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:
 

 
A handful of times between 1975 and 1986, a comic called “Dope Rider” appeared in the rollable pages of High Times. 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. If Kirchner’s strong compositions and clever wordplay didn’t already make him a perfect fit for High Times, the trippy visual tropes surely did, the most potent among them being the constant presence of a skeleton cowboy prowling the vistas of the American Southwest.

Kirchner himself has a blog up in which the entire run of “Dope Rider” is available as large jpegs—that’s right, every page. It turns out that “Dope Rider” didn’t even start its existence in High Times at all. The first incarnation of the character was executed on spec, so that Kirchner would have a sample ready for prospective freelance employers. It eventually appeared in the October 1975 issue of Scary Tales. 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.”

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.
 

Kirchner’s High Times bio, from the August 1976 issue
 
The primary function of any “Dope Rider” comic was to induce an “Ohhh wooow” reaction from the zonked readers. The comic occasionally featured a locomotive engineer with a third eye in his forehead who would supply cockeyed dictionary definitions such as: “Pyramid, n., to look within, to peer amid.” Most of the comics featured either a psychedelic vista or a shootout in which the Dope Rider skeleton character was killed—if not both. In “Crescent Queen,” Dope Rider inquired of a raven how to get to Tucumcari; the bird replies, “No one gets there, man. It’s one of those places you just end up.” Right on, man…..

That first High Times comic, titled “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” got Kirchner a little unwelcome attention from the Hell’s Angels:
 

I did one very bad thing in this story—I depicted the logo of the nation’s premier motorcycle club on the back of Dope Rider’s vest. That motorcycle club, whose New York City clubhouse was a few blocks from the High Times editorial office, sent over a contingent of large, hairy negotiators to make it clear that they didn’t care to be associated with High Times or the Dope Rider character. [High Times founder and editor Tom] Forçade let me know he would just as soon not have that happen again. I’ve blurred the logo out here in case they’re still checking up. (Love you guys!!)

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.)

Here’s a list of all the appearances of “Dope Rider” in High Times:
 

“Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” August/September 1975
“Beans for All,” December/January 1976
“Crescent Queen,” August 1976
“Taco Belle,” June 1978
“Matinee Idyll,” January 1981
“Loco Motive,” May 1986

  
In addition, Kirchner also worked up a single-page parody of his own series for Al Goldstein’s National Screw. In that story the character was called “Dopey Rider,” and the story was titled “Toe-Jam.”

I’ve cherry-picked a few of the more striking images for this post, but to see the entire “Dope Rider” output, you just have to go to Kirchner’s blog. He also has a Cafe Press store with plenty of great Dope Rider swag.
 

 

 
More “Dope Rider” after the jump…