Due to the notoriety of the subject, lots of interested parties in have been asking for updates on the graphic novel I’m presently working on. Instead of answering individual emails, I thought I’d use the (further) power of the interweb to post a few FAQs. They go a little like this:

Q: You’re working on a graphic novel about Igor Kenk, the world’s most prolific bike thief? That’s crazy.

A: That’s not a question.

Q: Good point. When will it be ready?

A: It will be in stores - virtual or otherwise - in the US and Canada late May, 2010.

Q: You’re working on a graphic novel? Aren’t you a journalist?

A: I am, but this is a journalistic graphic novel. In fact, I find the term ‘graphic novel’ kinda silly. Let’s call this a ‘graphic profile’, which is still dumb, but perhaps closer to the mark in this case.

Q: Bike thieves are assholes. I can’t believe you’d give them a forum. How much are you paying Igor for this?

A: This is not a forum for Igor Kenk; I’m not in the business of providing my subjects with a soapbox. This is a profile - much like the sort you see in magazines - except with lots and lots and lots of pictures. I do not pay subjects for interviews - ever, under any circumstances. I wrote a book about the Middle East without putting Hezbollah on the payroll. I wrote a book about Apartheid and neither F.W. de Klerk nor Nelson Mandela are any richer for it.

Q: But what’s so interesting about a scuzzy bike thief?

A: Very simply, we are defined by characters on the extreme edges of our society. As much as I’d like to write about the upstanding citizens of the world - and the older the get, I happily realize these are in the vast majority - they can play a little dull. Kenk: A Graphic Profile is as much about what it means to live on the fringes of a tightly regulated society as it is about bike theft. And if I had to define the book in one word, I’d assert that it’s about compulsion.

Q: This doesn’t sound like the type of book your usual mega-house would be salivating over. Who is publishing it?

A: Right you are. PopSandbox is the name; wacked-out journalistic graphic novels are their game.

Q: Who is doing the drawings?

A: Oy, this is complicated. There ARE no drawings to speak of. The book is a bridging of the fumetti genre with a long-form NewYorker style journalistic profile, crossed with a DIY punk zine. The source material is largely based on stills pulled from hours and hours of video-footage, photographs and archival shots, all run through an ancient photocopy machine, and then futzed with some more. It is an agonizing process, and it’s making me go blind. Nick Marinkovich, of Underworld comics fame, is responsible for the final look.

Q: The final look?

A: Coming soon, folks. Coming soon.

The good folks at To The Best of our Knowledge allowed me to blab on semi-endlessly about The Sheikh’s Batmobile. They were intimidatingly well-versed in the book, most of which I’ve blocked out, due to the trauma of writing it. That said, interesting interview.