Bicycle Day by Brian Blomerth
When Swiss Chemist Albert Hoffman discovered Lysergic Acid Diethylamide in November of 1938 he really didn’t think much of it. He was looking into ergotamines at the time, chemicals derived from the ergot fungus known for poisoning scores of people throughout the centuries via moldy bread. He fed it to some rats, observed no change, then went home. Five years later, after accidentally dosing himself and riding his bicycle home in a panic, he’d lay on his couch in terror and astonishment as his mind melted away into streams of color and geometry. It was dubbed “Bicycle Day”.
Set in a highly surreal and absurd dream version of Switzerland, Bicycle Day by Brian Blomerth tells the story of Albert Hoffman’s first encounters with LSD. It approaches the subject with the simplicity and naivete of a children’s book. While Bicycle Day is definitely not for kids, the style allows readers to consider this mind-altering substance from a place of innocence and curiosity, rather than bringing the full weight of the chemical’s long and storied history to bear.
Blomerth’s style has a surfer’s sense of humor and zen balance, with a huge nod towards 60's underground comics and other psychedelic art movements of that era. Emanating from within is the childhood zeitgeist beloved to hippies and underground comics artists alike: the relentless surrealism of classic cartoons. All these reagents are stirred together, creating a distinct brand of psychedelic playfulness which lands halfway between Matt Groening and Tex Avery, between Heinz Edelmann (the guy who did the Yellow Submarine artwork) and Carl Barks (the creator of Donald Duck who also filled his cartoons with anthropomorphic puppy-people). Bicycle Day takes place in a world filled with oozing mountains and wildlife cuties sporting bowler hats and bonnets. The hillside and sky loom with gradient glow, and everyone dances along in rubbery poses. Sleek roundness defines each subject, like it’s all ready to burst. The lines are simultaneously strict and fluid, expanding like balloons. The world is cartoon chaos well before hallucinogens are introduced.
Bicycle Day lives somewhere between the organic and the iconographic. Organic in the sense that everything takes on a cellular wobbliness and sway. Iconographic in the sense that every object and animal that inhabits Bicycle Day’ is simplified and caricatured, set apart almost to the point where each lives in its own little bubble of existence.
One of the best things about the artwork is Blomerth’s use of rhythm. He’ll take an item — a bird, window, chemistry flask, etc. — and repeat it, often with beautiful variations of color, shapes, orientation, and adornment. This rhythmic musicality is sometimes simply a background effect, but other times it takes center stage. One such scene details, with surprising specificity, the chemical process behind Hoffman’s LSD synthesis. It actually occurs twice, which is lucky for us because it’s among loveliest sequences in the book. It has the ordered complexity of chemical synthesis, but Blomerth’s iconographic austerity and the cryptic chemical names and structures lend it a mystical aura. You begin to see and feel the line connecting alchemy and chemistry, how chemistry relates to the creation of substances that can modify the world, our bodies, and our minds. It’s hypnotic, and I often found myself gazing back and forth across the pages taking in the shape and meaning of it all.
Blomerth, the chillhard, the wide-eyed nature-gazer, revels in wonder and astonishment. What you get in Bicycle Day is a highly focused account of the period of time during which Albert Hoffman discovered LSD, then the two times he actually experienced the effects of the drugs. Along the way we meet some of his friends, coworkers and rivals. You won’t find much in Bicycle day relating to the politics of the time, other than brief and jarring (but still visually stunning) intrusions by World War II. Instead, the narrative focuses on minute, usually one-on-one interactions between Hoffman and those around him. He frames the chemist as a man of few words, who goes about his day sopping up information from the world around him, as one who is spoken to rather than listened to. When Hoffman chooses to interact with the world it is by way of making something, whether it be a butter and honey sandwich, Swiss pancakes, or mind-altering chemicals.
This is a brief book. 192 pages, one panel per page, or two-page spreads. Nice big pictures but not many words. Blomerth doesn’t get into the massive repercussions of Albert Hoffman’s discovery so here’s a brief summary: His LSD was presented to the head of his firm, the Sandoz pharmaceutical department, who passed it along to his son, a psychiatrist who intended to do a human study. Much delayed by the demands of a war torn world, the study was finally published in 1947, and eventually raised some eyebrows in both U.S. leading eventually to the MKULTRA project. The substance leaked to the public, first through intellectual circles, some of which contained famous professional brain-havers such as Aldous Huxley.
Then, by means of the mysterious chaos these processes are governed by, it reached the public at large, and soon enough LSD infiltrated the world. Synthesis of the substance would become a rite of passage for college chemistry students. Youths would use it to catalyze both personal and social change. The Cure would release Disintegration. Hippies, punks, academics, comic creators, ravers, poets, Marianne Williamson probably — Even early computer engineers and designers loved the stuff!
Acid has played a part in Western culture which is actually pretty huge, especially considering it’s vilified and criminalized status among governments worldwide. Albert Hoffman did not win many awards for his work, certainly not a Nobel Prize such as the one Paul Hermann Müller won for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as the environmentally toxic and likely carcinogenic DDT. Müller actually appears in the book: He has a fictional encounter with Hoffman, rudely bragging to him about DDT and his expected fame. Hardly anyone talks about Müller nowadays, while Hoffman has had this dope ass book made about his life, a testament to the fact that intrinsic value can’t be dictated by mainstream markets.
Given the intricacies of the history of LSD, it’s no wonder that Blomerth chose to focus on a small patch of Hoffman’s life surrounding its creation and the discovery of its effects. The narrative focus on Hoffman’s personal life plays perfectly off the explosiveness of the art, and a ton of research went into getting it as right as possible. Bicycle Day, while quite crazy and quite cool in itself, isn’t about how crazy and cool LSD is. Blomerth says as much in his afterword. The majority of Hoffman’s initial trips take a turn for the terrifying. Rather, it’s about how the surrealness of everyday life leads to even more surreal situations, and how the act of putting something together from scratch, whether it be lysergic acid diethylamide or Swiss pancakes, can be much more important than expected.
~Postscript~
While writing this review I read an interview with Brian Blomerth in Bubbles Zine #3, which is a great publication, highly recommended. If you have an interest in Albert Hoffman’s life, there’s a nice long interview he did with High Times available for free online on Erowid. Bicycle Day is available for sale at Mexican Summer, and Brian Blomerth’s other work can be found on his website (seizure warning??). LSD and other psychedelics have huge potential in treating psychiatric disorders, and it’s highly recommended, if you have a buck to spare, that you donate to The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is working to free up access to these chemicals for research.
