Description
Book SynopsisBrian Blomerth first fused his singularly irreverent underground comix style with heavily-researched history in 2019’s Brian Blomerth’s
Bicycle Day, a Technicolor retelling of the discovery of LSD. Now, the illustrator and graphic novelist continues his wild and woolly excursions into the history of mind expansion with
Mycelium Wassonii, an account of the lives and trips of R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson, the pioneering scientist couple responsible for popularizing the use of psychedelic mushrooms. A globetrotting vision of hallucinatory science and religious mysticism with appearances by Life Magazine, the CIA, and the Buddha, Mycelium Wassonii is a visual history and a love story as only Blomerth’s Isograph pen can render it.
Trade Review“Blomerth’s fanciful and colorful illustrations offer a largely joyous overview of the couple’s work together, which Wasson continued to do for decades after Pavlovna’s death in 1958.” -The New Yorker, Nov. 2021
“Blomerth’s work here is a visual tour de force and a work of creative nonfiction; in some hand-written endnotes, he acknowledges some mistakes and omissions made for the sake of aesthetics and because “I ran out of faces.” Nevertheless, every page blooms with color and detail. Much of the storytelling is visual, but Blomerth also includes Cyrillic, Spanish, a visualization of the Mazatec tonal language, and an entire language of the mushrooms themselves — which his endnotes indicate, “should you yearn to suffer, you can figure that out.” The thick, matte paper quality evokes the underground comics of the 1960s, to which Blomerth’s work owes some of its line quality. Still, he also represents psychedelic states with a morphing of media, including watercolor and colored pencil scribbles that emerge as characters commune in psychedelic states.” - Hyperallergic, Oct. 2021
