Comic Artist Kevin Pyle's Lab U.S.A. Exposes a Shadowy and Forgotten Chunk of American History

In recent years, we've all heard at least one or two news stories concerning the United States government performing secret medical experiments on unwitting citizens. Sometimes they're soldiers, or prisoners or mental patients, and sometimes they're simply people who happened to be living in the wrong town at the wrong time.

It usually takes a while for word of these experiments to leak out?often decades. (Case in point?it was just a month or so ago that we heard about "Project Sunshine," which ended in the early 70s.) And generally when these stories do break, they amount to little more than a two-minute segment on the evening news, or a quarter-page story in a daily paper, then they're gone.

Now, however, more than 20 accounts of such experiments?some frighteningly recent?have been gathered together and presented in a unique and absolutely horrifying manner. As a collection they form a very disturbing portrait of an often shadowy and forgotten chunk of American history.

Local comic artist Kevin Pyle spent the past five years researching these experiments, gathering official government reports and illustrating them for Lab U.S.A. (Autonomedia, $17.50). The resulting pieces are not "comics" as most might consider them. There are no funny characters, no punchlines. Lab U.S.A. takes the form of dark collages, the stories told through reproductions of official reports and illustrated with Pyle's recreations of historic medical photographs. The results are quite unnerving.

Pyle's previous work often featured a political bent?he's been associated with the radical comics journal World War 3 Illustrated since 1991?but this was something different.

"When I first started doing work for WW3 I was a big Bertolt Brecht fan," he explained. "I was doing these Threepenny Opera-type things with this character called the Odious Omnivore, which were these jokey cartoons about this hungry fat capitalist which always ended in cannibalism. It was okay, but at the same time I was doing gallery work that was really collage-oriented. It seemed like I was doing two very disparate things. So I was trying to find a way to bring them together."

After reading Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain's Acid Dreams, about the CIA's LSD experiments in the 60s, and Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control, he figured he might have found just the subject matter he was looking for. And the more he started looking into these stories, the more he found.

"I was uncovering a lot more information, and it was sort of fascinating that all this stuff was reported pretty clearly in congressional reports and New York Times articles. The fact is, it's not hidden information at all."

Thinking?correctly, I believe?that few people were itching to sit down with a 300-page clinical history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment or other such nefariousness, Pyle decided that he'd present these stories, with all the documentation, in a comic format.

"Originally," he said, "I was thinking that the book would exclusively be about mind control experiments. In some ways I find that much more fascinating. I went to college in Lawrence, KS, where William Burroughs lived, and I got deep into reading all that stuff, and indulged freely in lots of hallucinogens. That's where my mind was at, that's the stuff I found really fascinating."

Then, in 1995, he heard about the Tuskegee experiment (in which unsuspecting African-American males were intentionally infected with syphilis). "In the past six years, it's mentioned in every article on medical ethics. At the time, it was just barely in people's consciousness. When I read that story, I felt really compelled to do the comic. Then other stories came up?radiation experiments, etc.?before I knew it, I had kind of moved away from the mind control stuff and was headed in this other direction... I realized it was such a complete history that doesn't really stop. It can go back before eugenics?I start the comic with 'The Night Doctors,' which is an African-American oral history?and you even have slave narratives about medical experimentation."

Because of the lack of solid documentation, however, he didn't go back that far, for fear of being labeled a conspiracy nut. That fear also explains why the book is so heavily footnoted.

"I thought that was much scarier and creepier?when you read it, you know it's true."

Just flipping through the book, it looks like an unorganized jumble of words and images, little more. Once you sit down with it, however, you see that it really does make sense, does hold together quite well. Despite the shift in style from chapter to chapter, it does, in the end, present a singular and horrifying story. Most surprising to me was the complete lack of editorializing on Pyle's part.

"I really just used documents and quotes from other sources, then constructed it out of those quotes, and let the pictures fill in the gaps. I was also really reticent to have any language at all that condemned it, even though it's extremely condemnable. The worst thing about political art for me is that, 'Those fucking pigs!' or 'How can they do this to us?' kind of thing... It's just not my approach to it."

Some of the artwork, he admits, strays from the strictly photographic into the more impressionistic terrain of his earlier WW3 style.

"[There's] the 'Washout' comic about testing new drugs on schizophrenics...or there's one called 'Love in Action' about using psychotropic drugs to try to make gay teens straight. And in some ways, those comics are closer to my previous work. I was excited about doing that, because I could really let the imagery go. Whereas some of the other ones, I felt restricted by what the piece called for."

The real work involved in putting the book together, he told me, was in the initial document and photo research, most of which he did in Philadelphia.

"I found a lot of things through Gretchen Worden at the Mütter Museum... And the picture library at the Free Library is amazing, because unlike New York, it hasn't been totally picked over... Doing this book in Philadelphia was really interesting, because there's so much history there of this kind of thing. The last comic takes place at U. Penn."

Surprisingly, he was able to find all the documents he needed without ever resorting to the Freedom of Information Act?which was a relief, given how nightmarish those searches can become. Mostly, he says, he contacted other authors who had written about these things, and received copies from them. Apart from that, Pyle also happened upon two remarkable sources.

"One was for the radiation experiments. The Dept. of Energy, in an attempt to find the victims of all the radiation studies, have put up on a website all of the declassified documents... I just basically plugged a few keywords into this government database, and found thousands of documents." Those papers became the basis for "Man and Rat," a comic about comparative radiation experiments conducted on lab rats and a housepainter.

The other source arose while he was researching open-air biological testing (some of which was conducted in the New York subway system). "I got in touch with an author, Leonard Cole, who wrote about a lot of this stuff. He told me that Sen. Paul Wellstone had done a lot of work to try and get that information released. I got in touch with his staff, went down to Washington, and they just pulled out three huge boxes of documents, then basically let me xerox whatever I wanted out of them. That was pretty amazing.

"The creepiest documents are the ones that are just reams and reams of...nothing but numbers. They don't have any other information on them at all?they're just numbers. I almost wanted to run a whole chapter of just numbers, but I ended up not doing it. I didn't know if people would get it."

Now that it's out, Pyle's only ambivalence toward Lab U.S.A., he says, is its complete lack of humor. Humor?dark as it may have been?was always a part of his earlier comic work. Here, though, he felt it would have been out of place. I suggested that, while humor might have softened the blow of this tidal wave of grim information, it might have also backfired on him?much as it would have had he made it a ham-fisted political conspiracy book.

"In some ways I think we live in a culture where those blows are being softened by humor," he said. "Prison rape is a really popular joke on tv. I understand that in comedy, the taboo often makes you laugh, but at the same time, collectively as a society, you can be numbed to things through humor. There are some things that should be taken seriously."

Yet at the same time, I noted, his earlier comics had a recurring "cannibalism" theme?which, in a way, he's still dealing with here. Pyle agreed.

"I love the idea of William Burroughs saying there's this entity called Control that wants to get into everybody's psyche and control everybody. The last bit of autonomy that anybody has is their body. It sort of shows how deeply authority wants to control us?that they'll go so far as to invade all these vulnerable people's bodies to get the knowledge they need to control other people. It's so Burroughsian it's unbelievable."