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

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If a few of Kirchner's Screw covers evoke psychedelic transformation, more fail to transcend their initial publisher's inherent sexism. In the most offensive example, an old bald man lounges at his leisure on furniture made of young naked women (there's even a "footrest"). In his postscript to Collapse, Kirchner says that he considered the work for Screw humorous, not pornographic, but it's worth noting that he signed most of it with the pseudonym "Kurt Schnürr." Tanibis has now published Awaiting the Collapse: Selected Works 1974-2014, a gorgeous compendium of some of Kirchner's finest work over the past four decades. 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. Despite the range of years and variety in genres here, Kirchner's surrealist spirit dominates. His comics poke at the weird worlds that vibrate beneath the surface of our own routine reality, offering new ways of seeing old things, to see the real as surreal.

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

Kirchner's power to evoke surrealist fantasy evinces throughout the miscellaneous comics collected in Collapse. Standouts include "Hive", a riff on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and "Tarot", which plays out as a duel between a knight and a wizard (both strips were published originally in Heavy Metal). In December 1973, Ralph Reese introduced Kirchner to Wally Wood, for whom he worked as assistant for several years. 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”). Such imaginative transformations evince in the covers Kirchner did for Al Goldstein's pornographic magazine Screw in the 1970s. In one cover, indicative of Kirchner's taste for drawing ultra-dominant women, men line up like slaves before an enormous nude woman who looms over the landscape like a sacred temple. In another cover, nude female forms fly through the sky like minotaur bomber jets.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 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 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. He illustrated Col. Jeff Cooper's To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth, as well as seven subsequent books for the noted firearms authority and big game hunter.

Dope Rider. A fistful of delirium · paul-kirchner | fatbottom

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. The collection ends with a nice long essay (including numerous photographs, strips, and illustrations) by Kirchner called “Sex, Drugs & Public Transportation: My Strange Trip Through Comics.” I haven’t gotten to it yet because I’m trying to restrain myself from gobbling the collection up all at once. He penciled stories for DC's horror line and assisted on Little Orphan Annie for Tex Blaisdell, who took over the strip after the death of Harold Gray. 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 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.)For Heavy Metal he did an equally surrealistic monthly strip, the bus (1979–85). These strips were collected in a book, The Bus, published by Ballantine in 1987. A new edition has been released in 2012 by French publisher Tanibis. [2] Paul Kirchner also wrote and illustrated occasional short features for Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated. Most of them were collected in the book Realms (Catalan Communications, 1987).