Ben Katchor

Last updated

Ben Katchor
Loz-katchor.png
BornBenjamin Katchor
19 November 1951
New York City, U.S.
Area(s) Cartoonist
Notable works
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship, 1995
MacArthur Fellowship, 2000
www.katchor.com

Ben Katchor (born November 19, 1951) is an American cartoonist and illustrator best known for the comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer . He has contributed comics and drawings to The Forward , The New Yorker, Metropolis , and weekly newspapers in the United States. A Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Katchor was described by author Michael Chabon as "the creator of the last great American comic strip." [1]

Contents

Career

Cartooning

Katchor contributed occasional illustrations while on staff for The Kingsman, the student newspaper of Brooklyn College, and he was an early contributor to RAW . He edited and published two issues of Picture Story, which featured his own work, with articles and stories by Peter Blegvad, Jerry Moriarty, Mark Beyer and Martin Millard.

In 1993, Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by Lawrence Weschler in The New Yorker [2] and an extended essay by John Crowley in The Yale Review (1998).

His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese.[ citation needed ]

Katchor wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" for Slate in 1997, [3] 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 of 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, including The Rosenbach Company (a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century); The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower, an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island; A Checkroom Romance, about the culture and architecture of coat-checkrooms, and Up From the Stacks, about a page working the stacks of the New York Public Library c.1970. All feature music by Mark Mulcahy. 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. [4] He gives "illustrated lectures" at colleges and museums accompanied by slide projections of his work. Since 2012 he has run the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium, a weekly symposium for the study of text-image work.

Awards

Katchor won an Obie Award for his collaboration with Bang on a Can on The Carbon Copy Building, a "comic book opera" 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 filmmaker Samuel Ball. The first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Katchor has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.[ citation needed ]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<i>Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer</i> Weekly comic strip

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer was a weekly comic strip written and drawn by Ben Katchor from 1988 to 1998. It was first published in The New York Press and subsequently self-syndicated to various alternative weekly newspapers including The Washington DC City Paper,Chicago NewCity,Philadelphia City Paper,San Francisco Weekly,The Forward (English-language),The Village Voice and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art Spiegelman</span> American cartoonist (born 1948)

Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman, professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly, and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Deitch</span> American cartoonist

Kim Deitch is an American cartoonist who was an important figure in the underground comix movement of the 1960s, remaining active in the decades that followed with a variety of books and comics, sometimes using the pseudonym Fowlton Means.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Ware</span> American artist

Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware is an American cartoonist known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), Building Stories (2012) and Rusty Brown (2019). His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reed Crandall</span> American cartoonist

Reed Leonard Crandall was an American illustrator and penciller of comic books and magazines. He was best known for the 1940s Quality Comics' Blackhawk and for stories in EC Comics during the 1950s. Crandall was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.

<i>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay</i> 2000 novel by Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Czech artist Joe Kavalier and Brooklyn-born writer Sammy Clay, before, during, and after World War II. In the novel, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry from its nascency into its Golden Age. Kavalier & Clay was published to "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller, receiving nominations for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation," and in 2007, The New York Review of Books called the novel Chabon's magnum opus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Brunetti</span> American cartoonist

Ivan Brunetti is an Italian and American cartoonist and comics scholar based in Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pantheon Books</span> American book publishing imprint, part of Knopf Doubleday

Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint with editorial independence. It is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Edward Sorel is an American illustrator, caricaturist, cartoonist, graphic designer and author. His work is known for its storytelling, its left-liberal social commentary, its criticism of reactionary right-wing politics and organized religion. Formerly a regular contributor to The Nation, New York Magazine and The Atlantic, his work is today seen more frequently in Vanity Fair. He has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of America's foremost political satirists". As a lifelong New Yorker, a large portion of his work interprets the life, culture and political events of New York City. There is also a large body of work which is nostalgic for the stars of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood when Sorel was a youth. Sorel is noted for his wavy pen-and-ink style, which he describes as "spontaneous direct drawing".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. S. W. Rosenbach</span> American collector (1876–1952)

Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was an American collector, scholar, and dealer in rare books and manuscripts. In London, where he frequently attended the auctions at Sotheby's, he was known as "The Terror of the Auction Room." In Paris, he was called "Le Napoléon des Livres". Many others referred to him as "Dr. R.", a "Robber Baron" and "the Greatest Bookdealer in the World".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Françoise Mouly</span> French-born American editor, designer and publisher (born 1955)

Françoise Mouly is a French-born American designer, editor and publisher. She is best known as co-founder, co-editor, and publisher of the comics and graphics magazine Raw (1980–1991), as the publisher of Raw Books and Toon Books, and since 1993 as the art editor of The New Yorker. Mouly is married to cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and is the mother of writer Nadja Spiegelman.

Gary Northfield is a British cartoonist, most famous for his Derek the Sheep comic strip published in DC Thomson's The Beano and BeanoMAX.

<i>Maps and Legends</i> Essay collection by Michael Chabon

Maps and Legends is a 2008 collection of sixteen essays by American author Michael Chabon, his first book-length foray into nonfiction. Several of these essays are defenses of the author's work in genre literature, while others are more autobiographical, explaining how the author came to write several of his most popular works.

Gary Gianni is an American comics artist best known for his eight years illustrating the syndicated newspaper comic Prince Valiant.

<i>Friday Foster</i> American comic strip

Friday Foster is an American newspaper comic strip, created and written by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Jorge Longarón. It ran from January 18, 1970, to February 17, 1974 and was notable for featuring one of the first African-American women as the title character in a comic strip. Jackie Ormes' Torchy Brown predated it, although it saw a more limited release in the Afro-American newspaper Pittsburgh Courier.

<i>The Cardboard Valise</i>

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.

Al Kelly was the stage name of Abraham Kalish, a U.S. vaudeville comedian. Kelly was known as a double-talk artist, and went on to stooge for other comedians such as Willie Howard and Ernie Kovacs. Near the end of his life, he made occasional appearances on The Soupy Sales Show when it was based in New York.

<i>Building Stories</i> 2012 graphic novel by American cartoonist Chris Ware

Building Stories is a 2012 graphic novel by American cartoonist Chris Ware. The unconventional work is made up of fourteen printed works—cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books—packaged in a boxed set. The work took a decade to complete, and was published by Pantheon Books. The intricate, multilayered stories pivot around an unnamed female protagonist with a missing lower leg. It mainly focuses on her time in a three-story brownstone apartment building in Chicago, but also follows her later in her life as a mother. The parts of the work can be read in any order.

This is a list of works by American author Michael Chabon.

Raw Books & Graphics is an American publishing company specializing in comics and graphic novels. Operating since 1978, it is owned and operated by Françoise Mouly. The company first came to prominence publishing Raw magazine, co-edited by Mouly and her husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman. In the 1980s the company published graphic novels, and with the formation of Raw Junior in 1999, branched into children's comics with Little Lit and Toon Books.

References

  1. Chabon, Michael. Maps and Legends (McSweeney's, 2008).
  2. Lawrence Weschler, "A Wanderer in the Perfect City," The New Yorker (August 9, 1993), pp. 58–66.
  3. Katchor, Ben (July 12, 1997). "Diary". Slate Magazine. Retrieved September 20, 2020.
  4. Parsons, The New School.
  5. Garner, Dwight (March 16, 2020). "An Illustrated Love Song to Jewish Restaurants of Old". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved March 16, 2020.