The recipient of a 2000 Mac Arthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama,
Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist’s career from 1988 to 2020.
In some of his early strips published in the 1980s in the
New York Press and
Forward, Katchor introduced one of his quintessential characters, Julius Knipl, a real estate photographer. By crafting Knipl as an urban flâneur prone to wandering, Katchor was able to variously demonstrate his absurd humor and linguistic whimsy alongside narratives packed with social critique. Three volumes collecting the Julius Knipl strips,
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer;
Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay; and
The Beauty Supply District, helped cement Katchor as a distinguished comics artist and social commentator. Later works, such as
The Cardboard Valise,
Hand-Drying in America, and
The Dairy Restaurant, have diversified his comics legacy.
Rooted in close analyses of the artist’s numerous series and collections, each chapter in
Ben Katchor is dedicated to a distinct aspect of the urban experience. Individual pages from Katchor’s work depict not only the visual, but also the auditory, tactile, and olfactory dimensions of life in the city.
Over de auteur
Benjamin Fraser is professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. He is author of several books, including The Art of Pere Joan: Space, Landscape, and Comics Form; Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form (published by University Press of Mississippi); and Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities.
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