Folks were very, very angry at me regarding my first Die Antwoord-related post at The Walrus. So I wrote a second one, which has made them angrier.

Sheesh, it’s been a splendid few weeks as far as the death threats are concerned. First, there was this hotly contested, angrily ingested piece on self-described Zef-rap outfit Die Antwoord in The Walrus. And then, as the May street date for Kenk:A Graphic Portrait approaches, so do the long knives. Nothing I can do about my Die Antwoord haters, but at least they’ve read the piece. My Kenk detractors? Not so much. So, I’ve updated the FAQs I posted a couple of months ago. Please read them before hitting send on emails with the subject line “You Flaming Shitbag.”

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 May, 2010.

Q: A graphic novel? With pictures? Aren’t you a journalist?

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

Q: What the hell do you know about bikes? I know writers, man — you probably drink a cup of gasoline and eat a plate of tar sands at breakfast, before backing your SUV over an endangered species on your way to the oil rig.

A: I really gotta show you my credentials? Okay, fine. I’ve been a bicycle commuter for as long as I can remember. That means I ride every day, wherever I go, all year round, regardless of the weather. I’m a founding member of Team GRG, a UCI-registered road-bike racing team, and I’ve raced both mountain and road in Canada and in South Africa. I’ve been on long, hard rides with two — count ‘em two — Tour de France winners (Bjarne Riis and Carlos Sastre), I’ve crested a 5,100-metre pass in Peru on a mountain bike, and I’ve logged tens of thousands of kilometres with my teammates in all manner of wretched weather. Oh, and as far as Igor Kenk is concerned, he has had in his possession three of my bikes over the course of our respective careers — I wasn’t happy about it then, and I’m not happy about it now. Okay, your turn.

Q: Wow, aren’t you a hero! Remind me to get you to sign some of my old bike shorts when this is over. But none of this changes the fact that 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 an in-depth, very serious journalistic profile — much like the sort you see in expensive 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 Portrait 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 a quicky sentence, I’d assert that it’s about a man without the art to implement his ideas, without the moral compass to realize his ideals, pulled out to sea by the power of his compulsion. And don’t worry, the prose in book is nowhere near as purple as that.

Q: Dude, this still seems stupid. Who cares about your quote unquote extreme characters? You’re just the suburban bourgeoisie romanticising the urban underclass. Your head will be the first one in the basket come the revolution.

A: Why, I’ll rip your freakin’ nads off, you…. Okay, okay, I’m calmer now. Listen, journalism need not be about breaking news. The irony of the internet age is that, despite the fact that space is essentially limitless, the long feature piece is just about a dead art. [Insert Twitter bitch here.] Oh, I know, there’s The New Yorker and The Atlantic and the beloved Walrus, but the golden age of my heroes, Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, is long, long gone. I said it best in a recent Globe and Mail interview:

I’m very attracted to the old New York reporting of Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling — guys who wrote about neighbourhood personalities for The New Yorker in the 50s. To me, this is the apex of journalism, because it says absolutely everything — not just about the characters in question, but about those who loved them, those who avoided them and the times in which they lived. These extreme characters explicated their surroundings and their epoch. It’s funny — very few people read Mitchell anymore, but I’ve been giving his collection to friends here in South Africa, and they absolutely love it and often categorically state it’s some of the best stuff they’ve ever read. His unfussy reportage is about losers in a 10-block radius of the lower East Side in the 1950s. And it’s both timeless and utterly universal. That’s what I hope to achieve with Kenk.

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 New Yorker 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: Well, this here cover should give you a taste.

Now go ahead to the Kenk website, sign up for email updates, and let’s start being nice to each other.