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.

The comic, as well as many more of Crumb’s Weirdo gems, can be found in The Weirdo Years by R. Crumb: 1981–’93. Complement it with Philip K. Dick on reality, media manipulation, and human heroism.