Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, is a never-done-before, 304-page work of experimental journalism. Based on thirty hours of raw digital footage shot by producer/publisher Alex Jansen and filmmaker Jason Gilmore, written by me — Richard Poplak* — and illustrated by Nick Marinkovich, the book tells the story of a Toronto man whom the international press dubbed “the most prolific bike thief in the world.”
Holly Jean Buck ponders why Igor Kenk needed to store 2,800 bikes in “Surviving the Apocalypse, on Two Wheels,” from The Walrus Blog
In the summer of 2008, Igor Kenk was arrested on suspicion of stealing a bicycle. Kenk was a legend in the Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood, infamous for trading in bicycles of unknown provenance. The story turned weirder and weirder: The scruffy street merchant had a gorgeous Juilliard-trained pianist for a wife; police searches of his shop, home, and rented garages turned up almost 3,000 bicycles and plenty of drugs; Kenk made outrageous claims inside and outside of his court appearances. The city, and indeed the world, became fascinated with this outrageous character. Folks wanted to know more.
And so we have Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, which is an attempt to bridge an in-depth investigative profile with a graphic novel. The following pages are extracted from Chapter II, where we learn about Kenk’s childhood and his time back in Slovenia, which he generously terms “the old shithole.”
PAGE 41
My mandate was a simple, given to me by comic book super-producer Alex Jansen (think of him as the medium’s thinner, less shouty Weinstein): Take a terabyte of raw digital footage and turn it into a graphic novel. Jansen wanted something that bridged observational documentary filmmaking, à la National Film Board great Allan King, with a big fat comic. I said, “Sure, no problem. Should take six weeks or so.” I set off gaily with footage and quill in hand. Eight months later, with no storyline and no ideas for one, I flashed my mental Bat signal, and banked on my boyhood obsessions.
Even villains have childhoods. This thought occurred to me when I realized that the Kenk would not reference the rich forty-year indie comic industry delivered by the likes of Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Art Spiegelman, but rather the superhero comics I grew up with. As I got into the writing process, I knew that I would have to base each page around a nine-panel grid, the same page paradigm that Alan Moore (and other British writers working in the ’80s) used for Watchmen and V for Vendetta. This doesn’t mean that every page adheres precisely to a nine-panel grid, but it is the informing structure of the book. Also, I wanted to make sure that we saw Kenk in his signature IM TIRED [sic] t-shirt as much as possible — hardly difficult considering that he was paid for his services with a box of these garments. In other words, Kenk has some serious superhero pedigree built into its DNA.
This page is a perfect example of how we would occasionally mix the thirty or so hours of digital video footage with pieces of archival material dug up through old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. Panels one through six are details of baby pics, taken in Maribor and Ljubljana — cities then in Yugoslavia, now in Slovenia — in the ’50s. (In panel six, the girl to Igor’s left is his first girlfriend. Barely out of diapers, and he was already a lady’s man.) Panel seven was culled from a two-hour interview Jansen and Gilmore conducted with Igor about a year before his arrest, in Toronto’s Lakeview Diner. I used this conversation as the spine for much of chapters II and III, mostly because Igor was unusually candid that day, even by his logorrheic standards.
Based on my original discussions with Jansen — who produced the book, much the same way one would a movie — the intention was always to use the footage as the basis of the piece. He and Gilmore had developed a fine pencil treatment that looked beautiful, but didn’t quite match the storytelling. I have always loved the fumetti genre — photographic comic books or photo-novels, wherein the great Fellini cut his teeth — but never thought I’d have the opportunity to make one. This was my shot, and Jansen and Gilmore backed the idea. That said, in the early stages of writing, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted the book to look like.
Enter my research trip to Slovenia.
PAGE 42
Apart from providing essential contextual background, without which this book would be a much thinner profile, and aside from meeting Igor’s friends who went a long way to fill in gaps of his early life, my visit to Slovenia informed the visual treatment in ways I could never have imagined.
One sunny winter afternoon, I hiked my way from Ljubljana’s town centre up to the museum district. In the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), I saw a poster for an exhibition that piqued my interest. It was a retrospective look at the underground FV movement, extant in Slovenia during the late ’70s and ’80s, and reminiscent of many punk and DIY subcultures across Eastern Europe at the time. I was familiar with the essential East Art Map, a brilliant précis on contemporary art in the region during the latter stages of the Cold War, but had read nothing of FV in that volume. The exhibition had been disassembled the previous week, but the curator, Breda Skrjanec, kindly allowed me to scour the archives.
