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

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Kirchner's power to evoke surrealist fantasy evinces throughout the miscellaneous comics collected in Collapse.

Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium by Paul Kirchner | Goodreads Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium by Paul Kirchner | Goodreads

The walker's magical high wire takes him over skyscrapers and into offices, dinner parties, supermarkets, and the homes of the gray citizens who, for panel after panel, fail to look up and see the miracle above them. Two more installments appeared in the November 1974 issue of Harpoon and the March and May 1975 issues of Apple Pie, which were actually the same magazine—the name change occurring “after lawyers for National Lampoon started clearing their throats. Panels weave in and out of each other or are juxtaposed on more expansive images, meta moments are liberally sprinkled throughout, and symbolism is, contradictorily, often simultaneously nuanced and direct.

In a way, it adds to the charm as it demonstrates a self-awareness, a reluctance to stray to far afield of what he knowns. Most of the comics featured either a psychedelic vista or a shootout in which the Dope Rider skeleton character was killed—if not both. Such imaginative transformations evince in the covers Kirchner did for Al Goldstein's pornographic magazine Screw in the 1970s. The bawdy comic starts with a highly-sexualized Kewpie doll performing a strip tease and escalates to a full-blown orgy, interrupted only when a pair of adult human feet enter the scene, at which point the orgy-goers transform back into dolls. He attended Cooper Union School of Art but left in his third year, when, with the help of Larry Hama and Neal Adams, he began to get work in the comic book industry.

Dope Rider | Kurokuma Dope Rider | Kurokuma

But while the landscape may speak to Salvador Dali, Sergio Leone, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the dialogue and visual gags, which are peppered with pop culture references belie a certain “normal dude” sensibility. While he doesn’t break any new ground here, he does demonstrate his ever-increasing mastery of perspective, page layout, and, above all, pure illustration. Many frames revolve around a sight gag or mystical imagery, which are tied off with a pointedly corny joke, as when Dope Rider takes out Wild Bill Hickok with a surrealist bullet and laughs, “Say Hello, Dali! The brainchild of New York comic artist Paul Kirchner, the first incarnation of Dope Rider was done on spec, so the artist would have a sample to show prospective freelance employers.Kirchner’s playful, tongue-in-cheek humor binds together all these influences into stories that mock both the mundane and the nonsensical alike. Despite the years, Dope Rider has stayed essentially the same, still smoking his ever-present joint, getting high and chasing metaphysical dragons through whimsical realities in meticulously illustrated and colorful one-page adventures. Heavily influenced by the gritty, intense westerns of Sergio Leone, “Dope Rider” was the creation of a young New York comix artist named Paul Kirchner. In this episode, Kirchner transmutes the Battle of Little Bighorn into a Pop Art mandala where Plains Indians morph into centaurs. After a 30-year hiatus, Paul Kirchner brought back to life his iconic, bony stoner hero whose first adventures were a staple of the psychedelic counter-culture magazine High Times in the 1970s and 1980s.

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

Many of Kirchner's Dope Rider strips are here, along with a handful of his covers for Screw, as well as miscellaneous comics in different genres. On his quest to keep pursuing that ultimate high he is joined by a supporting cast that includes sidekick Dilly the armadillo, MJ, Chief and his nemesis Wild Bill. Depending on who you talk to and when, blanket federal legalization is either extremely imminent or extremely impossible.Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium is an enticing doorway into the spellbinding unreality of Paul Kirchner. It still had great moments and is undeniably clever in a lot of ways but I didn't really get the nostalgia for and honoring of a stereotyped subculture surrounding weed. Heavily influenced by the gritty and intense spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, Dope Rider offers an outrageous blend of the drug culture with psychedelic scenery of the wild west. Roughly a third of the stories star Dope Rider, the pot-smoking skeleton whose psychedelic adventures take him through colorful vistas equally reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western films and of the surrealistic paintings of René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. An unstoppable force fuelled by your favourite nightmares, inching closer and closer, each chug equalling the energy needed to fuel a small star, just when you think you're safe you wake up, to see you're already looking down the barrel of the gun.

Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium (Book Paul Kirchner’s Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium (Book

In the span of just a few panels, he satirizes, celebrates, and deconstructs both the stoner culture in which Dope Rider has its roots and the wider pop culture in which that subculture is seated. Awaiting the Collapse is new in hardback from Tanibis Editions, the same good people who brought us hardback editions of The Bus (which I reviewed here), and The Bus 2 (which I reviewed here). He does this by making his limited real estate as appealing as possible, which, in turn, makes the time the reader spends in that world as pleasurable as it can be and invites re-visitation. Kirchner moves from surreal adventure to the "real" imaginative staging of surreal adventure and back again.

There were only a handful of copies of Paul Kirchner’s collected The Bus strips (originally published in Heavy Metal) and, knowing how much I love work that plays with the specific tools of comics he wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out. Its inherent seriousness---the plot hinges on the life of a sick infant---balances the anarcho-comedy of the Dope Rider strips. Given that marijuana is now fully legal in fourteen states and has been decriminalized or authorized for medical use in many others, High Times magazine and the contents therein cannot make the same claims to countercultural subversion that it once could. The aesthetic is peak Haight-Ashbury with a Kevin Smith mentality, with references ranging from a “Doobie Wan Kenobi” gag to Dope Rider being gawked at while attending Comic-Con (“If his head were on fire, I’d say Ghost Rider”).