The best graphic novels depicting the psychedelic experience

I’ve read Crawlspace a number of times, and the art never fails to give me a brain buzz. It’s a visual drug that always delivers. The story follows suburban teens who find they can leave their black-and-white world and enter an alternate reality through the door of a dryer. That reality is one of intricate, geometric patterns whose lines are filled with vibrating rainbow colors.

This hypnotically beautiful world has a quality at once entrancing and sinister as the teens encounter the strange creatures who inhabit it and begin to take on its colorful patterns themselves.

I love the look of late-1960s psychedelic art, which I associate with Peter Max and the animated movie Yellow Submarine. The style is one of simple linework filled with intense colors, to which are added decorative elements and optical effects.

A French cartoonist, Caza, brings this style to Kris Kool, his 1970 erotic science-fiction graphic novel. Like a male version of Barbarella, space traveler Kris Kool experiences bizarre and surreal adventures, many of them sexual. The plot is well constructed and carried me along with its surprising turns. There is no depiction of drug use, but the fantasies and imagery make reading it as trippy an experience as one can find between the covers of a book.

I treasure this book for the artwork. The rather simple story tells of Albert Hofmann’s creation of LSD 25 on April 19, 1943, in a Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. That day is known as Bicycle Day because after accidentally ingesting the chemical, Hofmann had a powerful psychedelic experience as he rode his bicycle home.

This trip is vividly depicted in a lengthy series of full- and double-page spreads, which become increasingly bizarre and hallucinatory as they go along. Blomerth’s cartoony but precise style is warm and whimsical, and he adds striking graphic effects to it. The art is presented to its best advantage on matte ivory stock that sets off the intense colors, which include Day-Glo colors. 

I was fascinated and appalled to learn of the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra, a long-running program in which the CIA dosed unwitting victims with LSD to study its effects and potential as a mind-control weapon. The subject has been covered in other books, but this graphic novel, illustrated by Stewart Kenneth Moore, brings this alarming tale to life visually.

His garish colors and mind-warping graphics depict the hallucinatory experiences in a sometimes appealing but more often terrifying manner. Moore’s art also gives the straight narrative elements of the story a warped, dreamy quality, imbuing even mundane reality with the disturbing quality of an acid flashback.

My mind was blown when I encountered the work of Philippe Druillet in the mid-1970s. This French cartoonist is considered one of the greatest of them all, creating alien worlds of startling originality and stupefying grandeur. Fifty years later, his work is as startling and original as it appeared back then.

No one has surpassed his ability to depict scenes of such mind-boggling scale and otherworldliness, as if he had a unique glimpse of some higher realm. As a young cartoonist, I was strongly influenced by Druillet, who inspired me with his demonstration of what it was possible to achieve in the comic book form. His work is not drug-oriented but depicts the sort of visions those who take hallucinogens would hope to experience.