One of the greatest benefits to my employment at Dangerous Minds has been the discovery and small role in promoting a genuinely neglected comix talent, Paul Kirchner, who in the 1970s and 1980s had been producing two separate (and very different) trippy and philosophical comics for High Times and Heavy Metal—that is to say, Dope Rider and the bus, respectively—but stopped putting out new work at some point. I discovered Kirchner’s work through the terrific blog Biblioklept, which several months ago began running one installment of the bus every weekend. Needless to say, the strips captured my attention. 

Dope Rider, which was about a pot-smoking skeleton cowboy wandering psychedelic vistas in the Old West, ran periodically in High Times from 1975 to 1986, while the bus (always set in lower-case), a Borgesian exercise in deadpan philosophizing involving a balding commuter and a gnomic urban transport vehicle, appeared in Heavy Metal from 1979 to 1985.

In March of this year I wrote a post calling readers’ attention to Dope Rider, and a month later, working with the cooperation of Kirchner’s French publishers Éditions Tanibis, I wrote a post about the bus. In both cases reader response was strong.
 

 
Over the weekend Éditions Tanibis contacted me to inform me that Paul Kirchner had published a new comic about his absence from the comix scene. That comic, called Strange Trip: A Boomer Odyssey, appeared in The Boston Globe yesterday. Strange Trip is about four pages long, and the subject is Kirchner’s own life and career as a cartoonist, from his childhood and college years to his apprenticeship as a comic book artist, his years of prominence with his two big strips, and his transition into advertising for financial reasons.

After some years of obscurity, Kirchner says that he is back to doing new strips for both the bus and Dope Rider; he also indicates that for the first time in a while, he’s been getting admiring correspondence from fans. For what it’s worth, my contact at Éditions Tanibis suggested to me that it was the recent Dangerous Minds coverage that brought Kirchner to the attention of The Boston Globe in the first place.

Strange Trip is more in the freewheeling style of Dope Rider, and Kirchner’s erudite approach is in full evidence, as he works in sly references to creative minds as varied as Bosch and Jodorowsky. The strip itself suggests a collaboration between Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud. According to Éditions Tanibis (and the new comic strip), a new edition of the bus is expected to come out later this year or next year.

Here’s a cute little video put out by Éditions Tanibis promoting their bound collection of the bus, which is available in English: