Paul Kirchner’s Awaiting the Collapse (Book acquired, 2 Nov. 2017)

Awaiting the Collapse collects some of the finest and most surreal comix from Paul Kirchner, from the 1970s up through this decade. The book is big and bold and gorgeous. Here’s the back cover:

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). A large portion of Collapse features Kirchner’s surreal western Dope Rider strips, which have been hard to find on the internet. It also collects the covers that Kirchner did for Screw magazine, as well as dozens of other one-offs and vignettes, comix in different modes, moods, and manners.

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.

Here’s Tanibis’s blurb:

This third collaboration between French publishing house Tanibis and comic book artist Paul Kirchner is a collection of the artist’s works, most of them initially published in counter-culture magazines in the 1970s and the 1980s and some dating from his return to comics in the 2010s.

Roughly a third of the stories star Dope Rider, the pot-smoking skeleton whose psychedelic adventures take him through colorful vistas equally reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western films and of the surrealistic paintings of René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. 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.

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”).

This book also features a broad selection of the covers Kirchner made for the pornographic tabloid Screw in the 1970s.

Awaiting the Collapse finally contains a previously unpublished essay by Paul Kirchner about his career and his influences, which helps put in perspective the works published in this book.

I promise I’ll have a review of Awaiting the Collapse up soon; for now, let me just underline my enthusiasm—it’s weird and wonderful and gorgeous stuff.