Gilbert Shelton saw this coming.

You may remember him as the creator of “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” if you ever knew his work at all (he wasn’t in the Sunday funnies section of the Muthalode Morning Mishap when you were a sprout).

I first saw Shelton’s stuff in Texas, back in the Sixties, when as an aspiring young motorhead I stumbled across his “Wonder Wart-Hog” strip in Pete Millar’s Drag Cartoons.

Even then I was a comics/superhero fiend, and dug satires of the genre, like “Captain Klutz,” which Don Martin created for Mad magazine. So naturally I loved the Hog of Steel and his alter ego, deuce reporter Philbert Desanex (a “deuce reporter” sitting at the opposite end of the pay scale from an “ace”).

Shelton wasn’t just another funny fella. He was also a student of American history and politics, and often aimed his pen at same in his work (see “Give Me Liberty: A Revised History of the American Revolution,” from 1976).

But man, he really hit his stride with “Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November.” A cartoon collection bearing that title was published in 1980, and the titular strip included the following:

• A stony-broke, hungry, unemployed journalist (Desanex).
• A Supreme Court that ruled the First Amendment was “a typographical error.”
• Assassinations and a discussion of the presidential line of succession (through the secretary of the Treasury, anyway).
• The country, having run through 13 presidents on one day, being managed as a trust by the board of directors of Gloptron, Inc., “an immense multinational cartel.”
• A presidential primary contest, in which Desanex secures the nominations of both the Democratic and Republican parties (OK, so that may seem a little far-fetched).
• Gloptron’s attempt to assassinate Desanex (foiled by the Hog of Steel).
• Gloptron’s queering of the weather on Election Day, hoping to keep all the voters home. It didn’t work: Desanex wins the popular vote.
• Gloptron’s zombies overturn the popular vote via the Electoral College and the coup is buried on page 67 of the next day’s newspaper (“Well, after all, it is Gloptron’s newspaper, Mr. Desanex,” explains an aide.
• Desanex takes his case back to the people, calling for a constitutional convention on New Year’s Eve to rewrite that hallowed document and dispose of the Electoral College.
• With predictable results, it being New Year’s Eve:

By the way, the splash panel is a fakeout. In the cartoon, the pig doesn’t win the presidency. Adolf Hitler does — seems he didn’t die in that bunker after all, having taken it on the lam after first getting his skull and teeth surgically removed to mislead his enemies.

And, after an extended rant against — well, pretty much everything and everyone, promising the convention “a strong, decisive leader who can bring back law and order and restore the nation’s dignity in the eyes of the world … purge the population of misfits, get our armed forces into shape and declare war on everybody who won’t toe the line!” — the new dictator of the USA orders an invasion of Mexico “on the pretext that the Mexicans had been secretly invading the United States for years.”

Any of this sounding familiar to you?

• Editor’s note: The headline comes from (of course) Hunter S. Thompson, who in “The Great Shark Hunt” rewrote that old saw, “You can’t wallow with the pigs at night and then soar with the eagles in the morning,” which came up in a half-remembered conversation at a Colorado bar in which a construction worker told a bartender why he shouldn’t have another drink.

Wrote HST:

No, I thought, that geek in Colorado had it all wrong. The real problem is how to wallow with the eagles at night and then soar with the pigs in the morning.