New York Strips: Uncanny Chronicles

A newspaper that records the dreams of the city’s sleepers, a club for compulsive nail biters, and an asylum for pretzel addicts—can these oddities possibly exist just beneath the film of everyday existence? This is what award-winning cartoonist Ben Katchor explores in his comics.

Katchor is fascinated by the strange objects, faded signs, bizarre societies, and unique sights, smells, and sounds that litter the urban landscape. “I love that moment when you arrive in a strange city, a culture you vaguely understand, and everything is a mystery, everything is fascinating,” he said in an interview. “I grew up in the city. I grew up in a world of low-level capitalism … I guess my comics are my way of communicating that.”

Among Katchor’s published works are “Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay” and “The Jew of New York.” He contributes frequently to The New Yorker, and is the first cartoonist ever to win the coveted MacArthur fellowship. He first garnered attention with “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer,” a strip that began running in the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward and has since been syndicated in a number of different American periodicals.

“Julius Knipl” chronicles the wanderings of a lonely, fedora-topped man across a half-crumbling, surreal urban landscape. There is an unmistakable air of nostalgia in Katchor’s imagined world—his black and white renderings of brick apartment blocks, newspaper stands, and corner drugstores filled with down-and-out men in suits and hats recall some shadowy film noir metropolis.
Katchor read from some of his latest strips at The Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sept. 20, where a tribute concert for musician and songwriter Mark Mulcahy, which brought together such stars as Thom Yorke and Frank Black, was being held. His reading prompted both laughter and sighs from the audience—which is no surprise, since his work as a whole oscillates between the amusing and the unsettling, while never shaking off a pervasive air of absurdity.

In his long career, Katchor has ventured beyond the comic book. He has collaborated extensively with Mark Mulcahy on several musical dramas, among other projects. Their musical “The Rosenbach Company” dramatizes the life and work of Abe Rosenbach, the 20th century’s foremost rare book dealer, a real life character, whose obsession and eccentricity seem to echo the peculiarity of the characters of Katchor’s strips.

Katchor’s works, filled as they are with uncanny subcultures and strange societies, at times betray an almost sociological bent. “Almost inadvertently, I’ve come to draw strips about odd professions, objects, ideas … that fall between the cracks of the sciences. I tend to investigate things that other sciences wouldn’t deal with.”

And the city truly is his laboratory. After reading a Katchor strip, one feels the urge to walk around a shadowy metropolis, to explore alleyways and grimy apartment blocks, to discover the fantastic curiosities of urban life lurking just inside a greasy diner or behind a locked door.