A Fistful of Delirium
$32.00
Hardcover, 132 pages
Language: English
Publisher: Éditions Tanibis
Publication date: March 19, 2021
Dimensions: 9” x 11.3”
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A new collection of my Dope Rider strips that appeared in High Times between January 2015 and May 2020. This is the English-language edition. Each book will be signed and will include a hand-signed, limited-edition print.
The book has been published with the exquisite attention to detail characteristic of Éditions Tanibis. The cover is detailed with glossy and matte elements, the endpapers are richly decorated, the paper is medium-weight matte stock, and the line art is printed separately from the color, giving the pages a crisp and vivid appearance they never had in the pages of High Times. Each of the more than 60 one-page strips appears on a righthand page, with a wordless story continuing in single frames throughout the book on the left.
Publisher’s description:
Dope Rider is back in town! After a 30-year hiatus, Paul Kirchner brought back to life the iconic bony stoner whose first adventures were a staple of the psychedelic counter-culture magazine High Times in the 1970s.
The stories collected in this book appeared in High Times between January 2015 and May 2020. 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.