DMT is a comic by John Campbell about his experiences with the titular drug. You can buy it here. I read it and liked it. A few thoughts below:
– The format of the comic is nice. Square nine panel pages which allows the entire page to be on the screen at once. It’s a PDF and John suggests that it been read as two page spreads, which I imagine is because he designed the pages as spreads. It certainly seems that way. Each spread is visually cohesive and most scenes only last one or two spreads. He really works the grid. There’s a nice rhythm here. It reads clearly and easily. Each drug trip is approached differently in terms of both the visuals and the rhythms of the storytelling.
– There are a few text pages, which is usually something that I don’t like in comics, but I thought it worked well here. Adds helpful and interesting context but allows the comic itself to focus on John’s experiences with DMT. Maybe it wasn’t off-putting because the single image chapter breaks encourage you to pause, making the text less invasive. It’s also not a ton of writing which I guess helps as well. The weakest portion for me was an early section that read like a wikipedia entry on DMT. I think this might have worked better as another page or two of text.
– John’s style has always been fairly minimalist but here it feels controlled and purposeful. There are lots of little tricks that he uses to strong effect, like characters’ eyes appearing/disappearing as a visual cue for moving in and out of a hallucinatory state. The storytelling is appealingly direct.
– The limited color palette – grey, blue, pink, and orange – works well and gives the comic strong visual unity. Drug experimentation is, I suppose, the classic excuse for exploring abstraction in a narrative context, but here it feels sincere and not at all cliché. The move from grey into first one color and then more becomes another powerful shorthand for the drug taking effect.
– I think John’s audience is largely in the webcomics world? At least that is my general sense. I don’t really know. I guess that for a while his work was in the webcomics joke-a-day vein, though always in a pleasantly off-kilter way – Stevie Might Be a Bear, Maybe was an early favorite of mine. His more longform comics over the last few years are still funny at times but are also much more challenging and interesting than the early work. I think his comics are definitely deserving of more “critical attention.”