Ben Katchor

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", "The New York Times," 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". [Lawrence Weschler, "A Wanderer in the Perfect City," "New Yorker", 9 August 1993, 58-66.] He 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 Foundation Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant"), Katchor has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

Katchor is currently touring "The Rosenbach Company," a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century, and "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. He wrote the libretto for the musical, which has music by Mark Mulcahy. " Slug Bearers" was originally produced in 2004 at The Kitchen in New York. The work will appear Off Broadway in January 2008 at the Vineyard Theatre, directed by Bob McGrath, with choreography by John Carrafa.

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

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)

References

External links

* [http://www.katchor.com/ Homepage]
* [http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/katchor.html Author page at Random House]
* [http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/search/KATCHOR.html Comics Research Bibliography page on Ben Katchor] accessed June 12. 2006
* [http://lambiek.net/artists/k/katchor.htm Ben Katchor profile] at Lambiek
* [http://www.slate.com/id/3733/entry/24714/ Katchor's "electronic journal" on Slate.com]
* [http://www.bangonacan.org/carboncopy.html Bang on a Can Presents "The Carbon Copy Building"]
* [http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/1/show-slug-bearers.htm Vineyard Theatre presents "The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island"]