Features

Igor Kenk, The World’s Most Prolific Bike Thief
“Kenk is worth close examination. Discover the man who stole nearly 3,000 bicycles… and what he was planning to do with them.”
Swenson Book Development, 8 December 2011

Best American Comics: the Notable Comics of 2011
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, 7 December 2011

Who Says Igor Kenk Stole Your Bike?
“Whether you ride a bike, or stole one or had one stolen, or not. We recommend this documentary and look forward to seeing whatever Pop Sandbox will do next.”
The Austin Chronicle, 7 October 2011

Great Graphic Novels of Fall 2011: Nonfiction
“Essential reading for the season.”
Graphic Novel Reporter, 16 September 2011

Stealing to save the world
“Creatively, the graphic novel KENK is an astounding success in its unique form: it is a thick book of dark pages containing photocopied images from previously recorded video with smudgy typewriter text that captures audio and carries a loose narrative.”
Art Threat, 18 August 2011

Books of the Year 2010: Non-fiction
“The book’s gritty, foot-in-the-gutter aesthetic is perfectly suited to its subject, a crank philosopher with a skewed moral sense who is alternately fascinating and infuriating.”
Quill and Quire, 23 November 2010

KENK: A Graphic Portrait
“The final result is arguably one of the best pieces of journalism released in recent years, graphic novel or otherwise.”
Broken Pencil, Summer 2010

Bike Swipe
“Kenk is one of those rare books that succeeds in both style and substance.”
Prairie Dog Magazine,15 August 2010

Kenk: graphic novel humanizes Toronto’s most notorious bike-thief without apologising for him
“Through this odd documentary style, the creators build up a picture of a complex, dysfunctional, philosophical pathological case.”
Boing Boing, 13 August 2010

KENK, a graphic portrait of Igor Kenk, ‘the world’s most prolific bicycle thief’
“You couldn’t ask for a more complex and compelling character, but this is equally the story of the changing neighbourhood and the collision course they were on.”
Jawbone TV, 30 July 2010

Kenk under glass
“I thought it was perfect for the G20. If the anarchists were about to put a brick through our window, they’d see the display and think, ‘Wait a minute — maybe these guys are on our side’. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but our store was left untouched.”
Open Book Toronto, 26 July 2010

Kenk: The Artsts Behind the Bicycle Thief
“I had to define the book in a quick 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.”
Comics & Gaming Monthly, 23 July 2010

Kenk: The bicycle thief, all mashed up
“An innovative mashup of comic, journalistic documentary and 21st century case study in urban flux, Kenk filters this fascinating and infuriating figure through a prism of media modes that both situate the man as a kind of mutant thumbprint individual and symptom of seeping new-world disorder.”
Toronto Star, 23 May 2010

Bike thief comic
“Igor Kenk has been called the world’s most prolific bike thief and a graphic novel is turning him into an unlikely celebrity.”
CBC News – The National, 17 May 2010

Dude where’s my bike?
“To appreciate Kenk, you have to hold the final product in your hands. Beyond the scratchy visuals deliberately modelled after a form of Slovenian photocopied underground publishing that Igor Kenk might have read as he came of age, the book is gritty.”
NOW Magazine (Cover Story), 6 May 2010

The Team Behind Kenk: A Graphic Portrait
“The base idea was to root every panel directly in the source footage (both image and transcription), and I was really excited by the possibility of creating a relatively new mash-up/hybrid form of documentary as comic book.”
Torontoist Books, 6 May 2010

Portrait of a Serial Stealer
“And so we have Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, which is an attempt to bridge an in-depth investigative profile with a graphic novel.”
The Walrus, 6 May 2010

Notorious bicycle thief inspires graphic novel
“It’s a rollercoaster ride, a story that keeps on growing.”
Inside Toronto, 6 May 2010

Pop Sandbox: An Interview With Alex Jansen
“I view the graphic novel medium now as an incredible place to pioneer new stories and build an audience for them with the least negative compromise.”
Open Book Toronto, 6 May 2010

Igor Kenk: The man who stole the world
“At times brilliant, often erratic, the book goes a long way towards shattering the myth of Kenk that has existed in the media and in local gossip since he came to the city a little more than two decades ago.”
National Post, 30 April 2010

Igor Kenk: The Novel
“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”
Torontoist Books, 21 April 2010

Enigmatic bike thief proves to be comic book character
“Its jagged, photocopy-art aesthetic is well-suited to its enigmatic subject”
The Globe and Mail, 6 April 2010

Bike thief gets literary treatment
“And while no one excuses the man’s graver follies, they’ve come to see Kenk as someone with deep, entangled complexities, an impression they hope the novel will impart.”
Toronto Star, 6 April 2010

Book outlines life of notorious bike repairman
“Kenk — whom international newspapers have called the “world’s most prolific” bike thief — is being immortalized, but not hero-ized, in a graphic novel.”
The Toronto Sun, 5 April 2010

Igor gets the book treatment
“But Kenk is also something of a popular hero, a notorious urban character who often helped people recover their stolen bikes, and whose antics brought a little colour to a grey city.”
The Globe and Mail, 5 April 2010

Igor Kenk’s story to become graphic novel, doc
“Once you have met Igor once, he’s stuck, he’s stuck in your head.”
CBC, 19 July 2009

I Just Kenk Get You Out Of My Head
“Because we have accumulated so much footage of Igor over the years, it allows us to do a very different style of journalistic graphic novel, a very different documentary project, and, most excitingly, it allows me to try and rethink how a journalistic feature piece might look on the web in twenty years.”
Torontoist, 27 May 2009

Notable Mentions

Richard Poplak talks graphic novels at Lucky’s Comics
“Book Choice of the Week”
Georgia Straight, 13 May 2010

Kenk crashes the party
“It was weird. It was wrong. Was he being valorized? I felt unsettled that he was there.”
NOW Magazine, 7 May 2010

Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2010: Nick Marinkovich
“Coming to TCAF to promote my new book – KENK – A graphic narrative about the infamous Toronto Bike Thief.”
National Post, 7 May 2010

Kenk book launch visited by man of the hour
“Igor’s stories and dramatic lifestyle are the core of what draw people to him. They know he’s a criminal (even though a CBC story claims he was an ‘ordinary guy’ who saw a loophole in the law). Even if only 50% of his stories were true, they would still be fascinating. ”
I Bike TO, 7 May 2010

Pop Sandbox making a name for itself with Kenk
“If the pre-release media coverage is anything to go by, the fledgling company could have a hit on its hands.”
Quill & Quire, 7 May 2010

New Books
“The book is sort of like a hypertext and feels sort of like film, sort of like a comic”
Sequential, 21 April 2010

This Week in Comics
“Spectators to the interaction of comics and cinema will want to hone their eyes on this Pop Sandbox release”
Comics Comics, 21 April 2010

Kenk for mayor
“No wonder Torontonians are fascinated by him. But where does Kenk go from here?”
The Toronto Star, 8 April 2010

Bike thief Igor Kenk released from jail
“He’s a crook. And he’s an outlaw. But the characters on the fringe of our society tell us what’s going on in our city.”
Toronto Star, 6 March 2010

Cycle Girl
“He has become some kind of counterculture hero.”
The Sunday Times, 14 February 2010

Igor Kenk, ‘the last of the Queen West outlaws,’ spared assault trial
“Mr. Kenk was notorious in the neighbourhood before the raid, and residents cheered as police cleaned out his Bicycle Clinic”
Toronto Star, 12 February 2010

In a Cyclist-Friendly City, a Black Hole for Bikes
“He’s easily the most hated man in Toronto…”
New York Times, 21 August 2008