The book is a beautiful object, a love note to good printing and
care for materials, with soft cloth you want to rub against your
cheek and a three-color foil stamp in black, neon orange, and gold.
It’s the kind of book printers send out as a sample to show what
they can do. Its contents, on the other hand, and I believe the
contrast is intentional, seem designed to make you so uncomfortable
that the resulting feeling is about half an inch away from
nausea.
This book has plenty of good reads, but it will also make you very
uncomfortable. That impact, however, is a rare one from any
artform, and it feels like something new and important.
*Paste Magazine*
Every few years a comics compilation arrives for those of us who
like our stories sans superheroes and a little cutting-edge.
I own three previous Kramers books, and all of them feature some of
my favorite artists, along with several up-and-comers. This time
around, editor Sammy Harkham chose creators that "reflect a more
specific and unified aesthetic space of discipline, sophistication,
and quiet power."
*USA Today*
Eight installments in (and now on its third publisher), Kramers
Ergot is sometimes discussed as if it’s merely a report card on the
state of alternative comics, as if the table of contents is all
that requires our attention. Ergot 8 looks to shake that foundation
a bit, opening as it does with the most bewilderingly aggressive
tract Harkham’s discovered thus far. From there, the book does take
on a bit of a laundry-list quality — there’s Johnny Ryan, there’s
Ben Jones, there’s Frank Santoro, Gabrielle Bell, all of your big
dogs, they’ve come for your bones — but don’t let the brevity trick
you into thinking there’s not something of substance going on.
There’s a method to the madness, and by the anthology’s weird,
atonal closer, you’ll be laughing (or wryly grimacing, at the
least) right along with it.
*Flavorwire*
In a reduction in size from the massively oversized previous issue,
which is comprised of mostly single "broadsheet" comics pages by
over 50 artists, KE 8 takes the form of a compact hardcover that
focuses on short but mostly multipage visual progressions and
graphic stories by eighteen contributors. These display a widely
divergent range of visual styles, which are unified in their
narrative content by irony and ambiguity.
*Publisher's Weekly*
Despite featuring a much smaller roster than previous volumes in
the series, and despite a much less “noisy” visual aesthetic than
that which has characterized the series since its phone book-sized
fourth volume caused a sensation upon its release at the MoCCA
Festival in 2003, Kramers Ergot 8 has an intensity that’s tough to
shake.
A cheekily provocative introductory essay from musician Ian
Svenonius and a massive selection of racy reprinted Oh, Wicked
Wanda! comics from the pages of Penthouse prove perplexing – but
it’s a good perplexing, because it forces the reader to consider
just how fingernails-on-a-chalkboard effective the rest of the
volume is at discomfiting them.
*Robot 6*
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