DOPE RIDER A FISTFUL OF DELIRIUM: A Fistful of Delirium (English Edition)

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Paul Kirchner (born January 29, 1952) is an American writer and illustrator who has worked in diverse areas, from comic strips and toy design to advertising and editorial art. There’s also a line in occasional pop cultural humour with references to reality shows, super-heroes, comic conventions and the like. But from bar brawls that use multiple, impossible perspectives to portray chaotic violence to a gunfight with Wild Bill that lasts decades it’s Kirchner’s next-level imagination that is the ultimate draw. Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium is an enticing doorway into the spellbinding unreality of Paul Kirchner. Dope Rider is a delightful blend of gritty sludge and kaleidoscopic psychedelia from one of the most integral cogs in the Steel City’s doom inner circle." - Astral Noize

Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium – An Enticing Doorway into

In 1981, he co-designed a line of military action figures, the Eagle Force, for the Mego Corporation. [6] The same year “Dope Rider” found its way to High Times, where it reached its largest audience and also used color images for the first time, which certainly improved its impact on the magazine’s baked readers.

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The real lesson here is how to take a riff and slow it down to its most threatening tone whilst still being recognisable as a six stringed guitar, and to then take that and repeatedly drive it into the audiences skulls, preferably from the base of the spine upward." - Real Gone This insight---that a more colorful, more surreal world is available to us via imaginative perspective---is threaded throughout Kirchner's cult classic strip The Bus, which originally ran in Heavy Metal between 1979 and 1985. The Bus, which centered on a mundane hero's fanciful duel with the banality of everyday existence, found a second life on the internet through pirated copies---grainy, incomplete versions that hipped a new audience to Kirchner's fabulous comics. In 2015, French publisher Éditions Tanibis released a complete (and very handsome) edition of The Bus strips, along with The Bus 2, a sequel featuring new work. This third collaboration between French publishing house Tanibis and comic book artist Paul Kirchner is a collection of the artist’s works, most of them initially published in counter-culture magazines in the 1970s and the 1980s and some dating from his return to comics in the 2010s. This EP will blow apart your skull with its double-barreled sonic blast of thunderous riffs. It's like a herd of elephants stampeding through the desert. I can't wait for a full-length from these guys! Kirchner eschews any narrative or character development that isn’t in service to a bit or a gag and the bits and gigs are in service to visual inventiveness and his exploration of surrealism, perspective, and his breaking the confines of the medium. Rendered in Kirchner’s confident hand, the strip reads as natural and understated, no matter how out there it gets. In working in such a limited space, Kirchner’s work in Dope Rider feels all the more outsize. (…)»

DOPE RIDER A FISTFUL OF DELIRIUM: A Fistful of Delirium

There are some artists who seem to arrive fully in control of their aesthetic and their vision from the outset of their career. As they deliver new work over time, their development seems so subtle and incremental that it is barely discernible to the uninitiated. But when an audience becomes versed in the artist’s language—visual or otherwise— they can detect and delight in this seemingly imperceptible (but no less apparent growth). For these kinds of artists, reinvention is unnecessary because the artist’s ability to access that magical space of familiar novelty with greater ease becomes the reason to keep showing up. Every addition to their body of work seems of a preconceived whole. Even as themes and tropes are re-hashed, they sparkle with greater clarity and deeper nuance. There is comfort in their familiarity. The work transcends the limitations of the medium to achieve an emotional tone.

BOOKS

Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry by Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus (Contemporary Books, 1991) And yet for all the attention to detail and all the layering of allusion, Kirchner's illustrations never feel cramped or stuffy. There's space to breathe here, and this stuff is good to inhale. Dope Rider's drugginess isn't so much narcotizing as enlivening. The strip propels itself with a vivid kinetic energy that functions on its own logic, a visual grammar that Kirchner develops throughout the series.

Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium - SEA - lesea.fr Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium - SEA - lesea.fr

An other third of the book is a miscellaneous collection of comics whose stories range from the loony (the sextraterrestrial invasion of Earth in “They Came from Uranus”) to the satirical (“Critical mass of cool”) and the outright subversive (if you ever wondered what games toys play at night, read “Dolls at Midnight”). NORD – Martin Simpson’s Norse Epic is a Stunningly Illustrated Tale of Mortality and Lineage October 31, 2023The Big Book of Losers: Pathetic but True Tales of the World's Most Titanic Failures (DC Comics, 1997) In December 1973, Ralph Reese introduced Kirchner to Wally Wood, for whom he worked as assistant for several years. Kirchner would later find more regular work at Heavy Metal, where he turned out a brilliant, surrealistic comic series called “The Bus” for several years. (That series is available in book form.)