Dope Rider Update

I am currently working on a follow-up collection to Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium. It will contain 48 one-page Dope Rider strips that I did for High Times between 2020 and 2024,  two long-form stories I've been working on for the past year, as well as additional material. If all goes well, it will be published in 2027.

My daughter took a picture of me at my drawing table, inking one of the new pages. I've got my headphones on, listening to my tunes, and the cotton gloves I wear while inking to keep the page clean.  I always wear a black t-shirt when inking as India ink is indelible. I wear the reading glasses with the strongest magnification, 3.25, and put dots on them to distinguish them from my normal 1.50 reading glasses.  I have three lamps positioned around the desk. I use the clamps at the top of the table to hold a page up when I'm working on the bottom of it.

Can it Be? High Times Magazine Reborn?

 

Full article here.

Dope Rider in Saigon

 An Australian fan was in The JunkYard Bar Nha Trang in Saigon where the bathroom was wall-papered in artwork, including a widely circulated frame from an old Dope Rider strip, "Matinee Idyll."

Dope Rider, "Meditation"

 This is the last Dope Rider strip I had published in High Times magazine before it shut down shop (sniff, sniffle).

Dope Rider, "Some Realities"

I'm getting near the end of the one-page trips I did for High Times before it closed shop in July of this year. I had hoped they would last another two years so I would have enough strips to fill a follow-up collection to A Fistful of Delirium. My thought is to do a few long-form adventures, perhaps six or eight page stories each, in the coming year. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to support myself while doing so through a Patreon or Kickstarter account. We'll see.

I had fun with this one, with the symmetry of the panel structure and the variety of fantasy environments and color palettes.

Dope Rider, "Dance"

 

You never know where you'll get an idea. In this case, I was inspired by a post I saw of page done by Gene Colan (see below). I liked the swirliness of it. I wanted to do something with that energy. The idea of having Dope Rider dance with a marijuana leaf popped into my head. I did a Google image search of all different ways people dance, picked a variety, and recreated them in pencil with our hero and his leaf. I scanned the sketches and organized them into a design on Photoshop layers. I then printed it out, traced it onto the Strathmore paper I use, and inked it in my old-school manner. The most obscure of the musical references is Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You" (1994), but I like the song and thought the title worked.

Dope Rider, "Alien"

I established a few recurring characters in the ten years I did the monthly Dope Rider strip for High Times. Sometimes when I'd be racking my brain for an idea, I'd think about bringing back one of the occasional characters and building a strip around him. One was an alien whose name is Martin, but with the letters turned sideways and upside down. It was a bit too much story to cram into one page, but one page is all I had.