "F.S." and hand-distributed on a Texas college campus.

In 1961, Frank Stack, a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, began drawing a series of satirical cartoons about Jesus. Given that such content would've been too controversial for college humour magazines (even The Texas Ranger, which he himself had edited as an undergrad), he instead shared them with his friend and fellow alumnus, Gilbert Shelton. The following year, Shelton collected a dozen of these strips and distributed them to friends, with a quickie cover he drew himself in Stack's style, as The Adventures of Jesus. Because Stack, now an art instructor at the University of Missouri, wanted to protect his reputation, the initial run of 40 copies bore simply his initials. Later, he expanded these into the pseudonym Foolbert Sturgeon, which he continued to use when Shelton's Rip Off Press published it commercially (with a new cover) in 1969 as The New Adventures of Jesus. Here's a small sampling from the expanded (44-page) 1969 edition.



Teehee, "Bonk."

Anyway, Stack, by popular demand, would go on to publish two sequels: Jesus Meets the Armed Services (in which Jesus returns in 1970s America and is drafted), and Jesus Comics (in which Jesus becomes a college professor). In these later works, as you might imagine, the target wasn't so much Jesus himself as it was the military and academia, respectively. By coincidence, another work most commonly labelled the first underground comic, 1964's God Nose by Jack Jackson (or Jaxon), also stars Jesus, along with his Father. The real underground boom was still three or four years away, so apparently religion, as opposed to sex and drugs, was the de rigeur topic for cartoonists working outside the Comics Code.

Comments

[randyripoff]

Fun stuff.

[halloweenjack]

Thanks for posting these; I loved the classic undergrounds and bought as many as I could given constraints of availability and budget. Which one of these has Jesus going to a movie version of the Gospel in which he's been reimagined as a big muscle-bound dude? (And before anyone mentions the Rob Liefeld thing, Stack was first, although Son-O-God in National Lampoon may have prior art.)

[alicemacher]

"Which one of these has Jesus going to a movie version of the Gospel in which he's been reimagined as a big muscle-bound dude?"

That would be the first one, The Adventures of Jesus.