Review by Frank Plowright

When Heavy Metal first brought the wild new strips created in 1970s France to an American audience they were accompanied by a few strips from American creators sharing similar sensibilities. Among them was Paul Kirchner’s The Bus, which was puzzling as his art wasn’t vibrant, wild and expressive, but tight and restrained, and in black and white. He created wordless, surreal half page strips, to begin with always involving the same balding, middle-aged man taking the bus. Stoic and accepting, the man adjusts to a stream of outrageous circumstances, sometimes as participant and sometimes merely an observer.

Given the amazement of the material it sat beside, The Bus was appreciated as a consistently clever quiet diversion for eight years, yet how many people realised what an innovator Kirchner was? Art Spiegelman might have been the first American comic creator to toy with form, but for him it was a brief experimental period (see Breakdowns), while Kirchner followed through accepting no boundaries for his formal experiments.

For all the innovation within, the majority of strips are also conventional gag strips, mimicking the newspaper strip pattern of individual panels building to a punchline. However, the content is limited only by Kirchner’s imagination, and that’s vast. The bus is recast as a prehistoric creature, as the Titanic and given an evolutionary history, part of the joke being it’s always the same make and model, always meticulously drawn with the destination window at the top featuring a gnomic comment. Very occasionally Kirchner steps from the silent joke to philosophical consideration, such as the bus from a Marxist perspective, addressing the big questions of life via the bus or taking a journey into the afterlife. He even has a strip suggesting trashy bus merchandise.

Constant innovation around a limited theme, polished art and a creative mind attuned to a gag make for a very desirable forgotten gem.

Ballantine issued a landscape paperback collection in 1987, now long out of print, but this was reissued as a small format hardcover by French publishers Tanibis in 2012, but using the English language strips. In 2013 Kirchner returned to The Bus, creating enough new strips for The Bus 2.