The Bus

When I was sixteen years old, I was an avid comics reader. I read the comics section in the newspaper every morning. I read superhero comics. Eventually, I got around to reading my father’s collection of Heavy Metal; this was the late 80s and he had a complete run. By that point, he had purchased nine white vinyl collectible binders to store the first nine years of the magazine in, which made the collection an intriguing target. One day, I took down the nine binders and went through them. I didn’t really linger on prose and if something looked boring, I skipped it. One strip immediately jumped out at me on that first read through – The Bus by Paul Kirchner.

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Two decades later, I borrowed the magazines from my father and started a second reread. I had a better understanding of the material that I was looking at, I decided. I now knew who Jacques Tardi was, for example, and could appreciate why it was interesting to find a story by him in an issue from 1977. When I got to the first appearance of The Bus in the January 1979 issue, I was nervous. I should not have been – the strip holds up.

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In high concept terms, The Bus is a black and white half page strip about a man who rides a bus. He’s always dressed in an overcoat over a suit, bald and slightly overweight, with glasses. He has no name. In later material, he’s referenced as The Commuter, but never during the initial Heavy Metal run. In fact, the entire strip is silent – there are no word balloons or sound effects. There are occasional signs and some of the meta strips use captions. But the vast majority of the strip relies entirely on old-fashioned cartooning and sequential storytelling.

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The artwork is tight and precise and always delightful. The creator, Paul Kirchner, was well-established by this point. He spent time as an assistant for Wally Wood and it shows in how the characters are handled vis-à-vis the space they inhabit. Kirchner was best known to readers of High Times for his Dope Rider strip, a lushly illustrated phantasmagoria about a skeleton that smokes marijuana. He was best known to the New York illustration community as the guy whose work showed up on the cover of weekly magazine Screw twice a month in the mid-70s under the name Kurt Schnurr. (The Dope Rider strips and a selection of works for Screw were collected as Awaiting the Collapse by Tanibis Editions in 2017.)

 

From that perspective, The Bus was the output of a mature creator who didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He was having fun and it showed. Unlike his earlier material, The Bus is stripped down – no color, just ink and zip-a-tone. It was not a simple strip, but it was elegant. There is a lot of detail in the work and it leans more realistic than not. But at the same time, only the important details are retained and there was obviously considerable effort put into explaining the spatial relationships between the various vehicles and the characters that inhabit the page.

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The strips can be roughly broken into three broad groupings. Most of them feature the everyman commuter. Then there are the strips that are formalistic experiments, mostly featuring the bus interacting with its environment. The final group are meta commentaries on the bus as a cultural phenomenon. In all cases, the strip is a celebration of the voyeuristic impulses that arise naturally from spending time around complete strangers.

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As far as I'm concerned, the everyman commuter is the heart of the piece, providing a point of view for readers with his minimalist reactions to the surreal and absurd things happening around him. It often feels like he's asking himself if he got on the right bus (and, in one instance, that's actually the punchline). He provides the foundation that best allows The Bus to highlight how taking the bus under ordinary circumstances can sometimes be transformed from a banal event into something very weird. And The Bus takes that transformation and turns it up to eleven. The commuter is given no explanations for what he encounters and neither is the reader. The unwillingness to explain puts the onus on the reader and makes the strip feel more mature as a result.

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The formalistic experiments are fantastic. These often rely on shifts in perspective and can feel like an extrapolation of an idea posited by MC Escher. There is one strip that is just a progression through a series of surrealistic landscapes. Another features the bus hitting a car, then backing up to rewind the damage done. There is strong overlap between these formalist experiments and the strips featuring the everyman commuter – often because the commuter provides the perfect reaction for the weirdness of the experiment.

 

Because the strip is only half a page, these experiments tend to be one-note, a straightforward examination of a single idea. The cleverness of the execution keeps them from being simple or boring. For the best of them, it would take longer to explain the idea that the strip conveys than it would to just look at it and take it in. 

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The meta strips are drole and basically swap the bus into examples of popular culture from the early 80s. They are very often commentaries on the absurdity of popular culture and posit that anything can be popular if marketed correctly. These strips rely heavily on captions and, as a result, tend to be the strips that I enjoy the least. I’m much more of a fan of the silent cartooning.

