cover image Kramers Ergot 6

Kramers Ergot 6

, . . Buenaventura/AvodahBooks, $34.95 (330pp) ISBN 978-0-9766848-7-9

This lavish, full-color art-comics anthology series gets thicker and denser with every volume. Editor Harkham's esthetic encompasses some more-or-less straightforward narrative comics, including his own deadpan heartbreaker "Lubavitch, Ukraine 1876." In general, though, it's much more concerned with freaky, stylistically unhinged pieces and contemporary art inspired by the spatial distortions and expressive linework of cartooning, like the surreal fairy-tale fetishism of Shary Boyle's "The Porcelain Figurine." A few of this issue's contributors are veterans of RAW , the granddaddy of this kind of anthology—there's a pervy half-drawn, half-painted piece by Jerry Moriarty, and some of Gary Panter's frenetic "Daltokyo" comic strips. As usual, Kramers features a handful of artists who obsessive-compulsively fill every square millimeter of the page with scribbly details, notably the team of Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel (whose "Elvis Studio" demands hours of stoned examination), Bald Eagles and the brilliant Canadian cartoonist Marc Bell. Although this collection surrenders a few too many pages to faux-naïf doodlers, Harkham also digs up some fabulous historical surprises: a selection of surreal, Hergé-influenced drawings by the late Dutch artist Marc Smeets and a lusciously colorful excerpt from a 1937 Japanese war-propaganda comic by Suihô Tagawa. (Sept.)