Synopses & Reviews
Dumpy, middle-aged Julius Knipl wanders the city's forgotten boulevards, photographing buildings and pondering the quirky minutiae and overlooked detritus of urban life: the reflections in freshly glazed cheese danish; the distant clanking of an underground metal-stamping factory; the distinct odor of bottles floating in the dark. The Knipl stories collected here some a single strip, some many pages long, and most never before published resurrect a last metropolis and its residents, summoning up half-forgotten yesterdays and celebrating the surreal substrate of the quotidien.
Review
"[Katchor] has written a funny, touching and compassionate ode to the city and the anonymous people who live there." The New York Times
Review
"I'm convinced that...Ben Katchor is the most poetic, deeply layered artist ever to draw a comic strip." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Katchor...has been doing for comics what Proust did for the novel." The New Yorker
About the Author
Ben Katchor's
Julius Knipl comic strips appear weekly in newspapers across the county. Radio sketches based on the strip, starring Jerry Stiller, have been featured on NPR's
Weekend Edition. The author of one previous collection of Knipl cartoons,
Cheap Novelties, he lives in New York City.
Michael Chabon is the author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Wonder Boys.