Paul Kirchner

In 1827, James Bowie carved his way into American history at the Sandbar Fight, and soon every fighting man of the South and West had to have a knife like his. The bowie knife could cut like a razor, chop like a cleaver, and stab like a sword, and many considered it deadlier than a pistol at close range. So great was the dread it inspired that by 1838 it was banned in several states—a ban that did little to stanch the flow of blood. Bowie's story is well known, but what of the other cutters and stabbers of his day? Gunfighters have long been celebrated, but those who fought with the bowie knife have been largely ignored—until now. Unearthing accounts from memoirs, court records, regional histories, and newspaper archives, Paul Kirchner, author of the Paladin bestsellers The Deadliest Men and More of the Deadliest Men Who Ever Lived , presents their stories for the first time in Bowie Knife Fights, Fighters, and Fighting Techniques. Kirchner identifies and profiles the four greatest bowie knife fighters of history, as well as numerous other wielders of the blade. He details the weapon's use in the Texas War of Independence, the Mormon exodus, the Mexican War, the slave system, the Gold Rush, Bleeding Kansas, the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination, the Indian Wars, and the Western frontier. The book describes bowie knife fighting tricks and techniques and provides numerous accounts of knife-against-knife and knife-against-gun encounters. Its final chapter surveys the continued use of the bowie and other fighting knives in modern warfare.

Bowie Knife Fights, Fighters and Fighting Techniques

Dope Rider is back in town! After a 30-year hiatus, Paul Kirchner brought back to life his iconic, bony stoner hero whose first adventures were a staple of the psychedelic counter-culture magazine High Times in the 1970s and 1980s. The new stories collected in this book were all created after 2015 and 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. Paul Kirchner lives in Connecticut. He started his career in the 1970s as an assistant to Wally Wood. His original Dope Rider stories are collected among other early works in the book Awaiting the Collapse. He also created the bus, a surrealistic monthly strip published in Heavy Metal magazine from 1979 to 1985 and illustrated the graphic detective novel Murder by Remote Control written by Janwillem van de Wetering. Paul Kirchner went back to comics during the 2010s with the bus 2 in 2015 and Hieronymus & Bosch in 2018. He continues to insist he has never used drugs, not even for research purposes.

A Fistful of Delirium

Dope Rider

The bus comic strips were first published in 1978 in Heavy Metal magazine, where they appeared regularly for seven years. From the simple, mundane premise of a man waiting for his bus, the strips quickly slip into a weird yet hilarious world where cities are surreal labyrinths and bewilderment is just around the corner. Six to eight wordless panels is often all it takes Kirchner to display his sense for the bizarre. In the bus, fire hydrants come alive, buses chose to stray away from the law, the distant horizon might be just an arm’s length away and the whole world might just turn out to be a two-dimensional panel messing with our sense of depth. More bizarre yet, in 25 years since its original publication in the USA by Ballantine Books in 1987, the bus has never been republished. This new edition contains the entire collection of strips drawn by Paul Kirchner, including a dozen previously unreleased. It also includes a new postscript and a new cover drawing by Paul Kirchner.

Melverna McFarlane

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