Det var fedt at diskutere Sammy Harkhams Blood of the Virgin, netop ude i opsamling fra Pantheon Books, med drengene! Især efter at have fulgt serien med spænding og glæde i så lang tid. Vi er alle ret vilde med den! En kommende klassiker? Måske.

Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9.

From Kevin Huizenga's contribution to Kramers Ergot 7

This week saw the passing of several notable people in letters. The one that hit closest to home here was the way too early departure of Alvin Buenaventura, one of the great artisans in comics publishing. I didn’t know Buenaventura and only barely met him, once, when he was in Angoulême with cartoonist and editor extraordinaire Sammy Harkham in 2009 to promote their giant undertaking Kramers Ergot 7. But he was one of those publishers one feels one knows through the facture of their books. And whatever else I thought of Kramers 7, it was a triumph of book production and a truly admirable publication in both its ambition and generosity.

Generosity was, I gather from the many touching words from people that knew him, a defining trait in Buenaventura, which is no surprise, because that is exactly the impression one gets from his publications, from the lo-fi texturing and sharp printing of Souther Salazar’s overlooked Destined for Dizziness to the accurate, always vivid reproduction of radically different source material, often from one page to the next, in the monumental Kramers 7. Buenaventura set an example to aspire towards. RIP.

Read Tim Hensley’s, Ken Parille’s, Dan Clowes’ and Anders Nilsen’s words and visit the comments thread of Joe McCulloch and Chris Mautner’s obituary at the Comics Journal.

From Beatty's overture

It was a surprise when Sammy Harkham and Picture Box publisher Dan Nadel announced their plans for Kramers Ergot 8 about a year ago. Some of us had assumed that the monumental Kramers Ergot 7 had been the decadent word in what has been by far the most groundbreaking comics anthology of the new century.

Despite good intentions and hard work, Kramers Ergot 7 was a disappointment, but on the other hand it was a book with everything to lose and little to gain, and at any rate it marked a fitting finale to a great run.

As an aesthetic project, Kramers Ergot has succeeded beyond the wildest expectations, and especially the breakthrough Kramers Ergot 4 remains the high point of helmsman Sammy Harkham’s anthology series.

Kramers Ergot 4 marked nothing less than a paradigm shift. Although quite a few of the individual contributions were less than great, the synthesis it presented was seminal. It inspired many an art comics anthology the world over, including Matthias Wivel’s and my own BLÆK and the upcoming Kolor Klimax, as well as the great Finnish series Glömp, to name but a few examples from our neck of the woods.

Its two successors — 5 and 6 — were outstanding too; 6 especially mixed up the formula in a surprising way with remarkable short works by Suihō Tagawa and Marc Smeets.

From Gary Panter's "Jimbo" story

This is followed by a sequel to Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp” entitled “Notes on Camp II,” written by the musician Ian Svenonius. Sontag’s original — and excellent — essay was an intelligent and much-needed challenge to the then-stagnating and hopelessly out-of-touch conception of high culture versus popular culture that legitimized the aesthetic appreciation of comics and other forms as art incompatible with high-art sensibilities. The present follow-up offers half-baked and half-bright babble on Andy Warhol, religious history, the Roman empire, and underground comics. A non-starter.

Then comes the first “real” comic, by none other than Gary Panter, whose reputation as the originator of American art comics (or punk comics) has deservedly grown in the last decade or so. But this outing of his signature Jimbo character is a dull, mechanical, metaphorical lark on the blessings of the detour. It does not exactly heighten one’s expectations for the rest of the book.

A few pages on we get Johnny Ryan with a Prison Pit-like rampage. Fun and energetic for what it is, but wait… it suddenly brings to mind Kramers Ergot 5, which spiked its great punch with Mat Brinkman’s small masterpiece “M.L.E,” a spirited mash-up of Jack Kirby and Gary Panter that established the kind of fucked-up mayhem on which Johnny Ryan has since been riffing in Prison Pit. Dejà vu or dull cover? It is hard to get particularly worked up about it in either case.

From Johnny Ryan's "Mining Colony X7170"

As an ensemble piece, Kramers Ergot 8 is tiring, uninspired and, most notably, decadent. If one compares with the shock and awe of holding Kramers Ergot 4 in one’s hands for the first time back in 2003, it is just a terribly depressing showing. That seductive, infectious, almost electrical feeling is long gone.

From the reprints of Ron Embleton and Frederic Mullalley's "Oh, Wicked Wanda"

(And where is that next shit today? I don’t know. I haven’t found it).