Written and Illustrated by Paul Kirchner
Published by Tanibis
Humor is so hard to pin down.
Is it funny? Isn’t it funny? Is it offensive?
It’s all so subjective. Something I find hilarious might make no sense to you while something that has you in stitches might be totally lost on me.
And when I do find someone to be funny, that doesn’t mean I like everything they do.
For instance, I laugh at a few Cheech and Chong bits but not many.
“That’s because you’re not a stoner,” people say.
It’s true.
It’s been 30 years since I myself briefly experimented with pot and just didn’t care for it…and yet I consider Gilbert Shelton, creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, to be one of the funniest cartoonists of all time! So it can’t just be that I’m not a stoner.
Maybe it’s just that some humor is funny and some isn’t. As simple as that.
Which brings me to some more dope humor.
Dope Rider, to be exact.
I first encountered Dope Rider in one of the many otherwise unfunny rip-offs of National Lampoon that dotted the stands in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t until decades later that I found out the strip continued on for years in High Times, a magazine in which I never had any interest. Creator Paul Kirchner rectified my ignorance by posting most, maybe all, of his mostly single page High Times strips online.
Kirchner was, for a while, an assistant to the legendary Wallace Wood, but his colorful surrealistic Dope Rider pages from back in the day owe more to Salvador Dali and Jim Steranko than to Woody. The new book, Dope Rider:A Fistful of Delirium, collects the second run of the series, restarted in 2015, and, if anything, Kirchner has upped his game considerably.
What’s it about?
Well, you see there’s this skeletal cowboy who, with the help of natural herbs, travels the universe on his skeletal horse with his loyal armadillo, Dilly. Whilst our protagonist enjoys various mind-altered and alerting adventures, Dilly often comments on them, Snoopy-like, within his own head.
A frequent stopover for Dope Rider is the Last Saloon on Earth where he sees his friend lady MJ (also called Calamity). Not quite a sidekick is the Chief, a Native American who often shares the insanely odd quests and interdimensional jaunts with our hero.
Much of what passes for plot deals with Dope Rider attempting to get more dope. But that’s all just an excuse on which to hang some of the most colorful mini-masterpieces of comics surrealism the reader has ever seen.
You’ll find airships, cloud cities, anthropomorphic bugs, cars made of bones, lava lamp people, aliens, a Pepperlandish yellow aeroplane, a comic convention, and a tear in the very fabric of reality itself. It’s all droll and funny and original, whether you’re a toker or not, beautifully drawn and executed every step of the way.
In between the full-page strips is a clever and equally surrealistic strip called “Smoke” which unfolds one panel at a time as the book itself progresses, managing to take you, by its end, back to where you started.
Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium is a rare treat from Paul Kirchner, a unique comics artist who learned from the best and went his own way, avoiding the mainstream but ending up outlasting many of his better remembered contemporaries. Better remembered perhaps, but nowhere near as talented.
Booksteve recommends.
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