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Kramers Ergot #8
Kramers Ergot #8
Kramers Ergot is the premier comics anthology of the twenty-first century. Since its inception in 2000, it has revolutionized the medium, introducing new talents, solidifying aesthetics and standing as a state-of-the-medium book. Kramers Ergot has always been a reflection of editor Sammy Harkham's current interests in comics past and future. So it is in this spirit, with this new volume, that he severs the anthology from many of the formal and stylistic elements with which it made its name. Whereas past issues were oversize, colorful and filled with a variety of artists all designed to overwhelm the reader with raw power, Kramers Ergot 8 is a complete shift both aesthetically and physically. The size of the book is smaller, to encourage a more intimate reading of the material, and the content reflects a focus on substantial works from a small group of no more than a dozen artists who, rather than being aesthetically disparate, reflect a more specific and unified aesthetic space of discipline, sophistication and quiet power. Among the contributors are Gary Panter, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Sammy Harkham, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Dash Shaw & Frank Santoro, Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally. Packaged in clothbound covers designed by artist Robert Beatty, this is the essential comics title of 2011.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published November 30, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 26, 2012
There's only one thing worth reading in here and it's by Kevin Huizenga. The rest is so much garbage. I was forcing myself through it by the end. This just reinforces my feeling that comics anthologies are usually uneven at best, and often truly terrible. It's such a strong contrast with collections of prose fiction. The first two 20-page stories in the one I'm reading right now were worth the price of admission alone. Kramers Ergot does not justify its price at all.
I know it's unfair to write this whole series off based on the third and eighth installments, but that's exactly what I'm doing. I cannot understand what people enjoy about these weak stories or their awful art. Life's too short to keep wasting it on crappy comics anthologies. wtf do people like about these collections?
I know it's unfair to write this whole series off based on the third and eighth installments, but that's exactly what I'm doing. I cannot understand what people enjoy about these weak stories or their awful art. Life's too short to keep wasting it on crappy comics anthologies. wtf do people like about these collections?
April 25, 2015
This is the first Kramers Ergot collection I have reviewed, though I have read or skimmed previous ones. I skimmed the reviews just after I read it and din't find it as bad as many seasoned comics vets did. It's Sammy Harkham's selection of stuff, with a new publisher.. and the range of stuff is interesting if you are looking at alt/underground/conceptual stuff, though other collections have been much more interesting, I think. The idea id cutting edge of ideas and shock/disturb/amuse. It's hard to keep topping these kinds of considerations, year after year, I guess.
Includes stuff from Gary Panter, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Sammy Harkham, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Dash Shaw & Frank Santoro, Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally.
My favorite piece was from Kevin Huizenga.
Includes stuff from Gary Panter, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Sammy Harkham, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Dash Shaw & Frank Santoro, Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally.
My favorite piece was from Kevin Huizenga.
July 31, 2012
Didn´t see the point of this, what a waste of paper. The two stars are because of Kevin Huizenga's story, he is always interesting. Johnny Ryan's story was also good.
December 23, 2017
Kramer's Ergot established itself as the most important comics anthology of the millennium, particularly Volumes 5, 6 and 7. Volume 7 is the legendary over-sized 16 x 21-inch hardcover, borrowing the format introduced by Sunday Press for their equally ground-breaking centenary reprints of the original 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' pages. Reproducing the exact dimensions of the fin-de-siècle broadsheets, these archival facsimiles were a revelation for McCay fans new and old; Kramers Ergot creator-editor-contributor Sammy Harkham had the idea to allow some of the world's most brilliant and cutting edge cartoonists a chance to create work in the same massive tabloid scale, a challenge that yielded brilliant results. Volumes 5 and 6 were both produced as 10 x 11.5-inch flexi-bound books with vinyl covers, and were both around 350-pages long. They share the same high-quality materials and design as Volume 7, and feature a rich and diverse assortment of avant garde artists working at their peak.
Volume 8 faced a couple of serious problems. Firstly, it was released by Picturebox instead of Buenaventura Press; Picturebox is an excellent indie publisher, but previous instalments benefitted from the creative input of co-editor and publisher Alvin Buenaventura. In his absence, the eighth outing experienced a quality decline on every level. Secondly, Kramer's Ergot faced a clear navigational crisis. Having made its name as a consistently surprising and ambitious anthology, the question of where to go after releasing a book as stunning as Volume 7 became a serious one. No matter what they did, it would seem like a regression... so they didn't bother to try. It's not as bad as other reviewers have made it out to be -- at least IMO, for what it's worth -- but it doesn't stand up to past volumes. It's a smaller, clothbound edition, but it's nicely constructed, with several changes in paper stock to best suit the material. It's also shorter than 5 or 6, with stories from the usual suspects that range from brilliant to uninspired. New contributors fail to leave any positive impressions, particularly the selections of artwork chosen to illustrate the book's loose thematic direction.
