“I saw God,” Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sher­ri state, “No, you just saw some­thing like God, exact­ly like God.” And hav­ing spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jest­ing Pilate, upon his ask­ing, “What is truth?”

–Philip K. Dick, VALIS

In the months of Feb­ru­ary and March, 1974, Philip K. Dick met God, or some­thing like God, or what he thought was God, at least, in a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry expe­ri­ence he chron­i­cled in sev­er­al obses­sive­ly dense diaries that recent­ly saw pub­li­ca­tion as The Exe­ge­sis of Philip K. Dick, a work of deeply per­son­al theo-philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tion akin to Carl Jung’s The Red Book. What­ev­er it was he encountered—Dick was nev­er too dog­mat­ic about it—he end­ed up refer­ring to it as Zebra, or by the acronym VALIS, Vast Active Liv­ing Intel­li­gence Sys­tem, also the title of a nov­el detail­ing the expe­ri­ences of one very PKD-like char­ac­ter with the improb­a­ble name of “Horselover Fat.”

LSD-trig­gered psy­chot­ic break, gen­uine reli­gious expe­ri­ence, or some­thing else entire­ly, what­ev­er Dick’s encounter meant, he didn’t let the oppor­tu­ni­ty to turn it into art slip by him, and nei­ther did out­sider car­toon­ist and PKD fan Robert Crumb. In issue #17 of the under­ground comix mag­a­zine Weirdo, Crumb nar­rat­ed and illus­trat­ed Dick’s meet­ing with a divine intel­li­gence in the appro­pri­ate­ly titled “The Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence of Philip K. Dick.” It was even­tu­al­ly col­lect­ed in the edi­tion, The Weirdo Years by R. Crumb: 1981-’93. (See the com­ic in motion in the awk­ward, ama­teur video above.) The com­ic quotes direct­ly from Dick’s telling of the event, which began with a wis­dom tooth extrac­tion and was ulti­mate­ly trig­gered by a gold­en Chris­t­ian fish sym­bol worn around the neck of a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal deliv­ery girl. Most PKD fans will be famil­iar with the sto­ry, whether they treat it as gospel or not, but to see it illus­trat­ed with such empa­thet­ic inten­si­ty by Crumb is tru­ly a treat.

If you only know Crumb as the cre­ator of las­civ­i­ous Rube­nesque women and schlub­by, drug­gy horn­dog hip­sters (like Fritz the Cat), you may be sur­prised by these emo­tion­al­ly real­ist illus­tra­tions. If you know Crumb’s more seri­ous work, like his take on the book of Gen­e­sis, you won’t. In either case, fans of Dick, Crumb, or—most likely—both, won’t want to miss this.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 14 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

The Con­fes­sions of Robert Crumb: A Por­trait Script­ed by the Under­ground Comics Leg­end Him­self (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness