Graphic Novel Based On Canadian Bicycle Thief

Igor Kenk is a controversial and unusual figure in Toronto — notorious for his trove of 3,000 mostly stolen bicycles that police uncovered when they arrested him for bike theft in 2008.

This week, Toronto writer Richard Poplak and Alex Jansen of the production and publishing company Pop Sandbox are releasing an unusual treatment of Kenk's story. Kenk: A Graphic Portrait is a journalistic graphic novel based on photos and footage of Kenk taken in the year before his arrest.

Poplak, who wrote about Kenk for Toronto Life magazine before being recruited by Jansen to create a graphic novel, said there was something "obsessive compulsive" about Kenk's behaviour.

"He was much, much bigger than life. He was a comic book character," Poplak told CBC Radio's Q cultural affairs show on Tuesday.

"He did say … that after our whole warped system crashes — and this was before August 2008 when the financial system came down — he said the man with the bikes will be king."



A large, scruffy man with an outsized personality, Kenk had a shop on Toronto's Queen Street West that was so crammed with bikes he couldn't get into it. The Bicycle Clinic was a dark hole with a sheet-metal front on a street that was rapidly gentrifying.

"It was a strange place," Poplak recalled. "He kept his own hours. It would be not at all out of the norm to see him open at two in the morning. It would have a shady cast of people around."

The Bicycle Clinic also had a long-established reputation for buying bikes from anyone who showed up at the shop.

"The first thing the police would say if your bike was stolen was, 'Go check Igor's shop'," he recalled.

"Igor had a series of very fixed ideas on how the world worked; he preached a zero-consumption lifestyle," Poplak said. "He loved bicycles more than anything, but at the same time, he was a man of compromised character. He lived in this moral grey zone where what was found, what showed up at the shop, was his."
It was Kenk's unusual philosophy that captured Jansen's imagination. He had started to make a documentary about the bike shop owner with Jason Gilmore in the year before Kenk was arrested.

"It's really a portrait of a man against this changing neighbourhood," Jansen said, noting how out of pace with his new hipster neighbours he was.

That movie provided the images for Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, which uses stills from the film as well as archival material to tell Kenk's story. Nick Marinkovich, a Toronto comic artist who has contributed to Marvel, illustrated the book.

Poplak traced Kenk's roots back to Slovenia and in his book portrays the peculiar mix of capitalist and socialist philosophy that motivated him.

Jansen said the work is an attempt to humanize the man dubbed by the media as "the world's most prolific bicycle thief."

"It might appear sympathetic just in the way he's being categorized ... but I think at the end of the day, it renders somebody who was actually myth before I'd met him and became really this complete black and white villain," Jansen said. "I think that what it does is it strips him down to being human."

Kenk has now finished his 30-month sentence for bike theft and is again living in Toronto.

- www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/05/04/igor-kenk-graphic-novel.html

...pretty cool little story, and it looks very interesting, a look inside this obviously erratic man's psyche. i'm probably gonna check it out...just thought i'd pass the info along.