Foolbert Funnies: Histories and Other Fictions

“Cult” cartoonist Frank Stack is best known as the artist behind Harvey Pekar’s award-winning graphic novel, My Cancer Year (his art was featured in the American Splendor film), and as the creator of the first underground comic book, The Adventures of Jesus. Foolbert Funnies collects comics—inspired by Stack’s pop culture-filled childhood and travails as a fine arts professor—that ran in National Lampoon and other publications. (For decades, Stack’s work was published under the pseudonym “Foolbert Sturgeon” to protect his career.) In Foolbert Funnies, you will find adventuress Dirty Diana; nostalgic time traveler Frank Crankcase; commonsensical Dr. Feelgood; politician Paddy Booshwah; “Southern Fried Homicide”; and a host of Amazons, artists, and pulp heroes, all depicted in Stack’s scratchy, hatchy “crowquill” style. This “best of the rest” is a tribute to a Texan who’s been quietly creating observational, iconoclastic art for more than forty years.

Texan teacher, editor, critic, and cartoonist Frank Stack’s The Adventures of Jesus (1962) was arguably the first underground comic book. Stack (b. 1937) was a professor of art at the University of Missouri for forty years, and has a BFA from the University of Texas and an MA from the University of Wyoming. He drew Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year (1994) and edited Naked Cartoonists (2012). His work has been collected in several solo collections, most notably The New Adventures of Jesus (2007).