Volume 8 faced a couple of serious problems. Firstly, it was released by Picturebox instead of Buenaventura Press; Picturebox is an excellent indie publisher, but previous instalments benefitted from the creative input of co-editor and publisher Alvin Buenaventura. In his absence, the eighth outing experienced a quality decline on every level. Secondly, Kramer's Ergot faced a clear navigational crisis. Having made its name as a consistently surprising and ambitious anthology, the question of where to go after releasing a book as stunning as Volume 7 became a serious one. No matter what they did, it would seem like a regression... so they didn't bother to try. It's not as bad as other reviewers have made it out to be -- at least IMO, for what it's worth -- but it doesn't stand up to past volumes. It's a smaller, clothbound edition, but it's nicely constructed, with several changes in paper stock to best suit the material. It's also shorter than 5 or 6, with stories from the usual suspects that range from brilliant to uninspired. New contributors fail to leave any positive impressions, particularly the selections of artwork chosen to illustrate the book's loose thematic direction.
February 14, 2012
i tried. i really tried. i've loved every other installment, but this one felt empty, in spite of a CF story.
September 17, 2018
The good stuff was good, the okay stuff was just okay. Worth a flip-through.
May 10, 2012
Kramer's Ergot 8 is a much more manageable size than the behemoth #7. This iteration casts aside any attempts at anthology and instead aims for the stratosphere making a serious case for a new art for a new dark age. The tone is set right away with an essay by anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian one-time front man for The Make Up* (and other bands) Ian Svenonius who draws a direct line from ancient gay history to modern camp sensibility to the pop art movement, and finally underground comics. Alt-comics as an extension of camp sensibilities (and gay history) is a juicy idea, and I milled over it for days. I predict the provocative, cringe-worthy, eye-rolling and laugh-out-loud funny ideas espoused by this essay to be cited in many grad school papers and smarty-pants essays for many years to come.
If traditional narrative is sentimental, then each of the comics in this collection is decidedly unsentimental. Svenonius states that alt-comics (via camp) provide stories with themes of "louche degeneracy, contempt for humanity, self-centered navel-gazing, and existentialism." Each story in Kramer's Ergot 8 wears each of these as a badge, but also with a forward-looking sensibility that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic; neither cynical nor realistic. Part of the bonus of this collection is that it manages to also contain all of this mostly within the realm of the sci-fi and horror genres.
Robert Beatty's airbrushed nonobjective illustrations are the "overture" of the book and at once recall 1970's/1980's aesthetics and -to me, at least- those two decade's cheap vision of the future. Beatty's symbolism is hard to decipher, and the 8 hexagons that make up the cover image are broken up and sharpened within his pseudo-narrative. Later in the book, Takeshi Murata's stunning digitally altered still life photographs pick up this forward-looking/backward looking idea for the future and makes it less abstract and more personal with seemingly banal symbols as VHS tapes, the book "Expanded Cinema", the Terminator skull and sexually-suggestive lemons.
Gary Panter directly recalls the trippy stories of underground comics, as his goofy characters find a ball that lets them indulge in their every fantasy. Their limited imaginations can only conjure up a sandwich and the story ends with them slackjawed as the ball plays several of their favorite movies simultaneously. The paradox of hedonism is that it is ultimately boring after a while. His presence amid artists of a younger generation seems reverential with his story at the front of the book.
Hedonism is a central theme of the book with characters engaging in morally questionable acts in stories by C.F., Gabrielle Bell, Sammy Harkham, Johnny Ryan, Anya Davidson, Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw. The latter pair and Bell draw stories rooted more in our reality, though tweaked slightly. Santoro and Shaw's story of a young man who finds himself running from the law uses a rough, sketchy line quality to emphasize the omnipresence of the narrative 'camera' used throughout. The highly-sensationalized, mediated news expose T.V. format is slowed down by the Santoro and Shaw's pacing and hazy color palate. Ryan and Harkham each have characters that seem to utilize violence and horror for their own sake. Ryan continues with his signature disgusting and nightmarish humor seen in his "Prison Pit" series and Harkham's wordless "A Husband and a Wife" feels like little more than an exercise in gothic storytelling, though I know there it is more studied than that. Anya Davidson's story is the most satisfying of these as she uses color schemes to distinguish 3 overlapping voices occupying the same space on the story's pages: a violent T.V. movie, the equally violent dream it inspires in a troll, and Buddhist writings.
