The True Story Behind the Monty Python Foot: An Exclusive Interview with Gilbert Shelton
There was a very special event held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts last night (Sunday 23rd November 2008) as part of their Comica 2008 season. Three of the all-time great underground comics artists – Gilbert Shelton, Spain and Art Spiegelman - delivered a ramshackle, rollercoaster of a round-table discussion, taking us from their work on bubblegum cards of the early fifties to their latest, and yet to be published in one case, works, via MAD, R. Crumb, and censorship from the Comics Code to the controversy over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed two years ago.
After the event the trio were signing their books for those attending, and were gracious enough to draw unique pictures in each and every copy. I rather cheekily asked Art Spiegelman to draw me an Alfred E. Neuman and, to his credit and after some protest that he wasn’t a proper Alfred artist, he acquiesced.
The eventual image features Alfred with the typically-Spiegelmanesque speech bubble: “Me Worried!”
But the highlight of the autograph sessions was meeting Gilbert Shelton. During the onstage talk he revealed that his first professional work was providing one-page gags to the third independent magazine Harvey Kurtzman had conceived and edited after leaving MAD, the first few years of which boasted a pre-Monty Python Terry Gilliam as its Assistant Editor, back when the man was simply an artist and graphic designer, and had not yet experimented with animation. (In 1964 his left his post and was replaced with R. Crumb.)
Since Monty Python and MAD are, to my mind, the most important, ground-breaking series in the history of comedy, I decided to quiz Gilbert Shelton on his time drawing for Help!. It was quarter to eleven and I was the last in the queue for autographs – I had plenty of time for anecdotes. And even when Shelton’s companions decided to leave a few minutes later, it was clear Shelton wasn’t going anywhere until he’d completed drawing his infamous trio.
And boy, am I glad I stuck around to ask such questions, because I was told something about the infamous Monty Python foot which I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere else. Thanks again, Gilbert Shelton.
[Note that this interview has been edited slightly, not only for clarity but also because of my incompetence with recording video on my mobile phone.]
Smarter Than The Average: Do you have any stories about Harvey Kurtzman? He’s a hero of mine, I wondered if you met him when you were on Help!.
Gilbert Shelton: He was in the Air Force, and served in San Antonio, Texas. As a New York Jew he was very unhappy, and so when I met Harvey Kurtzman he was very prejudiced against a Southerner like myself. I hardly knew what a Jew was at the time! He was very helpful to me, and said to me “I considered you an enlightened Southerner”. [laughs] I didn’t understand fully what it was all about until later.
STTA: Did you meet Terry Gilliam while you were there? Do you have any impressions of him?
GS: Yeah, yeah. Terry Gilliam and I are good friends. We were both in our respective universities at the same time – he was at Occidental College in California, I went to the University of Texas – and we were both editors of our student humour magazines at the same time. So we exchanged copies of our magazines so we knew [each other] through each other’s work. I met him in New York finally, and he was working as the Assistant Editor for Kurtzman. I even camped out at Terry Gilliam’s house for several weeks, me and various other humour magazine people. And then when I lived in London I saw Terry a lot. Haven’t seen him in the last couple of years, since the last time he was in Paris. We’re still more or less in touch. He’s a very good cartoonist.
STTA: Yeah, shame he doesn’t do so much any more.
GS: He’s very slow! [laughs]
STTA: Did you ever collaborate or think about collaborating with him on anything?
GS: When I was camping out at his house we were making little films, and I did a film on 16[mm] on his camera – hand-drawn on 16mm film, a giant foot coming down from the sky and smashing the character.
STTA: Really! Wow.
GS: That might have been his source of…
STTA: The inspiration.
GS: [laughs]
