Inspiration
Crumb has acknowledged that one inspiration for Mr. Natural was a character called The Little Hitchhiker, from a comic strip called "The Squirrel Cage" by Gene Ahern, which ran from 1936-1953. An homage is sometimes read into this (see external link, below). Mr. Natural also somewhat resembles an E. C. Segar character, Dr. O.G. Wotasnozzle. Mr. Natural's one-piece yellow outfit also bears a resemblance to Richard F. Outcault's early comic strip The Yellow Kid. There is a real person who claims he was also part of the inspiration for Crumb's comic character. Legally named, Mr. Natural has lived in the Haight district of San Francisco since the early 1960s and has been teaching his own simplified music learning system.
Read more about this topic: Mr. Natural (comics)
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)