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Igor Kenk: The Novel
Part of a page of Kenk. 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.
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 is ready.
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