Kramers Ergot 7 Launch Party. L to R: John Pham, Sammy Harkham, Souther Salazar, Ron Rege Jr., Kevin Huizenga, Seth, Shary Boyle. Photo by Nathalie Atkinson.
So! The most controversial book of the year (I guess it’s this year’s Best American Comics? Sort of?) was successfully launched in Toronto this week! We had a turn out of a little over a hundred people to see Editor Sammy Harkham and a bevvy of participating artists talk about the creation of Kramers Ergot 7, have a beer, and some of them even picked up a copy and got it signed. Good times, good turnout, and we’re quite happy.
I have to be honest: I couldn’t not pick up the book. It’s pretty amazing, and magnificent as an object. I haven’t read it yet, but I feel like the stories by Tom Gauld, Chris Ware, and Dan Zetwoch are the most immediately visually striking… even the stuff that doesn’t immediately resonate is actually pretty visually interesting, I feel like I’ll be spending a lot of time with it. Seeing it, holding it… Owning It… I can’t help but think that the ‘controversy’ about this book really was insane.
It’s only a book.
It’s beautiful, ambitious from both a creative and production stand-point, and many of its contributors number among my favourite cartoonists. It looks awesome on my shelf, people at my Christmas Party this weekend were awed by it. I’ll get incredible enjoyment out of it.
But it’s still only a book.
How it stirred up the anger it did is a little beyond me… I think a lot of it was because of the lack of information surrounding the initial solicitation. Cheers to Tom for getting the low-down on that, but If I had to put a guess out there I’d say that if the info in that interview with Sammy were available 3 weeks earlier, things wouldn’t have reached the depths of rhetoric they did. Maybe that was just the sort of buzz the book needed to get noticed in a crowded marketplace? Maybe not. That’s why I’m generally in favour of more information.
Anyway, it’s a great, great book. I hope the ridiculousness of the discussion surrounding it doesn’t overshadow the fact that it was worth every dollar I paid for it… and that the signatures and sketches I got from the artists at our event were the icing on the cake. I guess… the moral is “attend book launches; buy expensive books”.
It’s a poor moral. But the book is gorgeous 🙂
– Chris