The Bus 3

This is the third collection of the surrealistic single-page comic strips, “the bus.” The strip began in Heavy Metal magazine, where it ran from 1979 to 1985. Those original strips were published by Tanibis Editions in 2012, in both French and English editions, and the collection has been published internationally in countries including Brazil, South Korea, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic. In 2015, Tanibis published a second collection of new strips, “the bus 2.” In 2025, Kirchner has produced a third collection of new strips.

REVIEWS
BD Gest (France):
For a third time, Paul Kirchner waits for the bus and lets his imagination run wild. He has time; schedules are never respected anyway. Between surrealism, minimalism, and theater of the absurd, The Bus strings together improbable situations and infinite possibilities. A true graphic-logical game, the collection brings together around sixty variations on the subject of waiting for and the arrival of the precious means of public transport. The situation is banal, but can you even trust your senses? Doesn’t reality have several dimensions? What if fiction were to disrupt everything? Each one-page gag is in fact a triple exploration: that of everyday life, that of perception and that of one’s imagination.

Le Monde (France):
The greater the constraint, the greater the laughter. Based on this principle, American cartoonist Paul Kirchner adopted… a bus as the subject of a humorous study in the late 1970s in the magazine Heavy Metal (the American version of Métal Hurlant). What could be less amusing, indeed, than this long, low-slung vehicle designed to transport passengers who don’t speak to each other?
Kirchner and his double—a bald gentleman in a raincoat—turn it into a laboratory for graphic experimentation, halfway between Marcel Duchamp and M. C. Escher. Shadow and scale effects, mise-en-abyme, and perspective tricks serve a surrealist approach where imagination and reality merge, as form and content merge. The absence of text and the restriction to a waffle iron no larger than eight panels make the exercise even more enjoyable.

The Slings & Arrows (UK):
Paul Kirchner is a master of presenting the surreal and absurd with a straight face. Such is the tight exactitude with which he illustrates familiar scenes that when they slip into ridiculous or impossible situations it seems a perfectly natural outcome.

As in The Bus and The Bus 2, it has to be stressed how dependent the strip is on Kirchner’s unique creative mind. Plenty of people could write a Batman or autobiographical graphic novel, but shipping in another creator to take over The Bus would result in a disastrous dip in quality. It needs Kirchner’s sensibilities to come up with just the right circumstances of a sheepdog herding the passenger along with sheep, or having a miniature passenger affected by the ice lolly wrapper dropped by the full size version waiting at the bus stop.

For all the wonder at Kirchner’s creativity, The Bus would be an experimental curiosity if every strip didn’t also generate a solid laugh. They do, and while never syndicated, for that, the imagination and quality of the art, The Bus deserves consideration alongside the greatest of newspaper strips.