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 comics illustrators/artists in that they produce both the litera ...

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 complicate ...

best known for the

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...

'' Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer''. He has contributed comics and drawings to ''

The Forward ''The Forward'' (), 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 York Times'' reported that Set ...

'', ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

,'' ''

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

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

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

and

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and ...

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, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, ...

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 in New York City, United States. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls nearly 14,000 students on a campus in the Midwood and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn as of fall ...

, 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'' 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 ro ...

'' 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, moveme ...

, 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. 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 given since 1956 by ''The Village Voice'' newspaper to theater artists and groups involved in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions in New York City. Starting just after th ...

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

opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

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

documentary A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...

by the

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

filmmaker Samuel Ball. The first cartoonist to receive a

, Katchor has also received a

and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

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'' (Pantheon Books, 1998) * ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District'' (Pantheon Books, 2000) * '' The Cardboard Valise'' (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 Living people MacArthur Fellows American opera librettists Artists from Brooklyn Brooklyn College alumni 21st-century American Jews Writers from Brooklyn Jews from New York (state)