I'm back from the San Diego Comic Con. While there I scored a copy of the book Comix: A History of Comic Books in America by Les Daniels. It came out in 1971 and featured a lot of then-current underground comics. I had it when I was a kid and lost it long ago. One of my favorite things in the book was the Mr. Natural comic by Robert Crumb that I have scanned and put up today. Click on it and it will open up bigger. This is one of the first of Crumb's Mr. Natural strips. Here he is clearly called "Mr. Natural the Zen Master." Later on his designation as a Zen Master was dropped. But it's pretty clear that Crumb was referencing Zen teachers with Mr. Natural. Since he lived in San Francisco at the time he started doing the strips, I've often suspected he may have attended some of Shunryu Suzuki's talks or perhaps even had some relationship with Suzuki, Katagiri, Kobun Chino or others from San Francisco Zen Center. I don't know for certain.
Crumb usually gets it right, though, with the dialog he puts in Mr. Natural's mouth. My first teacher, Tim McCarthy was a big fan and I almost consider Mr. Natural himself as an early Zen teacher. He's often far better than supposedly legitimate books written about the subject. In this little strip he sets a very good example.
I had fun at the con. Didn't do a whole lot of what you might call "business," though I did get one deal sorta happening. We'll see if that materializes. Of course, I'm talking about my film biz work, not Zen. I was surprised to see, though, that Deepak Chopra attended the con plugging some sort of "spirituality in the comics" thing. Ha! Maybe I can get him interested in the often talked about but never acted upon graphic novel adaptation of Hardcore Zen.
I saw lots of Jedi knights there. Those robes are so close to Zen robes it's funny. I shoulda worn mine. I'd've fit right in with all the other geeks. Of course, in most senses that matter Zen people are precisely like comic book/sci-fi geeks. They do exactly the same things. And when they get together they act exactly the same way — always trying to out-geek the other geeks.
The thing with sci-fi geeks is that at home they're usually the only guy who's an expert in, like, Klingon syntax or whatever. Then when they get together with a bunch of geeks, suddenly their uniqueness is threatened. The response is to try and recover that uniqueness by out-geeking the other geeks. Totally the same thing happens in Zen places. It's hilarious! At some Zen factories (Eiheiji, Sojiji and all the rest included) it's even institutionalized with stuff like color coded rakusus (bib thingies that Zen geeks wear) to show you at a glance who's higher on the scale of Zen geekdom.
One day when the Jedi knights get their stuff more together maybe they'll have retreat centers and all the rest too. The San Diego Convention Center will become a place of holy pilgrimage. Hey, stranger things have happened. Look at Scientology.
