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.

Dope Rider | Kurokuma Dope Rider | Kurokuma

These stories were originally drawn for the marijuana-themed magazine High Times but were also for Kirchner an excuse to create his very own brand of visual poetry.

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. Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium is an enticing doorway into the spellbinding unreality of Paul Kirchner. She seems to calmly accept the realness of the new reality, and this acceptance is her saving grace.

Dope Rider - 3 Sons Brewing Co. - Untappd Dope Rider - 3 Sons Brewing Co. - Untappd

With a background in both comics anthologies and advertising, Kirchner knows how to command the reader’s attention with limited time and space. Its inherent seriousness---the plot hinges on the life of a sick infant---balances the anarcho-comedy of the Dope Rider strips. 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. Kirchner freelanced regularly for Tyco Toys, working on the Dino-Riders, Crash Dummies, and Spy-Tech [6] toy lines, for which he wrote the back stories, did design work, wrote and drew in-pack comics and scripted for animation. He wanted to base it on an old frame in which Dope Rider is holding a heavy machine gun and replace the gun with a Panavision movie camera.In 2015, French publisher Éditions Tanibis released a complete (and very handsome) edition of The Bus strips, along with The Bus 2, a sequel featuring new work. The aesthetic is peak Haight-Ashbury with a Kevin Smith mentality, with references ranging from a “Doobie Wan Kenobi” gag to Dope Rider being gawked at while attending Comic-Con (“If his head were on fire, I’d say Ghost Rider”). The album, which was previously released on cassette and compact disc, is now available on vinyl with some exclusive comic art. Each one-page strip is intricately rendered as we follow Dope Rider and company’s misadventures through their surreal terrain. 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 - SEA - lesea.fr Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium - SEA - lesea.fr

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. 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. 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. Awaiting the Collapse is new in hardback from Tanibis Editions, the same good people who brought us hardback editions of The Bus (which I reviewed here), and The Bus 2 (which I reviewed here).Floating cities, other planes of consciousness, and hallucinogenic 1960s dreamworlds abound as Kirchner makes able use of bright, vibrant colours to echo the drug-induced exploits of his cast. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. After a 30-year hiatus, Paul Kirchner brought back to life the iconic bony stoner whose first adventures were a staple of the psychedelic counter-culture magazine High Times in the 1970s.