Drugs and humour rarely go together. Ask Richard Pryor. In my case, I also have years of evidence to call on of stoned people reverting to conversations about either their favourite childhood television shows, their need for snacks, or the last time they were high.

Believe me, there might have been ounces of weed involved, but there weren’t even trace amounts of comedy. Which makes it surprising that I still find the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers so reliably amusing. Gilbert Shelton’s counterculture heroes are still going strong, and have recently had their adventures collected in a thumping big anthology, or indeed Omnibus as the cover describes it.

The action starts way back when, and one of the surprises is seeing how relatively sexist the hirsute trio’s adventures are by modern standards. I have no problem with that, just saying. And it’s inevitable because the Freaks are simultaneously of their time and transcend it, their status as archetypes allowing them to continue to get laughs these days when so much of their hippy era is viewed with suspicion or worse.

All very well, but how did Fat Freddy, Phineas, and Freewheelin’ Franklin get to become archetypes in the first place? Well, it’s partly about the way they look: they really are credible looking avatars of their tribe. But without solid writing creating strong stories for those images to inhabit, they’d be relegated to t-shirts and bumper stickers, whereas in reality their comic sales are still strong: 40 million since they started.

The strength of the stories, intricately connected with the quality of the cartooning, is in depicting a lifestyle that continues to be a rite of passage for many. There’s a point in The Matrix where the protagonist is offered the choice of the red pill or the blue pill. He chooses the one that leads to the revelation of truth. For the Freak Brothers, being offered a red pill and a blue pill presents no dilemmas: snaffle both, then follow them up with a rainbow of other pharmaceuticals, and cap it all off with a reefer of the finest ganja available.

It’s all about the pursuit of the high, which the likes of Terence McKenna say has evolutionary purpose, but which in the case of the Freak Brothers more often than not leads to devolution in ethics and behaviour. Which is interesting, and apt: hippies the Freak Brothers might be on the surface, but they’re not pure children of the stars. They’re greedy, selfish, dirty and horny, characteristics which make them much easier to identify, even if you’d rather not identify with them yourself.

The stories range from one-pagers to multi-issue epics, and I rather feel that Shelton’s plotting skills aren’t up to the latter. A shame, though all of the adventures have their moments. Some of the tales are broadly credible, others much more fanciful, but the consistency of characters and artwork (despite different cartoonists working on the stories) gets across that it all fits together, kind of. Better that than the kind of contortions needed to read several of the titles that Marvel or DC put out and convince yourself they’re part of the same world, anyway.

I took around three weeks to read the Omnibus, last thing at night, and pretty much every night I was guffawing at some or other aspect of the stories. Fat Freddy buying a gun to shoot game and being ordered by the others to eat the ‘roof rabbit’ (ie rat) he kills when he accidentally looses the gun at the ceiling. Norbert the Nark being overpowered by the gaseous side-effects of a Mexican meal when the trio come back to their apartment that the agent has rigged with a device to smell marijuana. Franklin being beaten up by his girlfriend when she smokes the special dope that Phineas laced with testosterone to help maintain his manhood. There’s some truly classic humour among these 600-plus pages, and you don’t need to be a dopefiend to enjoy them. Here’s hoping that the comedy successfully translates to a planned screen adventure for the Freak Brothers…