 

If you count the number of issues that the strip has appeared in (68), The Bus was the longest running strip that’s ever been printed in Heavy Metal. It ran almost monthly from 1979 right through to the point where Heavy Metal went quarterly in 1986 and completely changed their publishing strategy, dropping all of their legacy strips in the process. Statistically speaking, if you pick up an issue of Heavy Metal printed between 1979 and 1985, you are more likely than not to find The Bus. If nothing else, that’s probably why the strip feels like the best possible example of the kind of thing that Heavy Metal printed.

 

The irony is that the high-concept of The Bus doesn’t necessarily feel like something that you’d find in Heavy Metal. At the time that these strips were made, Heavy Metal had a reputation as a deeply subversive publication that challenged a lot of things about mainstream American corporate superhero comics. If nothing else, it proved that one could be commercially successful with a magazine that featured sex, drugs, science fiction, and violence – all things that ran counter to the Comics Code.

 

By contrast, The Bus did not feature sex, drugs, or violence. There were no explosions and it was more slyly surrealist than overtly science fictional in content. Heavy Metal was, ostensibly, a pre-internet gateway to escape from the mundane matters of the here and now. For many, riding the bus had a reputation as being as mundane an activity as it got (except when it wasn’t). If the material that Heavy Metal published did not already have such an eclectic range (both in terms of quality and artistic approach), I do not think that The Bus would have survived as long as it did.

 

Kirchner’s previous material leaned into the nature of the magazines they were produced for. Dope Rider was about smoking pot in a magazine dedicated to smoking pot. His work for Screw was raunchy. The Bus seemed to go against the prevailing grain of Heavy Metal. That is, until you read the strip and realized that it used the all-to-real concept of riding the bus as a foundation for Kirchner’s flights of fancy.

 

The fact that this particular little strip somehow managed to thrive in that space despite its subject matter is fascinating to me. It probably shouldn’t be surprising, though. At the time, Heavy Metal’s approach to content varied wildly depending on the editorial staff, month-to-month dictates, and what often felt like whimsical choices. The Bus was well-drawn, clever, and reliable. What else does an editor need in a regular strip?

 

Tanibis Editions published a collection of The Bus strips in 2014. If you purchase it on Amazon, Paul Kirchner does the fulfillment himself and might draw a little picture in the inside front cover of your copy for you if you’re lucky. Unless you are willing and able to track down the issues of Heavy Metal where the originals appeared, this is probably the only format you’re going to be able to read them in. Having had the good fortune to be able to read them in both the original anthology format and as a collection, I can say that the experience is very different.

 

It’s mostly due to material like The Bus that I have developed a pet theory that the context in which material is consumed is important to the way the material is absorbed. A collection sanitizes the reading experience somehow by removing it from its original context alongside all of the other weirdness. Seeing the anthology material that was printed at the same time affects the flavor of the material in the same way that eating a club sandwich provides you with a mouthful of variety. By contrast, a collection is one particular flavor throughout, to the exclusion of all else.

 

In the original issues, The Bus was often printed above advertisements, coming soon announcements or other publication indicia and often towards the back of the magazine, making it feel like something hidden away in a back alley for dedicated readers who made it all the way through the issue. Of course it’s location was listed in the table of contents, but flipping through the magazine to find the individual strips gives the reader a sense of accomplishment. The content in the magazine is the same as in the collection, but the reader’s experience of the rest of the magazine will influence their memory of the strip in subtle ways that the creator and publisher cannot possibly replicate. And I don’t often see people talking about that, which makes me wonder if I’m the only one who notices or cares.

 

Tanibis Editions published a second collection of brand-new strips in 2015 called The Bus 2. The material cleaves to the three broad categories I outlined above. It even starts with a heavy metanarrative slant that posits that the original studio was shut down and the actor who portrayed the Commuter retired and has been replaced by his son. If you find this kind of thing even remotely clever, you will absolutely enjoy both collections. And I’ve heard rumors that Kirchner is working on a third book.

 

Considering the fact that the current Heavy Metal editorial policy is wrapped around monetizing intellectual property from the first several years of the magazine that absolutely nobody asked for, I find it deeply ironic that the most prolific strip in the magazine is the one thing that has managed to grow legs and find an audience three decades after it stopped appearing in stopped appearing in Heavy Metal. Someone should probably take notes.