For nerds, opening a copy of Kramers Ergot 7 (Buenaventura Press) will be like touching the monolith from 2001. The latest edition of the popular art-comics anthology — launching in Toronto tonight — has expanded to vast dimensions: it’s 16 by 21 inches, spreads 60 cartoonists over 96 ultra-deluxe pages and costs $125. Many of those contributors — a diverse lineup of big names (Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Matt Groening) and others making theirs (Gabrielle Bell, Matt Furie, Frank Santoro) — were particularly drawn to the liberating/daunting experience of using such a grand canvas, one that echoes the full newspaper pages where early strips like Little Nemo first explored the medium.
Seth is one of them. Speaking from his home in Guelph, the acclaimed cartoonist tells me “the thing that excited me about working on this is that I wanted to do something that was super-dense. I wanted to be able to get 120 or 150 panels on a page.” He had worked on such a scale before, drawing a few full-pagers for the National Post, but this was his first chance to do so without constraining deadlines. The result is a characteristically nostalgic and elegant tribute to Canadian illustrator Thoreau MacDonald, colourblind son of Group of Seven member J. E. H. MacDonald.
“I certainly enjoy the work of his father,” Seth continues, “and the Group of Seven in general, but I think Thoreau’s work spoke to me more than any of them because it’s close to the actual trade of a cartoonist. He’s working in simple black and white images, and he’s using them the way a cartoonist uses them. It’s more about a cartoon language or an iconographic language than it is about trying to draw nature. He’s using black and white drawing…. He never went out into the field and drew — what he would do is come back into his studio and draw from memory. And I think that kind of ink drawing, where you’re creating iconic images to stimulate the viewer’s memory, makes them plug in the actual details. That’s very similar to a cartoonist’s art.”
Noting with blissful resignation that he’s “probably going to end up down the road somewhere doing a book about him,” Seth also admires the late artist’s modesty, adding: “Occasionally you’ll read about some particular genius, like Frank Lloyd Wright or something, and you will think it’s great that they were such an asshole, but generally I think we’re drawn to people that we would want to like.”
An open question is how many people will be drawn to the plus-size Kramers Ergot. Debate about its price has raged online, with a few aggrieved readers taking series editor Sammy Harkham and publisher Alvin Buenaventura to Nerd Court over their alleged “greed.”
Christopher Butcher manages The Beguiling, Toronto’s renowned comics store which is organizing the anthology’s local “tour stop,” and while he sympathetically says, “It’s tough to justify a purchase this big for a lot of people,” he adds that “no one is going to regret spending the money on it once it’s in their hands…. Our order for Kramers Ergot 7, as compared to the rest of the volumes of the series, might be a little lower in quantity, but will blow away the rest of the series in dollar-value…. In terms of other, similarly expensive projects, we expect it to outpace them all sales-wise. There are just so many authors in this book that are on peoples’ must-own lists.”
Kramers 7 is a moon shot, a climb for the summit. The risk, at least to Harkham’s and Buenaventure’s badly depleted bank accounts, is considerable. But this gleeful exploration of the field’s possibilities is a far greater reward.
Kramers Ergot 7 launch
With Shary Boyle, Sammy Harkham, Kevin Huizenga,John Pham, Ron Rege Jr., Souther Salazar and Seth. Presented by The Beguiling. Dec 11,
7-10pm. 918 Bathurst (Former Buddhist
Temple). 416-533-9168.
www.beguiling.com.