KE_08

The Kramers Ergot 8 release party was last night. Got my copy signed. The crowd was a slighty nerdier version of the hipster crowd I see in Echo Park so obv I loved it.

As for the book itself, well I've only had it for one day so I haven't fully thought about it.

I do think that it's design is interesting. 4, 5, 6 were super colorful and gave the appearance of being all over the place (though were in many ways pushing a similar aesthetic). 7 was big and expensive and inspired by the reprints of the old newspapers strips. 8 feels like an archival collection in some ways. Seneca in his review referred to it as "building the medium its next academy, a new repository of wisdom for future artists to draw from and bend to." I think that is close to true. I think in some ways it is inspired by the archival collections that are being put out right now.

Maybe it's just because I also recently picked up the new Barks collection. There's something a little goofy about these nice hardcovers of originally disposable material (that is not to say I don't think Barks was a genius). All these new collections feel like we're building a 'serious' library of comics history. This volume of Kramers feels like it will fit right in. It even has the somewhat out of touch intro essay and a list of other books by Picture Box.