In January, Picturebox releases the eighth issue of editor/cartoonist Sammy Harkham's influential anthology title, Kramers Ergot. 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. In KE 8, the introductory essay by Ian F. Svenonius semi-studiously exposes the establishment of Pop and Postmodern Art to posit a theme that our commonly agreed-upon comfort structures are illusions created by a power elite. Kramers Ergot 8 as a whole gives the impression that the younger generation of comic artists as represented by Harkham live in a world that has perhaps passed beyond our ability to save it.

Harkham deliberately counterpoints artists who make highly refined statements with those whose work has a nearly perfunctory execution, as well as some who range between the two extremes. The smooth digital or airbrushed progressions of Robert Beatty and the machined montages of Takeshi Murata are less comics than suites of surreal, ephemeral images, while the semi-traditional comics of Leon Sadler reject the digital plasticity of contemporary comics in favor of the handmade artifact. Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw's collaboration appropriates an episode of the TV show To Catch a Predator, which facilitates the arrests of a horrifically inexorable parade of pedophiles. Ben Jones' "The Ultimate Character 2002" and Johnny Ryan's "Mining Colony X7170" further that theme and the dismissal of slick craft to provide works that seem like they were done by traumatized but imaginative children. These are effectively countered by the closing selection of absurdly overpainted "Oh, Wicked Wanda" strips, here divorced from their original context in the men's magazine Penthouse. Harkham's own contribution, the accomplished and nearly wordless "A Husband and a Wife", reconfigures his visual tropes to produce an extremely disquieting nightmare that extends the contemporary chaos on display elsewhere in the book to an unspecified past.

Via email, PW Comics World interviewed editor Sammy Harham about his choice of the anthology format, the change in size for this edition and about the specific works chosen for the book.

PW Comics World: Can you explain the meaning of the title, Kramers Ergot, sans possessive apostrophe?

Sammy Harkham: The title is nonsense. I dropped the apostrophe because it didn't look as good visually as it did with it on the cover of #1. The 'ergot' in the title is not Latin, but the bacteria that grows on rye.

PWCW: I have been told by nearly every publisher and editor that anthologies "don't sell." It seems clear that many anthologies do sell, there have been many long-lasting anthology format comics here and abroad. The EC comics and Mad, the Warren books, a lot of the output of Atlas/Marvel, DC's horror, war and romance titles, the black and white magazines of Warren, and then Zap, Slow Death, Skull, Raw, Arcade, Weirdo, more recently Eric Reynolds' MOME and your KE have had good runs. All of these titles were great and were successful, at least for a while. Many anthology titles have since ceased publication but they had long runs, were tremendously influential and launched many successful careers.

SH: Anthologies usually don't sell as well single author books and novels sell better than collections of short stories, period. If someone wants to read Stephen King, they buy a book with Stephen King's name on the cover, not a collection with 12 pages of Stephen King and a bunch of people no one cares about. And, that's if they even know he is in the anthology. Otherwise, I would have sold 40,000 copies of the last Kramers because Dan Clowes and Chris Ware were in it. The other thing is, I don't want to spend money on a book that has a one or two things I want to read, but otherwise looks bad, is badly designed and badly put together. I feel like I am being blackmailed. It's easier for publishers and retailers to sell single author novels. Anything after that becomes a muddle. For an anthology to sell well, it has to develop a reputation and a name like if it was a real person, so readers buy the book because they trust the name, regardless of the table of contents. I doubt any of the anthologies you mention have sold as well as their most popular contributors' solo books, excepting MAD of course, since that brand is so strong. "A good run" doesn't mean it was lucrative or worth the effort. Like anything else, if an anthology is truly a success and making money, it never ceases publication. One of the biggest problems with these books is that nobody takes the job seriously. The editor has to have a strong idea of what they want the final book to be. Otherwise they just have a muddle of a mess. Raw is probably the best anthology of all time. Mouly and Spiegelman had a clear idea of what they wanted to express and they did it with masterful group of cartoonists who really valued the anthology.

PW Comics World: Why have you decided to downsize the magazine and limit the amount of contributors for this particular issue?

SH: I wanted a book that was lean (physically, conceptually, aesthetically), compact and would be easy to travel with.

PWCW: What are the challenges for the editor and publisher in the actual logistics of assembling such a varied collection that demands so many different resolutions in printing, the distribution of color signatures for instance?

SH: There is not so much logistics as far as printing goes. Some of the work in the book is printed on glossy paper, so those paper signatures need to fit a certain way, but it was easy enough to organize.

PWCW: I appreciate Gary Panter's positioning here: first. It seems to me that he, more than anyone else, has freed comics from the anal-retentive aspects that have constricted development for so long; he enables human mark-making to take on a much greater importance, for Gary all marks are fair game. Here, though, he does a pretty disciplined strip, it has straightforward compositions, delicate cross-hatching and the story is a quite coherent and cutting commentary on what our society wants, given our choice of anything we could have.

