April is definitely the cruelest month. I read a lot of comics, and I didn’t have any time to write about them. I was really thinking about writing a 420 themed column for April. I actually think it’s worth talking about, I’m not here to take pot-shots at pot-heads. I can’t smoke anymore, I’m recently sober. But speaking as a lapsed stoner, I had a lot of formative comics reading experiences under the sway of the reefer. I first read Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey while enjoying a joint, and it was an intimate reading experience that has affected how I approach comics ever since. In my stoner days, I learned how to look at pages and panels alone as portents of something special beyond parts of a story. I slowed down to really drink in every part, every line and detail, because it was pleasant. I learned to appreciate finding something funny in an illustration as no different from finding something beautiful. I learned to appreciate Jack Kirby’s prose as much as his Krackle, the smaller observational weirdness, the persona beneath it all. I don’t think anyone needs weed to get all that. I am not missing anything without it, that’s for sure. But I appreciate the good that came from the interaction weed had with my comics reading habits.

Comics have, obviously, mingled with psychedelia for as long as both have had a culture. But at the risk of sounding like the stoner I very much used to be, I think comics can themselves be the substance. There’s something about a particularly great image, a great sequence, in a comic book that can take us to a giddy, heightened place, a feeling of amazement at living in a world with this in it. Time stops and rushes in those images. That blissful disbelief is what I liked about the giddy states THC could share with me. As long as I have comics, I can visit that place, that vibe, whenever I want. I deeply appreciate that. A few comics have gotten me to that fun place recently. Let’s talk about them!

Corrine Halbert is no stranger to psychedelic offerings, with her 2022 series Acid Nun offering a self-evident trip through the mind of divine feminine blasphemy. Last year’s Total Vore, Halbert’s contribution to Katie Skelly’s Viscere anthology, likewise gives you all you need to know from the title, yet promises a whisper of something eerily more, a mystical and profane world of powerful, scary women. Scorpio Venus Rising is Halbert’s latest ongoing series from Silver Sprocket, and, while continuing to forge a bold path of bluntly psychedelic obscenity, her intentions may not be so clear. The title, of course, is a cheeky reference to Kenneth Anger’s gay counter-culture classic Scorpio Rising, distorted into a painfully girly evocation of that most occult girly thing, astrology. Halbert’s comic draws on the iconography of tarot cards, the first issue remixing The Fool, The Magician, and The High Priestess into a psychic epic, the priestess looking down upon the titular hapless heroine Venus as she flees vampires through fields of corn and travels the desert under the weight of piercing swords. Tarot is an exciting direction for Halbert to take her work in, a more open concept than her prior work – astrology is hazy in meaning yet potent in symbolism, an obscure and specific history ruling the hearts of all. That’s the kind of femininity that Halbert is all about. Venus just happens to look a whole lot like the artist; perhaps this comic is the reading of her fate. My only gripe is that Silver Sprocket really ought to print Halbert’s art at a much larger scale – I love a good occult tract but the bright color palette and solid linework in this pamphlet would blast my face off at Euro album dimensions. These are comics to stare at for hours.

Trevor von Eeden might not like his comics to be called a trip, but that’s exactly what they are. At his 1980s best, forging ahead under the crushing weight of deadlines for B-list gigs at a pre-Dark Knight DC Comics, von Eeden churned out an inimitable vision of what comics could be, wildly slashing marks and deliriously dynamic splatters of panels laid out on the page like shards of broken glass. A von Eeden comic is so perfectly rendered, yet every composition seems to disintegrate the longer you look at it, melting into raw ink on page. It’s a grammar of comics-making that appears downright otherworldly. While I was bin-diving the other day, I chanced upon a few issues of Thriller, von Eeden’s short-lived 1984 prestige series written by Robert Loren Fleming. It’s an… occult spy thriller, maybe? I’ve read an issue or two of Thriller before, and I have never been able to figure out what the hell was happening, honestly. I don’t think it’s a terribly hard series to follow, or that badly written either, it’s just so terribly more interesting as a work of art than as narrative. Von Eeden draws people jumping through skylights and fighting to the death on trains, houses on fire, and giant glowing heads shrieking while unraveling into nothing. Issue 4 is a dizzying mess of speed and movement, faces absorbed by the slashing lines of the wind whipping about them. The cartooning is an elemental force. Words do not contain it.

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Another recent book that stuck me with a certain psychedelic rhythm was Makinaphobe, Rafael Zaiats’ debut graphic novel from the always interesting Strangers Publishing. The artist calls the book “my favorite fever dream about how I was hit by a car when I was 12.” Fever dream is an apt description – it is a netherworld of skeletal highway-like systems, page after page of frenetic battles between a shonen-esque boy hero and strange creatures, cars and busses flying out of the page amid battles and combat expressed with breathless speed. Speed and kineticism are Zaiats’ strengths, but also Makinaphobe’s greatest shortcoming – there is attention to conveying movement, but not to moment-to-moment choreography. Everything is a bit vague and mysterious in a way that reminds me of an overcooked 90s Image comic that demands the reader marvel at the significance of every event without stopping to give a meaningful hook for the reader to get a grip on why it’s all so exciting. That said, on a page-by-page basis Zaiats makes thrilling comics, organic forms that are a bit like Michel Fiffe’s Copra by way of early Tsutomu Nihei. Zaiats is also a charming writer, dialogue peppered with nicely gratuitous “damn”s and “fuck”s at home in an early 2010s scanlation. Makinaphobe would benefit from more deliberate composition, but the giddiness on every page that leaves the work so disorienting and rushed is also Zaiats’ strength. There’s something in here, something I’m struggling to find for myself that I can only hope Zaiats will reach for in works to come.

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That’s the column this month. Next year maybe I’ll write something for the weed day on the weed day. But hey, it’s all for fun. Hope you enjoyed reading.