Earlier this year I had the good fortune to stumble upon the high-quality and criminally under-appreciated underground cartoons of Paul Kirchner, who had made his name in the 1970s and 1980s in primarily two ways. From 1975 to 1986 Kirchner produced a full-color, psychedelic comic strip set in the Old West called “Dope Rider” for High Times. Meanwhile, his strip “the bus” (the title is always set in lower case), a black-and-white comic strip about a municipal bus, appeared in Heavy Metal from 1979 to 1985.

For those who haven’t seen it, “the bus” is a gem of philosophical cartooning, a near-perfect blend of The Far Side, M.C. Escher, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rene Magritte.

In 2012 a French company called Éditions Tanibis did the world a service by publishing a book version of Kirchner’s original run of “the bus.” I own a copy, and it’s a very satisfying volume.

Sometime in the 1980s, Kirchner abandoned the cartooning game in favor of a (much more lucrative) career in advertising, but to the joy of his fans the world over, Kirchner recently started doing “the bus” strips again.

On November 25 of this year, Éditions Tanibis released the bus 2, which collects the strips that make up Kirchner’s second run of “the bus” strips.

Here is a bit of the promotional copy that accompanies the book:
 

In 2013, Paul Kirchner surprised commuters when he decided to start working again on the bus. He fixed the old vehicle up, took it out of the garage and called its iconic passenger in the white overcoat back on duty, waiting to be taken on new, exotic adventures. The bus’ unpredictable personality causes him to mimic classic pop culture icons such as King Kong or Steve Martin while in turn analyzing or teleporting his passenger. And that’s only when it’s not cheating on him with other commuters. Kirchner’s new ideas are on par with the original strips, proving that his creativity didn’t end with the 80’s. The crazy cartoon logic of the original strips is still present, and wackiness is the norm. Some details, such as the so-called “smart” phones or the passengers’ looks, root the stories in the 21st century, but Paul Kirchner’s universe retains a timeless vintage aesthetic that blends eras, lending these new stories a hint of nostalgia. The bus 2 will be published in hardcover horizontal format identical to the previous collection published in 2012. Back in that twilight dimension he calls home, it is rumored that Paul Kirchner is at work on new material for his psychedelic western Dope Rider. After all it seems that the bus’ passenger is not the only one who gets caught occasionally in strange time warps… Parts of the bus 2 material have previously been published in magazines in north America and in Europe.

 
It’s a perfect Christmas present for the underground comix fan in your life—or you can give it to your favorite bus? I don’t know either, but it does seem like a Kirchner-y way of thinking about it.

Here are a few of the new “the bus” strips. Click on any of them to see a larger version.
 

 

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘The Twilight Zone’ meets M.C. Escher meets Dali in the philosophical comic strip ‘the bus’
‘Dope Rider,’ the trippy wild west comic from ‘High Times’

 
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: