CETTE ÉDITION EST EN LANGUE ANGLAISE. CE LIVRE EST DISPONIBLE EN FRANÇAIS SOUS LE TITRE DOPE RIDER : POUR UNE POIGNÉE DE DÉLIRES (ISBN 9782848410593).
Dope Rider is back in town! After a 30-year hiatus, Paul Kirchner brought back to life his iconic, bony stoner hero whose first adventures were a staple of the psychedelic counter-culture magazine High Times in the 1970s and 1980s.
The new stories collected in this book were all created after 2015 and despite the years, Dope Rider has stayed essentially the same, still smoking his ever-present joint, getting high and chasing metaphysical dragons through whimsical realities in meticulously illustrated and colorful one-page adventures. Fans of the original Dope Rider comics will still find the bold graphical innovations, dubious puns and wild dreamscapes inspired by classical painting and western movies that were some of Dope Rider’s trademark.
This time though, Kirchner draws from a much larger panel of influences, including modern pop – and pot – culture (lines and characters from Star Wars as well as references to Denver as the US weed capital can be found here and there) and a wider range of artistic references, from Alice in Wonderland to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ed Roth’s Kustom Kulture. Native American culture and mythology, only hinted at in the classic adventures, is also much more present in the form of Chief, one of Dope Rider’s new sidekicks. Kirchner’s playful, tongue-in-cheek humor binds together all these influences into stories that mock both the mundane and the nonsensical alike.
Paul Kirchner lives in Connecticut. He started his career in the 1970s as an assistant to Wally Wood. His original Dope Rider stories are collected among other early works in the book Awaiting the Collapse. He also created the bus, a surrealistic monthly strip published in Heavy Metal magazine from 1979 to 1985 and illustrated the graphic detective novel Murder by Remote Control written by Janwillem van de Wetering. Paul Kirchner went back to comics during the 2010s with the bus 2 in 2015 and Hieronymus & Bosch in 2018.
He continues to insist he has never used drugs, not even for research purposes.
« (…) 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. (…) »
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Ian Thomas, The Comics Journal
« (…) This actually marks the fourth collaboration for this artist/publisher tandem, preceded most recently by 2017’s Awaiting The Collapse, a bumper volume consisting of 40 year’s worth of strips, cover illustrations, and general artistic ephemera, and this new handsome hardcover replicates the physical dimensions and overall exceptionally high production values of that book, so there’s no need to worry about whether or not you’re getting plenty of bang for your 30 bucks here — it’ll look gorgeous on your bookshelf. But hey, as we all know, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and on that score, despite tonal and thematic incongruities that pop up from time to time, it’s rather hard not to admire what Kirchner’s achieved with this one, even if you’re well past the point of partaking in the “demon weed” yourself. (…) »
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Ryan Carey, solrad
« (…) The puns, mind-expanding vistas, and Zen serenity make for a curiously addictive combination. »
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Publishers Weekly
« (…) Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium is an enticing doorway into the spellbinding unreality of Paul Kirchner. »
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Andy Oliver, Broken Frontier
