Cartoonist Brian Blomerth returns with a second eye-popping paean to the history of psychedelics in Mycelium Wassonii. The book is a spiritual successor to Blomerth's 2019 graphic novel Bicycle Day, an exuberant, surreal account of Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman's discovery of LSD. Here, Blomerth details the careers of R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson, pioneers of ethnomycology and key figures in popularizing psilocybin mushrooms in the West.
The Wassons' adventures in mycology begin in a cabin in Upstate New York, during the couple's honeymoon in 1927, where Tina proselytizes to a reluctant Gordon about the consciousness-expanding powers of fungi. Blomerth's art is likewise expansive. His full-page compositions are boldly designed and richly detailed: mushrooms spring from the earth and chitter away in an alien language; Tina's headscarf resembles a wizard's cap, suggestive of a mystic or a prophet; waterfalls shimmer with multicolor gradients, evoking a heightened state of awareness.
Years later, the two collaborate on a "cookbook turned treatise," merging mycology and anthropology. Their research eventually brings them to Oaxaca, where they encounter the Mazatec healer María Sabina, a "first-class curandera" (or medicine woman). They document her use of psychoactive mushrooms in ceremonies--despite her warning that "showing the photos or telling anyone will be a betrayal"--and, in so doing, unleash a tide of Western interest that transforms the Mazatecs' relationship to the mushrooms.
While Blomerth is clear-eyed about the pitfalls of Westerners' historical embrace of psychedelics (he prefers "entheogens," a name "unvulgarized by hippy abuse"), Mycellium Wassonii is above all a celebration: an ecstatic visual fantasia in praise of both the mushroom and the movement that has sprung up around it. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.