Igor Kenk: The Novel

(Image courtesy of Raincoast Books and Pop Sandbox Inc.)

Before he was arrested and charged in such spectacular and public fashion in July 2008, Igor Kenk, the Dickensian Fagin of the bike-theft crowd, allowed his daily activities to be filmed by filmmaker Jason Gilmore and publisher Alex Jansen. The Toronto duo planned to eventually transform the raw and revealing footage into a graphic novel, but a year into the project the narrative took a dramatic twist with Kenk’s arrest (see Torontoist’s early look at the project here). With almost thirty hours of film in the can and no clear ending for the graphic-novel-in-waiting, Jansen approached Richard Poplak, who had already written about Kenk for Toronto Life, to ask for the journalist’s help in finishing the project. Poplak agreed, and he was soon busy supplementing the existing material with new interviews with the jailed Kenk and a research trip to the bike thief and drug dealer’s native country, Slovenia. One long strange journey with Kenk, Gilmore, Jansen, and comics artist Nick Marinkovich later, the resulting graphic novel, titled simply Kenk, is ready. Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger interviewed Poplak about the book, which will be hitting stores in early May. Come back to Books@Torontoist and Torontoist for full details about the book launch as they become available and for interviews with other contributors to the project.

Torontoist: How did you get involved with the project?

Richard Poplak: Alex Jansen and Jason Gilmore were on my radar when I was writing the Toronto Life profile of Igor, shortly after his arrest in July 2008. After the article was published, they invited me out for beers. I understood that they had filmed a good 20 or so hours of footage, and I was expecting them to regale me with how they were about to make a crappy, dullsville, earnest documentary. Two sips into my beer, I heard the term graphic novel. Halfway through the beer, they had my agents’ number. It was pretty clear that they were determined to do something exceptional, and both of them were totally uninterested in exploiting the footage by selling it to a news station for some quick cash, or by making a shitty doc. They handed me all of the footage, and I got to work.

Torontoist: How much did you know about Igor Kenk before you became involved with the book?

RP: Same as most folks in the city. I’d sold bike parts to him; he told me I was a shit business man. I called him to enquire about a stolen bike; his line was always busy. In other words, not much, except that he had the bedside manner of Dr. Mengele.

Torontoist: Did your opinion of him and his actions change over the course of writing the book?

RP: The second I start a big investigative piece–the more controversial the better–the greatest of pleasures is dispensing with my useless, baseless, meaningless opinion. And believe me, I can bloviate with the best of ‘em. Then I get down to the very hard work of understanding the issue or person at hand. By way of example, I’m currently working on a piece about the Payday Loan industry for Toronto Life. That’s as nasty an industry as they come, but there are compelling reasons for its existence. Taking a story seriously alerts you to the fact that the world is at once thrillingly complicated and icily simple. And it’s my job to make sense of these paradoxes. Glenn Beck I ain’t.

Torontoist: Do you think there is any justification for Kenk’s actions?

RP: Which actions? If you’re talking about buying obviously hot bikes with drugs, then no. If you’re talking about collecting discarded junk off the streets and selling it at scrapyards, then yes. What I mean to say is that he’s a complicated person, and there are facets of him that are quite admirable. And others that are downright awful. I’m not being a relativist when I say that this applies to most of us. What makes Igor so compelling is that his faults are so outsized, and so representative, that he starts to explain our society.

Torontoist: I’m curious about the process of writing the text for the book. Was it difficult writing from the template of the documentary film footage? How much did you actively collaborate with Alex, Jason, and Nick?

RP: First off, there was no template, and there was no documentary film. Just hours and hours of raw footage, entirely unedited. Second, I had a very simple mandate: Write a fumetti (photograph-based graphic novel, my favourite genre) rooted in the footage or in any supplementary archival material we accumulate. In other words, I had to write completely from scratch, scouring the footage for the story, much as a documentary filmmaker would. But the language of film is surprisingly different from that of a graphic novel. So I used the template of the great British graphic novels of the eighties–Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Neil Gaimen’s stuff–and instituted a nine-panel grid model. Then I tried to fashion it into a coherent profile of Igor, warts and all.

I wrote a sort of script, with detailed descriptions of each panel. Alex edited from these, which I then sent on to Jason. He’d do a preliminary layout, and then we’d sit together and perfect it. Alex would edit from those. (Legal and copyright were huge issues, and he’s a detail guy to the last.) Then everything went to Nick for treatment, and got a further edit. I could not have asked for a more sensitive editor than Alex. He knew and understood the material, he pushed back, and while we occasionally called each other some pretty horrible names, he was supportive even when it ended up costing him money, time and happiness.

Torontoist: How do you think the public will react to the book and the documentary? Is there a danger that the projects will be perceived as being in sympathy with Kenk’s crimes?

RP: The book is a sui generis piece of profile journalism that some people will adore, and others will loathe. Kinda like any book. As for those who think Kenk is one big Igor love-in, I’ve written about two of the foulest ideas in history–Apartheid and Islamo-fascism. Would those same people be willing to suggest that I’m “in sympathy” with the aforementioned? That simply by writing about racists and suicide bombers I must be among their legion, cheering them on from the sidelines? I’d like to think they wouldn’t. C’mon, people, where’s the freakin’ love?