The 384th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

Paul Kirchner: Fifty Years of Visual Storytelling

Paul Kirchner will talk about his 50-year career in visual storytelling. He will discuss the artists he has worked with, projects he has worked on, lessons he has learned, and the ways the comics landscape has changed during that period. He will discuss finding one’s style, creative blocks, Sturgeon’s Law, individual versus collaborative projects, the relationship of panel and page, and other topics. He will talk about his inclination toward surrealism and wordless storytelling and will share his speculations on the nature of the creative process.

Born in New Haven, CT in 1952, Paul Kirchner attended the Cooper Union School of Art with the ambition to eventually draw comic books. He dropped out during his junior year in 1973 when he began getting work in that field, penciling horror stories for DC and working as an assistant to Tex Blaisdell, Ralph Reese, and Wally Wood. He wrote and drew the Dope Rider comic for High Times magazine and created the regular feature “the bus” for Heavy Metal. He collaborated with the Dutch mystery writer Janwillem van de Wetering on the graphic novel Murder by Remote Control. In the 1980s he began doing more mainstream illustration, much of it comics related. He did design work for the toy industry, as well as writing and illustrating comics that were included with toys such as the Eagle Force and Dino-Riders. For Telepictures magazines, he produced comics about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ThunderCats, GoBots, and Power Rangers. He worked as a freelance storyboard artist, eventually accepting a position as an art director at a New York agency, a job he held for six years before going back to freelancing. After his freelance work dried up about ten years ago, he returned to comics, producing new Dope Rider strips for High Times and new bus strips for a second collection. The French publisher Editions Tanibis has put out six hardcover collections of Kirchner’s work: the bus, the bus 2, Awaiting the Collapse, A Fistful of Delirium, Hieronymus & Bosch, and Murder by Remote Control, in French and English language editions.