Ben Katchor (born November 19, 1951) is an American

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

and

illustrator An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicat ...

best known for the

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer'' is a weekly comic strip written and drawn by Ben Katchor since 1988. It is published in ''The Jewish Daily Forward'' and various alternative weekly newspapers. Katchor embodies his love of the fading ...

''. He has contributed comics and drawings to ''

The Forward ''The Forward'' ( yi, פֿאָרווערטס, Forverts), formerly known as ''The Jewish Daily Forward'', is an American news media organization for a Jewish American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper, ' ...

'', ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

,'' ''

Metropolis A metropolis () is a large city or conurbation which is a significant economic, political, and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections, commerce, and communications. A big c ...

'', and weekly newspapers in the United States. A

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

and

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to ...

recipient, Katchor was described by author

Michael Chabon Michael Chabon ( ; born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, DC, he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, gr ...

as "the creator of the last great American comic strip."

Career

Cartooning

Katchor contributed occasional illustrations while on staff for ''The Kingsman'', the student newspaper of

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

, and he was an early contributor to ''

RAW Raw is an adjective usually describing: * Raw materials, basic materials from which products are manufactured or made * Raw food, uncooked food Raw or RAW may also refer to: Computing and electronics * .RAW, a proprietary mass spectrometry dat ...

''. He edited and published two issues of ''Picture Story'', which featured his own work, with articles and stories by

Peter Blegvad Peter Blegvad (born August 14, 1951) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, writer, and cartoonist. He was a founding member of German/English avant-pop band Slapp Happy, which later merged briefly with Henry Cow, and has released many sol ...

, Jerry Moriarty, Mark Beyer and Martin Millard. In 1993, Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by

Lawrence Weschler Lawrence Weschler (born 1952) is an author of works of creative nonfiction. A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981–2002) a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', w ...

in ''The New Yorker'' and an extended essay by John Crowley in ''The Yale Review'' (1998). His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese. Katchor wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" for ''

Slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...

'' in 1997, he contributed articles to the now-defunct ''Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress,'' did illustrations for the ''New Yorker'' and occasionally ''The New York Times Book Review''. Katchor was the guest editor of the 2017 edition of ''Best American Comics.''

Strips

* ''Julius Knipl'' – Paints a fictional version of New York City with a decidedly Jewish/urban sensibility. ''Julius Knipl'' has been published in several book collections including ''Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay'' (Penguin), ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories'', with a foreword by Michael Chabon (Little, Brown & Co.), and ''The Beauty Supply District (Pantheon Books)''. * ''The Cardboard Valise'' – A weekly strip chronicling the travels of Emile Delilah to a variety of imaginary nations. It was expanded, collected and published by Pantheon Books in 2011. * ''Hotel & Farm'' – A weekly strip dealing, over alternating weeks, with hotel culture and agriculture. It appeared in weekly newspapers in the U.S. * ''Shoehorn Technique'' – A weekly strip exploring the possibilities of human mobility across socio-economic strata in an imaginary city. Temporarily suspended after 52-weeks. * ''Metropolis'' series – Since 1998, Katchor has produced a monthly strip for the back-page o
''Metropolis''
magazine dealing with the topics of architecture and urban design. Katchor's operas ''The Carbon Copy Building'' and ''The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island'' were adapted from strips in this series. The strips were collected in the 2013 book

Hand-Drying in America and other stories'' (Pantheon Books). This series ended in December 2016.
"Our Mental Age"
– An online comic-strip series started 2017. * ''The Dairy Restaurant'' (2020), an illustrated history of the dairy restaurant with an online addendum.

Theater

Katchor has written several works of

musical theater Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement ...

, includin
''The Rosenbach Company''
(a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century)

an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island

about the culture and architecture of coat-checkrooms, an

about a page working the stacks of the New York Public Library c.1970. All feature music by

Mark Mulcahy Mark Mulcahy is an American musician and front-man for the New Haven, Connecticut-based band Miracle Legion. The band earned modest renown, especially in their native New England region, but disbanded after a sad turn of events with their recor ...

. In 1999, he collaborated with Bang on a Can on an opera entitled, ''The Carbon Copy Building.''

Teaching

Katchor has been an associate professor at Parsons The New School since 2007. He gives "illustrated lectures" at colleges and museums accompanied by slide projections of his work. Since 2012 he has run th
New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium
a weekly symposium for the study of text-image work.

Awards

Katchor won an

Obie Award The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards originally given by ''The Village Voice'' newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City. In September 2014, the awards were jointly presented and administered with the A ...

for his collaboration with Bang on a Can on ''The Carbon Copy Building'', a "comic book

opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...

" based on his writings and drawings that premiered in 1999. The same year, he was the subject of ''Pleasures of Urban Decay'', a documentary by the

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

filmmaker Samuel Ball. The first cartoonist to receive a

, Katchor has also received a

and is a fellow of the

American Academy in Berlin The American Academy in Berlin is a private, independent, nonpartisan research and cultural institution in Berlin dedicated to sustaining and enhancing the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany ...

Bibliography

* ''Picture Story 2'' (editor and contributor) (self-published, 1986) * ''Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay'' (Penguin, 1991) * '' Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories'' (Little, Brown & Co., 1996) * ''

The Jew of New York ''The Jew of New York'' is a graphic novel by Ben Katchor, inspired by Mordecai Manuel Noah's attempt to establish a Jewish homeland in Grand Island, New York in the 1820s. It was originally serialized in the pages of ''The Jewish Daily Forward' ...

'' (Pantheon Books, 1998) * ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District'' (Pantheon Books, 2000) * ''

The Cardboard Valise ''The Cardboard Valise'' is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Ben Katchor. Published by Pantheon Books in 2011, it brought Katchor the National Cartoonists Society's Graphic Novel Award. The book deals with its characters' obsessive tour ...

'' (Pantheon Books, 2011) * ''Hand-Drying in America'' (Pantheon Books, 2013) * "Conversations: Ben Katchor," edited by Ian Gordon (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2018)

''The Dairy Restaurant'', an illustrated history, March 2020.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Katchor, Ben 1951 births Alternative cartoonists American comics writers American comic strip cartoonists Jewish comedy and humor Jewish American writers Living people MacArthur Fellows American opera librettists People from Brooklyn Brooklyn College alumni 21st-century American Jews