With illustrations by Janjetov and brain-melting color by Beltran, The Technopriests is an eye-popping visual feast. Jodorowsky has been quoted as saying, “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”. The same would seem to be true of his work in comics. Indeed, in collaboration with Janjetov and Beltran, he brings worlds to life that would be impossible to film, even with today’s CGI wizardry. [ read more ]

Once again, it’s the interaction between the writing and the illustration that provides such a lush and unique means of expressing the psychedelic experience. To bring the world of Rogan Gosh to life, artist Brendan McCarthy mined his own childhood obsession with the Amar Chitra Katha tradition of Indian comic books—cross-wiring that with the electric offspring of punk-rock pop art to produce a lurching, spiral play of hyper-color lotuses, sitar-rayguns, corridors of endless uncertainty, ashrams of the absolute, and the dead-end sprawl of South London. [ read more ]

Don’t let the leopard-print short-shorts fool you! Four-part comic book miniseries Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (reprinted at long last in a handsome hardcover “deluxe” edition) is one of the most sophisticated representations of a drug trip ever written or drawn. [...] At the same time in an alternate reality, an unnamed rock singer is dying of a drug overdose in the rain. He’s taken everything in the house, including quite a bit of LSD, and he’s talking on a mobile phone to the unseen voice on the other end of a suicide prevention hotline. All he wants to talk about are comic books. [ read more ]