Cultural journalist, author, and all-around nice guy Jesse Jarnow has a new column at Aquarium Drunkard—in its debut installment, he has some characteristically smart stuff to say about cartoonist Brian Blomerth and his vibrant graphic novel Bicycle Day:

The most accessible of the new batch of psychedelic books–and surely the most gleeful–is Brian Blomerth’s Bicycle Day (Anthology Editions, $30.00). A gorgeous graphic novel, it depicts the most notorious mind-weirding origin story of them all—Albert Hofmann’s 1943 lab accident that unleashed a world-changing technicolor superpower. Blomerth’s rendering Hofmann’s invention of LSD in Basel, Switzerland in the years surrounding World War II is lush and overflowing, a welcoming color-swirl that will almost surely beckon repeat dives. A stunning visual rendering of Hofmann’s discovery, Bicycle Day winks to R. Crumb, Yellow Submarine, the Grateful Dead, and numerous comix conventions, unfortunately including a hyper-buxom depiction of Hofmann’s assistant, Susi Ramstein, the first woman to take LSD.

Read Jarnow’s whole column here. And as Jesse and I share a great deal of common interests, I reviewed Blomerth’s new comic for The Los Angeles Times in June.