 In the film "Comic Book Confidential", Crumb says that he was inspired to draw the character when he heard then radio DJ David Rubenstein, jokingly calling himself "Mr. Natural".A conscious model for Mr. Natural would be various louche and disreputable Great Depression survivors who'd gone through the Second World War in various capacities such as war correspondent, and who'd volunteered for service in the Spanish Civil War, only to discover, in the McCarthy era of the 1950s, that their background made them unemployable and who developed various sorts of scams to prey upon the postwar Baby Boomers' search for enlightenment.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.