Now that's a big comic book!

Kramers Ergot v.7 came out last year and right off the bat I was opposed to the very idea of this comic book, from its hefty price ($125.00) to its elitist contents (me saying this is probably funny to some people who know me with my elitist tastes in entertainment). I hadn't seen an actual copy of it until I went over to my friend's (Todd Murry) house a couple of months ago and he had bought one from a small company called Amazon. Anyway when you see a copy of this huge comic book (16 x 21) you can't not see it as an art object.

Kramers Ergot v.7 is an almost 100 page (so that comes to more than one dollar per page) comic book anthology with numerous alternative comic cartoonists contributing not more than three pages each. Like most anthologies the actual content varies from good to bad and I think that even with excellent contributions by artists such as Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Ivan Brunetti, that a lot of this book is just of the throw-away variety that wouldn't justify a twenty dollar price tag for a regular sized graphic novel collection (meaning work by pretenders to elitism that gives elitism a bad name). But here in this glorious over-sized format, everything looks impressive and seems to be pushing boundaries. I'm still kind of annoyed with the price as it will exclude a big section of people who would like its contents from being able to justify shelling out that much (and I've always liked the idea of comic books being the affordable art form for the masses - even though sadly with cover prices of the periodicals going up that is less true).
So after seeing my friend Todd's copy of Kramers Ergot v.7 I made it a point to see if I could still get a copy for myself from Comic Relief The Comic Book Bookstore (one of the premier comic book stores in the U.S. - they're in Berkeley), who had a booth at the San Francisco Wondercon a couple of weeks ago. I was happy to find that Todd (the new owner of Comic Relief after its founder, Rory Root, died last year) had a couple of copies left and I was more than happy to throw some money his way and was especially elated to read in the contents page that this book was dedicated to the memory of Rory Root, Dave Stevens (creator of the Rocketeer and responsible for the revival of Bettie Page's popularity), and Will Elder (Mad magazine and numerous EC comics), three giants of the comics medium who died last year. So while I wouldn't buy several pricey books like this, I'm glad to have this on (warts and all), being shown a physical copy by my friend Todd, and buying it from another Todd (of Comic Relief, natch).