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.
During the years 1974 to 1986, after working as an assistant to Wally Wood, Paul Kirchner created several comic strips such as Dope Rider for High Times magazine and the bus for Heavy Metal. In 2012, Tanibis published an anthologie of the bus strips that was nominated at the Angoulême International comics festival, proving that even a 30-year old public transportation vehicle can take part in a Grand Prix.
In 2013, Paul Kirchner surprised commuters when he decided to start working again on the bus. He fixed the old vehicle up, took it out of the garage and called its iconic passenger in the white overcoat back on duty, waiting to be taken on new, exotic adventures. The bus’ unpredictable personality causes him to mimic classic pop culture icons such as King-Kong or Steve Martin while in turn analyzing or teleporting his passenger. And that’s only when it’s not cheating on him with other commuters.
Kirchner’s new ideas are on par with the original strips, proving that his creativity didn’t end with the 80’s. The crazy cartoon logic of the original strips is still present, and wackiness is the norm. Some details, such as the so-called « smart » phones or the passengers’ looks, root the stories in the 21st century, but Paul Kirchner’s universe retains a timeless vintage aesthetic that blends eras, lending these new stories a hint of nostalgia.
The bus 2 will be published in hardcover horizontal format identical to the previous collection.
Back in that twilight dimension he calls home, it is rumored that Paul Kirchner is at work on new material for his psychedelic western Dope Rider. After all it seems that the bus’ passenger is not the only one who gets caught occasionally in strange time warps…
Parts of the bus 2 material have previously been published in magazines in North America and in Europe.
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.