Greg Kerr (June 28, 1969 – June 28, 2022)

I’m not sure what happened yet, but Ottawa cartoonist and musician Greg Kerr died at the end of June, and on his fifty-third birthday, no less. I don’t want to believe it.

I first encountered Greg’s work through his self-published BUNCHA STORIES chapbook-sized comics (almost in a Chester Brown Yummy Fur vein, offering separate issues of stand-alone but interconnected stories) at Crosstown Traffic in the Glebe, these small roughly-made first-person comics of drinking and other ridiculous adventures. I was immediately struck by the energy of Greg’s work, and his ability to tell stories. The comics were rough, but he understood narrative, and how to pace out the action. He was really good at telling stories, whether through comics or in-person. During that period, I knew an editor at Carleton University’s weekly newspaper, The Charlatan, who was letting me do whatever I wanted in their centre spread, so managed to find a contact with Greg and meet up for an interview (which allowed me to meet him in person for the first time), which can be found online here. He did give me the original of his illustration of me interviewing him, but unfortunately, that, along with my personal copies of the piece, disappeared after a particular move. Not long after that, he even did a back cover illustration for one of my chapbooks.

Most of my encounters with Greg were on the streets of Ottawa’s Centretown, throughout the 1990s and into the aughts, encountering him randomly on the street or at the original Royal Oak Pub on Bank Street, just by MacLaren. My interactions with Greg were always positive, always random, always a bit ridiculous. On the surface he seemed quiet, almost shy, his comics allowing for a more outgoing, gregarious (so to speak) self. A personal favourite was a single-panel comic displaying, basically, all the things he realized he now owned after a particularly rowdy evening of drink, a list that included “a chair from McDonalds,” a traffic barricade light and other completely random items. He later drew me a couple of times, including an “author photo” included on the cover of my first full-length poetry collection with Broken Jaw Press, back in spring 1998. At one point, during the stretch of years I wrote daily at a Dunkin’ Donuts at Bank and Gloucester (where a Tim Horton’s now sits), he wandered by and displayed a pair of hugely oversized trousers he referred to as “Czechoslovakian winter pants” (large enough that four or five of us could have comfortably fit simultaneously within), purchased while drunk from Irving Rivers that they wouldn’t allow him to return. At another point, he wandered by with a Yogi Bear lamp sans lampshade that he gave me, although he paused to remove and keep the light bulb.

I kept this lamp for years, until I realized it required an electrical repair I’d never get around to. When I mentioned the lamp to Greg again, he had no recollection of any of it, and thought him taking the bulb back was confusing, hilariously funny, even mean. He laughed: Why did I take the bulb?

I spent the latter half of the 1990s most late afternoons and evenings at that particular Oak, usually working on fiction, and hanging around with whoever might be around. Greg would go in to socialize, and read the newspaper. We spent hours upon hours together. He once did a comic depicting a full day spent at the Royal Oak where he accidentally spent his entire paycheque, writing our pal Sunny further into the story and writing me out—I had been part of the first eleven hours of his twelve-hour misadventure, as he purchased round upon round of drinks for the two of us, finally switching to gin-and-tonics around 10pm. Because, as he said at the time, “beer takes; gin and tonic gives.” He eventually cut me off because I wasn’t drinking fast enough. Later, upon seeing the comic, I asked why he’d edited me out and he laughed, saying that he figured he’d drawn me enough.

Greg knew more trivia about WKRP in Cincinnati (the greatest television program of all time) than anyone else, and even produced a couple of comics around the show. Greg Kerr was a Centretown standard, even when he ended up moving to Gatineau. Do you remember rhat period of time when he’d be without a phone because he’d refuse to pay the phone bill and get disconnected? Eventually, Bell would convince him to reconnect, and they’d be off again, and he'd be cut off again after another period of months before they realized he had no intention of giving them any money. This went on for years, a cycle that seemed to be a strange kind of game that he delighted in, and Bell Canada never quite picked up on. Over the years, Greg performed in numerous bands, and worked in a restaurant kitchen or two (where the head chef would put on CFRA Talk Radio’s right-wing provocateur Lowell Green, which prompted Greg to fume every morning at work).

During the period he was part of the band The Deadbeat Dads, they were an episode’s guest-band on The Tom Green Show (during Tom’s Rogers Ottawa days), and started an off-camera fight during taping. If you watch that particular episode, you can hear a scuffle, as Tom turns from the camera and looks to his right. Apparently, after that, the floor director would warn bands not to cause problems during taping, thanks to their scuffle. Apparently, as Greg claimed later on, he just saw bandmate Scott Fairchild’s “big ugly red head” in front of him on stage, “and just had to hit it” with his bass. And that was that.

Greg made comics. I even produced an above/ground press title at one point, Drunkboy Stories (1997), around the time I was publishing his comics regularly in my journal Missing Jacket (the same comics he ended up re-selling, years later, to the Ottawa X-Press, actually). He was ridiculous and extremely fucking talented, without a speck of malice beyond a kind of impish impulse to cause trouble. He was curious, and I always wondered why he didn’t push to continue his comics; a kind of ambition that perhaps conflicted with his interests in doing other things, whether playing music or hanging out with friends or simply not worrying about any of that stuff. He was a good dude, and I will miss him.

A memorial for Greg Kerr will be held on SATURDAY AUGUST 6^th, 2022 (3pm to 7pm) at The Dominion Tavern, 33 York Street, Ottawa. Mark your calendars.