I have already extolled the virtues of Paul Kirchner’s the bus when I chose it as one of my “Desert Island Comics” for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival’s Between the Lines magazine. My reason then was to include something that represented work fluent in the pure language of comics. Kirchner’s the bus originally ran in the pages of Heavy Metal between the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s. These one-page landscape strips ingeniously played with the mechanics of comics to present ever more surreal twists on the simple premise of one man’s repeated, daily commute.
Publisher Tanabis collected that early run of strips in the bus 1 some years back, with Kirchner’s return to the strip many years later in 2013 collected in the bus 2. And this year we have the treat of a third collection of the comics masterpiece you’ve probably never heard of in the bus 3. And it’s just as wonderfully, dizzyingly, hypnotically absurd as its predecessors. In fact, if anything’ it’s even more imaginatively witty than anything that came before.
Throughout all three volumes of the bus Kirchner is practically giving us a textbook guide to all the storytelling techniques that comics and comics alone can employ. He toys with perspective, with timing, with between-the-panels reading comprehension, with ideas of place and space and, most of all, with our expectations as our commuter protagonist’s daily journey takes on ever more skewed visions of public transport.
Strips generally hinge on either digressions from reality for the commuter or for the bus itself. It seems almost criminal to discuss examples in a review and give away any gem of a strip here but from the given examples on this page anyone unfamiliar with the bus can get an understanding of Kirchner’s approach. The commuter getting onboard the bus only to find the interiors slowly turning into a cinema/movie theatre with an eerily dreamlike pacing. The commuter’s reflection embarking on a romantic liaison with another passenger’s reflection while their “real” counterparts sit unobservant. The exterior view from the bus’s windows turning out to be an illusion operated on a cycle by a props man. The commuter finding himself absorbed into an advertisement for an exotic holiday on the bus’s outside. It’s all consistently and brilliantly inventive in construction, and played almost straight for (ironically) even greater comedy effect.
For the full experience pick up all three volumes of the bus in one go if you possibly can. It represents some of the cleverest uses of the medium you will ever have the privilege of reading (and while you’re at it check out his Dope Rider if you can as well reviewed here at Broken Frontier). Comics has its own unique lexicon. Few projects showcase that more ably than Paul Kirchner’s the bus.
Paul Kirchner (W/A) • Tanibis, 14.00 €
Review by Andy Oliver
