Who remembers "The Forty Year Old Hippie" comic?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve recently been digging up some favorite underground comics online. I’ve found websites posting issues of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Dealer McDope. Yesterday I thought to hunt for The Forty Year Old Hippie, and located and bookmarked some sites carrying some strips.

Then I found the obituary for the author, Ted Richards. He died about one year ago, in a hospital a few miles north of where I live. I read up on him, and what he was up to after TFYOH.

He was computer-savvy, and he left the comix scene and went to Silicon Valley to apply his talents for graphic design. Here’s a quote from a website called “Remembering Ted Richards”:

“In 1987, he founded AdWare, providing software products and design services for computer clients, including Apple and Microsoft. Among his innovations was the first ‘shopping cart’ for an e-commerce site. From the 1990s, he became a web site developer, offering enterprise-level development services, consulting, web design and information architecture. In the 2010s he was a principal designer for Deep North, Inc.”

Wow, I had no idea. One of his last TFYOH strips details Hippie getting his first job in twenty years - in Silicon Valley.

Anyone else love this old underground comix strip?

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Me! I thought the Ol’ Hippie (and his dog Acid, and the kid named Child Person, and Leslie, the Hippie’s long-suffering old lady) were pretty hilarious.

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Glad to see that someone remembers Hippie. I read on that same page that Ted Richards was once staying with some aging hippie friends in Cotati, California, and that gave him the idea to create the character. Mr. brown also bummed around northern California in the 1970s, and Cotati was a popular place for counterculture burnouts back then.

Here’s a link to where you can see a couple of Hippie’s adventures online, in case anyone’s interested.