What I saw was a revelation. FV adopted the photocopier as its primary medium, and this informed its hardcore ethos. Indeed, Igor made some of the early flyers for his original Toronto Bicycle Clinic in this exact style. (Reference page 31 of Kenk, where Igor used a still from Da Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. You just can’t make this shit up.) I knew then that the book would closely mimic this style, mostly because it spoke so keenly of Igor’s combined traits of DIY hyper-capitalism and what’s-ours-is-ours hyper-Socialism — both elements of the ’80s, post-Tito transition era in the crumbling Yugoslav republics.
In the museum archives, I jotted down the gist of my process, and it stayed pretty much according to plan. I would write a detailed, Alan Moore–style script that would include the mood of the panel, the necessary facial expressions, the captions, dialogue, etc. (I was working off both the video and interview transcriptions typed up by one of our tireless interns, Katie Parker.) Occasionally I would draw thumbnails or do provisional layouts to get a sense of pacing, and modify the script accordingly. I would then hand this over to Gilmore, chapter by chapter, and he would lay the pages out, pulling individual stills and filling in the archival material as it came along. We’d further finesse these together. Jansen would then edit from these, and we’d make changes according to his comments.
Still missing, of course, was the artist.
PAGE 43
In one of those serendipitous accidents, Jansen had recommended a fellow named Nick Marinkovich to friends working on a Canadian Film Centre project. Marinkovich had worked for Marvel and Image Comics, and he was an adept at doctoring photos and working them into a hip-hoppish, urban-noir style. (See Impaler, and his Underworld adaptation.) We gave Marinkovich some provisional layouts, with some brief instructions, and he nailed them on first go.
It helped that Marinkovich is himself of Serbian descent, and perfectly understood the sensibility we were after. This page gives a pretty good idea of his process.
I insisted that we go as analog as possible. Jansen sent another fearless intern, the incomparably intrepid Brendan Hennessy, out to find an old ’80s photocopier. There were all sorts of problems with this idea, the massive cost of off-market toner among them, so we settled for a ’90s model. Nick would fiddle a bit with the layouts in InDesign, and then run them through the photocopier, distress them, “illustrate” line work with a razor blade, scan them, add some vector lines, and voila — the Kenk visual treatment you see before you.
One of my concerns with this style was that we’d lose the remarkable expressiveness of Igor’s face — he is a man who should never play poker — but Marinkovich ensured that this was never the case. I particularly love that sheer exhaustion Igor radiates in panel seven, and the gentleness of his wife’s arm as it makes its way into frame to rustle his hair. It takes a pretty good artist to run that through a photocopier ten times and keep a sense of emotion and pathos.
PAGE 44
One of my favourites. This is an archival image of Igor in his cadet suit. I wanted to liberally pepper the book with splash pages, something I learned both from superhero comics and the layout work of uber-designer and Batman nut Chip Kidd, who I suppose also learned them from superhero comics.
Marinkovich really went to town here. You can see the beautiful razor-blade work, and how the technique gives a sense of the blush and luminousness of youth. At the same time, the image is distressed enough for us to understand that all the promise inherent in this picture has come to very little. In many respects, this chapter is meant to speak eloquently to the reader about Igor’s fall. It’s not like he didn’t have opportunities; it’s not like he didn’t have talents. There is a streak of darkness in his temperament — especially when he speaks of his youthful “crash” — and this page somehow underlines the poignancy of all this.
I should quickly comment on the dialogue and caption font here. It had to match the visual tone, had to be legible, and had to feel analog. Kudos to Gilmore for picking the right typewriter font, which totally matches what I was looking for. In the script, I would emphasize certain words — much the same way superhero comics have always done — and Gilmore would adjust the font accordingly. The idea here was to approximate the rhythm of Igor’s patois, and to represent as truthfully as possible his particular brand of street poetry.
PAGE 45
This page is one of the best reflections of all the discussions that Marinkovich and I had with regard to Eastern European avant-garde collage in general, and more particularly Russian Modernists like Kandinsky to whom I wanted to offer homage in the book.
This is a quintessential Kenk page, using found footage (the star in panel two is from a photograph by the brilliant war photographer Ron Haviv, whose work I greatly admire). The middle three panels are pulled from video, and the bottom image is one of Jansen’s judo class. It’s exactly this sort of hodge-podge we were aiming for, because this perfectly reflected Kenk’s grab-bag life.
And that, friends, is how we made our comic book. It’s about a bike thief, sure. But it’s also about how cities change, neighbourhoods die and are reborn, and how outsize characters — called “earbenders” by the great American journalist Joseph Mitchell — define the edges of our society, and therefore explain our world.
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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