The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2264: Mr. Natural #3, 1977

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Though he's considered the founder of the underground comix movement, I don't really enjoy R. Crumb's comics all that much. He's been rightly called out for his violent and misogynistic portrayals of women in his work, as well as his use of ethnic caricature, well into a time when he should have know that such things were not particularly acceptable.

Mr. Natural is a pretty OK character, an old Hippie trying to find the peace and cosmic tranquility promised by that generation. In today's issue, his quest for enlightenment causes him to be placed in an asylum, and that's actually the last we see of the titular hero. The next few pages are made up of slimy magazine editors trying to get the story on Mr. Natural and how this icon of the 60s ended up locked up in the 70s.

Some of the reading I did on Shamanism way back when points to the idea that, in tribal societies, the shaman often lives apart from the rest of the tribe, and evinces behaviours that we, in our spiritually-vacant scientific way, would label as schizophrenic. To this end, whenever I pass someone on the street who is obviously living in both our world and another one that only they can see, I tend to listen, just in case I glean a pearl of wisdom from them. We treat our extreme neuroatypical people like they're diseased, rather than touched by something that we cannot understand completely. These are the sorts of things I was thinking about while reading this comic. Mr. Natural is committed by his old friend Flaky Foont who, by the 70s, has moved on from enlightenment seeking and into the secular reactionary period of the late 70s and 1980s. The Hippie stuff didn't make its way back around until the 90s, when I was in high school.

This is, of course, not to say that when someone is suffering from a mental state that is dangerous to themselves and others that we shouldn't take some steps to keep everyone from harm. But perhaps we ought to be listening to what they're saying and not simply taking it as the ramblings of a diseased mind.

More to follow.