Softie 'Ironhead,' soap ad come away clean winners" by Heather Burns ( USA Today, December 16, 1997, Sports section, p.1) Kirchner was born in New Haven, Connecticut. 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. [1] Career [ edit ] Comics [ edit ] Paul Kirchner's Shaman, from Heavy Metal In 1981, through his brother Thomas Kirchner, a Zen Buddhist monk, Paul Kirchner met the Zen practitioner and author Janwillem van de Wetering. Together they produced a graphic detective novel, Murder by Remote Control (Ballantine, 1986). [3] Murder by Remote Control with Janwillem van de Wetering (Ballantine, 1986, Dover, 2016 (reissue ed.))

Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium (© Paul Kirchner - SEA Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium (© Paul Kirchner - SEA

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. It first appeared in 1974 in Scary Tales magazine, then made its way to Harpoon and Apple Pie . In 1975, the comic found a home at High Times , the perfect fit for the strip where it reached its largest audience and also used color for the first time. 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.) 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." 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. Kirchner wrote three pop-culture books for Rhino Entertainment. The first, Forgotten Fads and Fabulous Flops, inspired an episode of The History Channel's Modern Marvels, "Failed Inventions", in which Kirchner is featured.Kirchner lives in Connecticut with his wife, Sandy Rabinowitz, an illustrator specializing in equine art. They have three adult children. [5] Bibliography [ edit ] Comics [ edit ] 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). In 1981, he co-designed a line of military action figures, the Eagle Force, for the Mego Corporation. [6] a b c d Kirchner, Paul (2015). "Strange Trip: A '70s memoir in comic book form" The Boston Globe (June 26, 2015). 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.

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

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. Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry by Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus (Contemporary Books, 1991) Forgotten Fads and Fabulous Flops: An Amazing Collection of Goofy Stuff That Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (Rhino, 1995) From 1996 to 2002, Kirchner held the post of senior art director at Jordan, McGrath, Case & Taylor (later Arnold New York). Kirchner and his creative partner, writer Andrew Cahill, created a campaign for Zest body wash featuring football's Craig "Ironhead" Heyward. [5]He has published five books with Paladin Press: The Deadliest Men, Dueling With the Sword and Pistol, Jim Cirillo's Tales of the Stakeout Squad, More of the Deadliest Men Who Ever Lived, and Bowie Knife Fights, Fighters, and Fighting Techniques. 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 Kirchner eschews any narrative or character development that isn’t in service to a bit or a gag and the bits and gigs are in service to visual inventiveness and his exploration of surrealism, perspective, and his breaking the confines of the medium. Rendered in Kirchner’s confident hand, the strip reads as natural and understated, no matter how out there it gets. In working in such a limited space, Kirchner’s work in Dope Rider feels all the more outsize. (…)» 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. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Kirchner did several dozen covers for the pornographic magazine Screw. He regularly did illustrations for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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

This book also features a broad selection of the covers Kirchner made for the pornographic tabloid Screw in the 1970s. The magazine’s baked readers became big fans of the brilliantly illustrated and psychedelic comic featuring a skeleton cowboy known as the “Lone Stoner” who prowled the prairies of the American Southwest. Along the way, the cowpoke encountered bizarre characters, outlandish landscapes, and some badass weed!

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In the mid-1970s, Kirchner wrote and illustrated the surrealistic comic strip Dope Rider for High Times. 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. 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. 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.

Éditions Tanibis - Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium, by Paul

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”).

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Awaiting the Collapse finally contains a previously unpublished essay by Paul Kirchner about his career and his influences, which helps put in perspective the works published in this book.