This is a collection of the artist's works, most of them initially published in counter-culture magazines in the 1970s and the 1980s and some dating from his return to comics in the 2010s.

Roughly a third of the stories star Dope Rider, the pot-smoking skeleton whose psychedelic adventures take him through colourful vistas equally reminiscent of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western films and of the surrealistic paintings of René Magritte and Salvador Dalí.

These stories were originally drawn for the marijuana-themed magazine High Times but were also for Kirchner an excuse to create his very own brand of visual poetry.

Another third of the book is a miscellaneous collection of comics whose stories range from the loony (the sextraterrestrial invasion of Earth in “They Came from Uranus”) to the satirical (“Critical mass of cool”) and the outright subversive (if you ever wondered what games toys play at night, read “Dolls at Midnight”).

This book also features a broad selection of the covers Kirchner made for the pornographic tabloid Screw in the 1970s.

Awaiting the Collapse finally contains a previously unpublished essay by Paul Kirchner about his career and his influences, which helps put in perspective the works published in this book.

Artist: Paul Kirchner
Publisher: Tanabis, 2017
Number of pages: 152
Format: Hard Cover; Full Colour illustrations
Size: 10" x 12" (249mm x 317mm)
ISBN: 9782848410449