On his quest to keep pursuing that ultimate high he is joined by a supporting cast that includes sidekick Dilly the armadillo, MJ, Chief and his nemesis Wild Bill. I’ve cherry-picked a few of the more striking images for this post, but to see the entire “Dope Rider” output, you just have to go to Kirchner’s blog. An unstoppable force fuelled by your favourite nightmares, inching closer and closer, each chug equalling the energy needed to fuel a small star, just when you think you're safe you wake up, to see you're already looking down the barrel of the gun.

Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium by Paul Kirchner | Goodreads

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. well, our hero smokes some really, really good dope, resulting in a vision that allows Kirchner to show off his estimable visual talents.In 1981, through his brother Thomas Kirchner, a Zen Buddhist monk, Paul Kirchner met the Zen practitioner and author Janwillem van de Wetering. There are some artists who seem to arrive fully in control of their aesthetic and their vision from the outset of their career.

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

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”). 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.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. Each one-page strip is intricately rendered as we follow Dope Rider and company’s misadventures through their surreal terrain. It’s a masterpiece and if I had to select just one book to be stuck on a desert island with to remind me of the unique properties of the medium it would be The Bus. 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. The walker's magical high wire takes him over skyscrapers and into offices, dinner parties, supermarkets, and the homes of the gray citizens who, for panel after panel, fail to look up and see the miracle above them.