Curator Sammy Harkham offers a new vision for the future of comics, one that requires a foot firmly planted in its subversive campy roots. Comic narratives in the era of Comics Studies, "Best American Comics" and 24/7 self-promotion tend to be 'safe', that is to stay more in the realms of homogenous consumerism, memoir and nostalgia. Political and sexual subtexts tend to be too clean... the whole endeavor seems to be a bit too neat, too polite. Kevin Huizenga's contribution stands out because it is the most square, reading like a completed class assignment. Of course it is technically very good, but it's in the wrong book-- lost a the sea of debauchery, particularly in the colorful conclusion: 1970's reprints of "Oh, Wicked Wanda!" from Penthouse Magazine. This politically incorrect strip is a bold move that may alienate some readers (particularly the female ones), but it nails the point home that the next evolution for comics is to move away from dinner table and back to under the covers with a flashlight.
*Listen to the album "In Mass Mind" by The Make-Up. Now.
If traditional narrative is sentimental, then each of the comics in this collection is decidedly unsentimental. Svenonius states that alt-comics (via camp) provide stories with themes of "louche degeneracy, contempt for humanity, self-centered navel-gazing, and existentialism." Each story in Kramer's Ergot 8 wears each of these as a badge, but also with a forward-looking sensibility that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic; neither cynical nor realistic. Part of the bonus of this collection is that it manages to also contain all of this mostly within the realm of the sci-fi and horror genres.
Robert Beatty's airbrushed nonobjective illustrations are the "overture" of the book and at once recall 1970's/1980's aesthetics and -to me, at least- those two decade's cheap vision of the future. Beatty's symbolism is hard to decipher, and the 8 hexagons that make up the cover image are broken up and sharpened within his pseudo-narrative. Later in the book, Takeshi Murata's stunning digitally altered still life photographs pick up this forward-looking/backward looking idea for the future and makes it less abstract and more personal with seemingly banal symbols as VHS tapes, the book "Expanded Cinema", the Terminator skull and sexually-suggestive lemons.
Gary Panter directly recalls the trippy stories of underground comics, as his goofy characters find a ball that lets them indulge in their every fantasy. Their limited imaginations can only conjure up a sandwich and the story ends with them slackjawed as the ball plays several of their favorite movies simultaneously. The paradox of hedonism is that it is ultimately boring after a while. His presence amid artists of a younger generation seems reverential with his story at the front of the book.
Hedonism is a central theme of the book with characters engaging in morally questionable acts in stories by C.F., Gabrielle Bell, Sammy Harkham, Johnny Ryan, Anya Davidson, Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw. The latter pair and Bell draw stories rooted more in our reality, though tweaked slightly. Santoro and Shaw's story of a young man who finds himself running from the law uses a rough, sketchy line quality to emphasize the omnipresence of the narrative 'camera' used throughout. The highly-sensationalized, mediated news expose T.V. format is slowed down by the Santoro and Shaw's pacing and hazy color palate. Ryan and Harkham each have characters that seem to utilize violence and horror for their own sake. Ryan continues with his signature disgusting and nightmarish humor seen in his "Prison Pit" series and Harkham's wordless "A Husband and a Wife" feels like little more than an exercise in gothic storytelling, though I know there it is more studied than that. Anya Davidson's story is the most satisfying of these as she uses color schemes to distinguish 3 overlapping voices occupying the same space on the story's pages: a violent T.V. movie, the equally violent dream it inspires in a troll, and Buddhist writings.
Curator Sammy Harkham offers a new vision for the future of comics, one that requires a foot firmly planted in its subversive campy roots. Comic narratives in the era of Comics Studies, "Best American Comics" and 24/7 self-promotion tend to be 'safe', that is to stay more in the realms of homogenous consumerism, memoir and nostalgia. Political and sexual subtexts tend to be too clean... the whole endeavor seems to be a bit too neat, too polite. Kevin Huizenga's contribution stands out because it is the most square, reading like a completed class assignment. Of course it is technically very good, but it's in the wrong book-- lost a the sea of debauchery, particularly in the colorful conclusion: 1970's reprints of "Oh, Wicked Wanda!" from Penthouse Magazine. This politically incorrect strip is a bold move that may alienate some readers (particularly the female ones), but it nails the point home that the next evolution for comics is to move away from dinner table and back to under the covers with a flashlight.