SH: Gary's an inspiring person and artist. They say you should start your anthology with a great strip, and few, if at all, are better than Panter working these days. The strip also touches on a lot ideas and concerns that are found throughout the anthology, so it was a good strip to start the book for those reasons.

PWCW: The production values are as high as usual and the balance between color and black and white linework in the issue is striking—for example, your piece and those of CF and Johnny Ryan are printed as linework, but then you have the lushly colored bookend paintings of Robert Beatty, and Anya Davidson's effortless-appearing work has some nicely pumped psychedelic coloring; she resembles a cross between Mort Meskin and Victor Moscoso. Leon Sadler's diffused collection of strips is another of my favorites here, it feels as if there is little or no hesitation between mind, hand and paper. Some pages are spectacular but not in any sort of overbearing way, again what is there is a sense of freedom that allows for some hope for the comics medium as a whole, which so often seems a bastion of redundant tropes worked and reworked to death. Strips such as Sadler's point back to the real appeal of the medium: the artist's unfettered personal expression communicated directly to the reader.

SH: I usually request a strip be color or b/w. So, I had some idea of what Davidson and Sadler would add to the book's tone and idea. In some ways they define the book by what they are not, being exceptions as they are to everything else included.

PWCW: For this reader, Davidson's philosophical asides and Sadler's light color handling offer some of the only moments of reprieve from the general darkness of the views expressed here.

SH: Your reading of the book being dark is something I agree with and strived for.

PWCW: As with some of the other more fresh-looking, non-overworked pieces in KE, Ben Jones' piece is uniquely individual and gives the impression of freedom of conception and execution.To me he is certainly breaking the "rules" of acceptable levels of "craft", visually speaking. Can you articulate what you see as the value of his work?

SH: No. I think there is a high level of craft evident in Ben's work.

PWCW: Could you elaborate on your reasons for including the reprints of Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullalley's “Oh, Wicked Wanda?” It has many problematic and confrontational aspects: the female characters appear autonomous but are represented in such a way for the sexualized entertainment of men; it apparently pokes fun at, but is actually subsumed in, the misogynistic and homocentric rationale of the magazine that provided the strip with its original forum, much like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's squandering of their considerable talents on Little Annie Fanny for Playboy, which Wanda was obviously designed to compete with. In this context, a book assembled by a Jewish man, it trivializes Nazism, for instance, to a sort of Mad magazine-style slapstick, and such a refined approach to the art seems to dignify banal text—it becomes a reflection of today's overly rendered and hysteric mainstream comics. Maybe these are your reasons?

SH: I think Oh Wicked Wanda is a fascinating, beautiful, unique, and funny comic strip. It runs circles around “Little Annie Fanny.” Again, I don't feel like it's my place to say in great detail what exactly makes me include something. I'd much rather let readers form their own conclusions, which are just as valid!

PWCW: Your editing of KE takes your time away from the work you do for yourself, your own art. You are at a moment of major development; I am really loving your work right now and hoping to see more. And yet, here you are doing KE again, and, it seems, planning more issues.

SH: I had a story due for my French publisher, so since I was going to have to take time away from my current long form comic strip, I thought I might as well do the story for an issue of Kramers and kill two birds instead of one. I am currently back working on Crickets 4, and my French publisher is happy with the story, which is in the new Kramers.

PWCW: I wonder, have a few of your artists diverted from the usual thrust of their work to do something specific to your editorial intent? For instance, Kevin Huizenga's uniqueness lies in his inventive layouts for his dreamscape stories and philosophical musings, but here he evidently simply transcribes a somewhat vague crypto-religious story from an old sci-fi comic, Also, CF deviates from his bizarre post-Metal Hurlant stylings for a self-contained, deliberately perverse strip.

SH: I usually have one long vague conversation with a potential contributor, laying out what I am thinking of the issue overall and what I am hoping they can contribute. I find cartoonists push themselves all the time into new territory to keep things fresh and terrifying.

PWCW: You sound like the ideal editor. Mostly in my experience they seem to want you to dumb it down, clean it up or otherwise make it more accessable. Terrifying is never an option.

SH: Well, I understand where those editors are coming from. They are working on books with relatively large print-runs that need to sell relatively large amounts to keep their giant corporate machines moving. I obviously don't have to consider those things with Kramers Ergot. And since the paycheck is minimal, a large part of why a cartoonist takes part is [because they are] creatively motivated more than anything else. I have learned that most independent cartoonists like the idea of an editor giving some direction or help as needed. It clears the air of the usual doubt of what is expected when you do work for others.