My review of Paul Kirchner’s collection Awaiting the Collapse is up now at The Comics Journal.
From the review:
Tanibis has now published Awaiting the Collapse: Selected Works 1974-2014, a gorgeous compendium of some of Kirchner’s finest work over the past four decades. Many of Kirchner’s Dope Rider strips are here, along with a handful of his covers for Screw, as well as miscellaneous comics in different genres. Despite the range of years and variety in genres here, Kirchner’s surrealist spirit dominates. His comics poke at the weird worlds that vibrate beneath the surface of our own routine reality, offering new ways of seeing old things, to see the real as surreal.
Kirchner’s Dope Rider strips are particularly surreal. Dope Rider, a psychedelic skeleton cowboy, embarks on adventures that transcend time, space, and psyche. In “Beans for All”, Dope Rider rescues Pancho Villa, busts his revolutionary army out of the hoosegow, and opens the U.S. border, leading the revolution to Las Vegas, a psychedelic city floating over an astral desert. In “Loco Motive”, Dope Rider crosses the border again to smuggle good dope back into the mother country. “Crescent Queen” finds Dope Rider on a quest to find mythical Tucumcari. In this episode, Kirchner transmutes the Battle of Little Bighorn into a Pop Art mandala where Plains Indians morph into centaurs. And in “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…” our hero… well, our hero smokes some really, really good dope, resulting in a vision that allows Kirchner to show off his estimable visual talents.
