Dog Star Man: Lilly Wave
At The Comics Journal a read of Lilly Wave, the comics biography of John Lilly by Brian Blomerth drawn in the Blomerth style: everyone's a jovial floppy canine, lolloping along the street or merrily adrift in innerspace or tripping balls in the outer cosmos.
Blomerth already did two books about major psychonauts drawn the same way, bios of Albert Hofmann and R. Gordon Wasson, and the style looks like it comes to the artist as easily as breathing. It might work better this time round with Lilly's paranoid gnostic Illuminatus! 1970s America than it did for Hofmann's starchy narrowed 1940s Europe—now the underground funny-animal comix vibe has something to grab on to.
But not much about Lilly or whatever the hell went on inside his isolation tanks or his hoovering up ketamine or talking to dolphins is on a par with Hofmann and Wasson's dreamy LSD levitations and mushroom hunting. Drawing Lilly's mindbenders in the same style feels like Blomerth trying to wrestle a much more aggressive animal into the same sack.
Even at the far end of Lilly's spectrum, like that time he got a message via Comet Kohoutek from a cosmic solid-state entity planning Earth's doom, the art has just the one jovial gawky affect to call on, when something able to tap psychedelic pity and terror might match the occasion. Or it would, assuming Blomerth doesn't just see Lilly and the others as funny-animal-appropriate. In the book's notes he says he had no firm views about Lilly one way or the other, and the same probably goes for Hofmann and Wasson; but if mockery isn't on Blomerth's mind, he's cracked the door open.
Or maybe Blomerth just likes drawing the hi-jinks of these crazy dogs and their stunts. Three of them (four if you count Wasson's wife) have been shown swept up in revolutionary thought rewiring society, but it wouldn't make much difference to the art if the dogs were composing The Rite Of Spring or designing the Large Hadron Collider instead.