the bus 2 by Paul Kirchner

The title is in lowercase on the book, so I did the same on my post. Sure, it's pretentious, but this book was published in France, so it comes by its pretension honestly.

No seriously: the text, where it exists, is in English, but the book was published by Tanabis Editions of "19, rue Francis Chirat 69100 Villeurbanne, France." (My assumption is that Villeurbanne is the name of the town, but it could be a district or arrondissement or something else for all I know.) As proof I also offer that the spine reads up rather than down.

Anyway, it's the bus 2, the sequel to the original the bus, published in 1987 and collecting a bunch of surrealist strips about a guy and a bus by Paul Kirchner. I never read the original, as far as I can remember, but they did run in Heavy Metal in the late '70s and early '80s, so it's likely I saw at least one of them.

This one opens with an arch comics-format preface, talking about how "the studio that produced 'the bus' was forced to shut down" many years ago, but a surge in interest brought it back in 2002 with the son of the original "commuter" stepping into his father's shoes. The truth? I have no idea -- my best guesses are either Kirchner suddenly had new bus ideas, or some paying editor popped up and mentioned loudly loving the old strips and wishing he could publish some new ones. However it happened, either in 2002 or somewhat later (since this 58-page book came out in 2015, collecting nearly fifty single-page strips and a couple of related illustrations), Kirchner did a new batch of the same kind of thing he'd done thirty years before.

Most of the strips are wordless, though a few have captions. All are pantomime -- the commuter, the bus driver, and various other characters never speak on-panel. And they're all surreal: bus seats as ski-lifts, a Busby Berkley commuter extravaganza, plays on size and shape and direction, and so on.

Kirchner draws it all with a clean, precise illustrative line, almost like advertising art: his buses are solid and specific (General Motors "New Look") and his people are a bit more generic, especially the balding commuter.

It's amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny, but that's what it's supposed to be: various weird things happening, one per page, to a generic commuter on a generic bus. Someday, maybe, there will be a massive (by which I mean: more than a hundred pages) the complete bus with everything, and that will be even better. But this is just fine for what it is right now.