“There is nothing worse… no punishment greater than to have known God and no longer to know him.”
In 1981, counterculture creative icon R. Crumb — who revolutionized album covers by bringing comics to music in the 1960s and 1970s — created the magazine Weirdo, a comics anthology conceived as the lowbrow response to Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s intellectual-skewing Raw magazine, which had launched the previous year. Even so, Crumb, who would later illustrate Bukowski and adapt Sartre in a comic, couldn’t escape the appeal of the literary. In Weirdo #17, published in 1986 and eventually included in the altogether fantastic anthology The Weirdo Years by R. Crumb: 1981–’93 (public library), Crumb illustrated sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick’s now-famous spiritual “exegesis,” his hallucinatory 1974 experience in which he believed to have encountered a God-like presence. Crumb’s signature psychedelic pen-and-ink crosshatchings only amplify Dick’s message about the illusory nature of reality, leaving us to question whether he was a madman or a genius. Still, when all is said and drawn, who is one to judge another’s experience? Jane Goodall put it best.
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