Ben Katchor

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Ben Katchor (born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY) is an American cartoonist. His comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer paints an evocative picture of a slightly surreal, historical New York City with a decidedly Jewish sensibility. Julius Knipl has been published in several book collections including Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay and The Beauty Supply District. Other serialized comics by Katchor include The Jew Of New York (collected and published as a graphic novel in 1998), The Cardboard Valise and Hotel & Farm. He regularly contributes comics and drawings to The New Yorker and Metropolis magazine. He was a contributor to RAW and published and edited two issues of Picture Story magazine, which featured his own work along with illustrated articles and stories by Peter Blegvad and Jerry Moriarty. He wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" for Slate in 1997 and contributed articles to the now-defunct Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress. His comics have been translated into French, Italian, and Japanese. He currently draws a weekly strip, Shoehorn Technique, for The Forward.

In 1993 Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by Lawrence Weschler in the The New Yorker.^[1] He collaborated 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.

In 2000 Katchor became the first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant").

Katchor frequently gives "illustrated lectures" at colleges and museums accompanied by slide projections of his work.

[edit] Bibliography

Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (Penguin, 1991)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (Little, Brown & Co., 1996)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (Pantheon Books, 2000)
The Jew of New York (Pantheon Books, 1998)
Picture Story 2 (editor and contributor) (self-published, 1986)