The Style of Paul Kirchner

We’re back! This time, we’re going to talk about one of Nirvana Noir’s inspirations, the comic artist and illustrator Paul Kirchner.

Paul is best known for Dope Rider, a comic he created in the 70s - 80s and resumed in 2015. The Dope Rider is a skeletal hero exploring psychedelic themes, pop art landscapes, shamanistic imagery, and surreal scenarios.

Each page is a visual treat of design, layout, and draftsmanship. We’re tremendously inspired by how he balances so many different elements and the constant inventiveness.

We also adore Paul’s other works, such as Murder by Remote Control, a trippy detective story where the fedora’d protagonist's intuition is represented visually by conceptual layouts, like this one where a biker’s past is implied visually. He’s not telling the detective everything, but we don’t need to hear his whole life story to understand who he is.

We had only discovered this book after completing Genesis Noir, and it was very gratifying to discover another artist playing with repetition, graphic layouts, and visual depth to convey a timeline. Reading Murder by Remote Control left us very inspired to explore more of these visual timelines!

Paul Kirchner is a visionary artist whose work explores drug use in Dope Rider for High Times and sex in his work for Screw. You might think he’s a bit of a freak. But, as he writes in an autobiographical essay at the end of Awaiting The Collapse, he’s a pretty straight laced guy who had a mystical experience that “...made [him] reluctant to use drugs, as having experienced what [his] brain could produce unassisted [he] was afraid to tamper with its workings.”

Paul’s experience suggests that psychedelic territory welcomes all travelers. We hope you’ll enjoy journeying with us to Nirvana Noir’s.

Until next time!

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