Frank Stack, whose Adventures of Jesus is regarded by many as the first underground comic, died on April 12 at the age of 88. In addition to his underground work, Stack was the artist for Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner’s Our Cancer Year, and he was inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame in 2025.
Stack was born in Houston, Texas, on October 31, 1937, and attended the University of Texas, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959. His first credited work in print appears to be the illustrations for the story “King” in the Winter 1957 issue of Charlton’s Campus Humor. In 1958-59, while an undergraduate, he was the editor of the university’s humor magazine, The Texas Ranger, where he published the early work of fellow student Gilbert Shelton, who would go on to a career as an underground cartoonist himself.
In 1962, Shelton, now the editor of The Texas Ranger, published Stack’s comic strip The Adventures of Jesus, which also appeared in several alternative newspapers. In 1964, Shelton collected about 40 of the strips in a photocopied zine, and handed them out around campus. Stack, who had begun teaching art at the University of Missouri in 1963, was credited simply as “F.S.” on the cover of that zine and soon adapted the pseudonym Foolbert Sturgeon for his comix work. Although it was not commercially printed, and only 50 copies were made, many regard this as the first underground comic.
Shelton and another early comix creator from UT, Jack Edward Jackson, a.k.a. Jaxon, founded Rip Off Press in 1969, and they published three issues of Stack’s Jesus Comics in 1969-72, as well as two of Feelgood Funnies (in 1972 and 1984) and two one-shots, Amazon Comics (1972) and Dorman’s Doggie (1979). Stack contributed stories to a number of anthologies during this period, including “Jesus Goes to the Faculty Party” in The Rip Off Review of Western Culture (1972); his work also appeared in Blab!, Rip Off Comix,Weirdo, and the Swedish anthology Pox. Several of his comics also appeared in Drawn & Quarterly’s self-titled anthology, the company’s first publication, in 1990-91.
Stack began contributing to Pekar’s American Splendor in 1987, with issue #12, and in 1994 he collaborated with Pekar and Brabant on Our Cancer Year, which won a 1995 Harvey Award. In the early 2000s he contributed two stories to Eureka Comics’ Graphic Classics, an adaptation of the Ambrose Bierce story “Justice” in Graphic Classics # 6 (2003) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Love, What Is Love?” in #11 (2004). Eros Comix published Naked Glory: The Erotic Art of Frank Stack in 1998. In 2007, Fantagraphics collected all Stack’s Jesus stories, plus a new one, in The New Adventures of Jesus: The Second Coming, and in 2015 they published the collection Foolbert Funnies. His work was included in the 2009 group exhibit “Underground Comics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix” at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (see “Underground Comics Exhibition”).
In addition to UT, Stack studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and received his Master of Art degree from the University of Wyoming. He was an art professor at the University of Missouri from 1963 to 2001, and his fine art work was exhibited internationally as well as in the 2012 retrospective “Frank Stack at 75” at the Missouri State Historical Society.
He also had a brief film career, playing “Elderly Man” in the 2010 horror film A Horrible Way to Die (2010) and “Old Man” in the found-footage anthology V/H/S (2012).
Stack married fellow UT student and Texas Ranger staffer Robbie Powell in 1959, and the couple had two children, Joan and Robert.
Source: ICv2