*Listen to the album "In Mass Mind" by The Make-Up. Now.
April 18, 2012
If you like comics, graphic novels, design, art, or any of the above - you need to see this book. Just enough to frustrate while entice readers. I can't say I like every strip in here, which makes me like the whole volume even more. CF hits another cracking reality work out of the park, while seemingly not making a obnoxious visual deal out of anything. Comparisons don't really help with explaining this compilation, but there is plenty of dark blood messed around. Finally, the last excerpts from Playboy are insane. Colors, cartons of spies, and extreme curves, that all go unfinished. Continuous.
January 17, 2013
Absolutely dire. The good artists (Panter, Huizenga,Gabrielle Bell) were on auto-pilot. The so-so Frank Santoro manages to achieve something even worse though a partnership with the otherwise brilliant Dash Shaw. There is some utterly hideous glossy photographs of what?- sophomore art student installations?. And this is the good stuff. The rest is just plain dismal including the worst material that I have ever seen outside a tatty photocopied fanzine by the extremely untalented Leon Sadler. My son, who's 8, does offbeat bizarre scribbled comics that can stand along side Sadler- I love him, but I wouldn't ask anyone else to pay a load of money to see his work in a fancy binding.
May 10, 2013
I'm in agreement with most other reviews I have read on this collection. It is a really nice looking book. It's nicely bound and just the right size. But much of the content does not match up with the presentation. I am all right with a story being nonsense if the art keeps me reading or if it establishes a mood regardless of story. Most of these stories don't do that. But there are a few cool stand-outs created by Sammy Harkham, Chris Cilla, Johnny Ryan, and Gabrielle Bell. With strong entries by these artists, the book could be redeemed by the Oh, Wicked Wanda reprints at the end. The art in it is beautiful, but the story is so compressed as to be almost unreadable.
March 25, 2012
This was pretty sucky. Lousy follow-up to volume 7, which was at least a really impressive object, and had some really interesting work in it as a bonus. Not so much here. A couple pieces were okay, it's always nice to see some new stuff by Sammy Harkham, but overall quite bad. It's pretty clear I'm not the target audience, I know I don't like "weird to be weird" stuff, but still, bad even with that in mind.
July 21, 2016
Not as good as #5 IMO. Sure, it was a bit more comprehensible in terms of excluding some of the so avant garde that its meaningless stuff, but it also had a shitton of stuff which seemed to only be in there for the sexual content. And a lot of pages were wasted on glossy abstractions. Anyway it was still pretty good. I did enjoy most of the stories, and most of the sexuality was bizarre in a meaningful way. Also the introduction was unnerving.
December 12, 2011
Picked this up at BCGF this weekend, working through it now. Nice-looking book, good Bell, Harkham stories, Huizenga covers an old (Dell? Charlton? EC?) genre comic. Work by CF, Shaw & Santoro, Panter, Johnny Ryan + lots more. Goodish amount of horror comics from the look of it, sex and violence, as well as a number of swastikas. Nicely printed by PictureBox, worth a read.
March 31, 2012
Some good stuff here--Johnny Ryan, Gary Panter, Dash Shaw--but an awful lot of of filler and inconsequential stuff, too, including about 50 pages of the ever-dreary "Wicked Wanda" series from Penthouse magazine about 40 years ago. It wasn't funny then, and it hasn't improved with age, no matter how good the artist's technique. Overall, a disappointment.
February 4, 2015
Wasn't as exciting as Nos. 5 & 6 were, which were kind of accidental revelations of my adolescence that helped me think of new ways comics could be read - and made, but that might have to do with the fact that I have more expectations of "art comics" than I did when I was younger
October 23, 2015
Leon Sadler is the only true soul. The other stories end on sex or just give us a moral view about it and narrative didn't meant to evolve for that. Two stories about underage relationships seems too much.
January 23, 2012
I liked each contribution, though Gabrielle Bell, Sammy Harkham, and Kevin Huizenga are the stand outs
February 22, 2012
Not that great.
September 12, 2016
I've noticed that since I began working at the library I've mostly been reading a lot of junk. Odd.
April 17, 2012
A hit and miss anthology (but oh, aren't they all) with some standout work by Dash Shaw, Gabrielle Bell, Kevin Huizenga, Tim Hensley, and C.F.
January 22, 2013
This issue has a different vibe than previous issues. There's more if an emphasis on fantasy character-driven short stories. Easy to get into. I liked everything except for two pieces.
November 24, 2013
bunch of boringness. liked anya davidson's comic. that's all.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews