Surreal Estate:
Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl

On a cold Wednesday evening in late January, Ben Katchor stood at a podium before a few dozen people in the Proshansky Auditorium of the City University of New York, and read aloud a few entries from a 1960 edition of the Chicago Yellow Pages. “Artificial Flowers and Plants,” he began, in a somewhat gravelly deadpan. “Ionian, Illinois Trading Corporation, Importers of Polyethylene: Completely Washable Flowers and Foliage; They Look Real, They Smell Real. Lee Schubert Floral Arrangements: Trees, Hedges, Any size, Any shape; Nature's Plant and Floral Beauty Reproduced; Free Estimates.

“Coin Changing Devices," he continued. "Meyer and Wenthe Incorporated: Official Money Changers; Multiple Tubes; Any Throw Arrangements; Slug Rejecters.” This only lasted a minute or two, and then it was back to what Katchor had already been doing for the last half hour or so: A slide presentation of episodes from his long-running comic strip, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer,” accompanied by audio tapes of some Knipl radio dramatizations produced for NPR a couple of years back. In that context, the recitation made perfect sense-it was as oddly evocative and amusing as the fictional world that Knipl inhabits.

A schlumpy, middle-aged fellow in baggy suit and a derby, Knipl first appeared in an alternative weekly called The New York Press in April 1988. More or less from the start, he was less a protagonist than an organizing device for Katchor to build a fascinating city around: an ink wash collection of obscure neighborhoods in an unnamed place that is not quite New York at an unspecified time that is not quite the present. The strip now appears in the Forward, New York-based Jewish weekly, and in about a dozen alternative papers around the country. Little, Brown has published two collections, Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (1991) and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories. (1996).

By now Katchor has fashioned a whole world, one that is invariably described by listing its delightful details. There is a Public Directory of the Alimentary Canal, featuring two-line summations of the gastrointestinal condition of every citizen. There are men who take work as licensed expectorators, or moving heavy objects short distances without the benefit of a hand-truck. There is the Siren Query Brigade, which will explain, by phone, the ambulance alarm that just passed your window. There are buildings, like the Verile-Hinge, that will provide your business with a fake prestigious address for a monthly fee. There is Hoyvel's Coconut, an all-night tropical drink stand in the cheap merchandise district. There are public mustard fountains. Finally, there is Knipl, a rumbled observer who remembers, watches, and speculates as he goes about his work-and who will go way uptown to find a place that still sells Grepz, a defunct soda brand.

In other words, the things that surround Knipl usually seem both unlikely and difficult to explain. But then, so is Meyer and Wenthe Incorporated: Official Money Changers.

* * * * *

Katchor can be a bit elusive himself. He's 45, though he looks about 10 years younger. He discusses his work in the subdued, distracted style of a man discussing things well beyond his ability to explain, let alone control. At times, his sandpapery New York voice drops almost to a whisper. The phrase “I don't know” becomes more and more prominent. The closest he will come to defining “Julius Knipl” to a hypothetical first-time reader is to suggest that it simply doesn't need to be defined. “One great thing about it being a comic strip,” he says, “is people think it's very obvious. I want them to approach it as though they know they'll understand it. If you tell them it's more complicated-'You have to read it a few times' — then they won't read it. So I never tell people anything other than, 'It's a comic strip.' And they come to it very certain that they'll know how to read it. And they do know.”

For most of the past 15 years, Katchor has lived in an office building in New York's financial district, a neighborhood of narrow streets that are crowded by day and empty by night. His two-room apartment, which has also functioned as his studio, resembles a Knipl set, cluttered with books and magazines and newspapers like The Encyclopedia of Aberrations, the AIA Guide to New York City, Harkavy's Complete English-Jewish and Jewish-English Dictionary, old issues of The American Mercury. He happens to be in the process of moving from here to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so the usual assortment of peculiar objects (most notably his collection of British matchboxes) are packed away. On the 10-minute walk from here to the Delphi Restaurant, a standard-issue Greek diner, he still speaks softly, but a bit more easily, as he points out particular buildings, chats about New York coop laws, and mentions the certain Laundromat odor he's noticed a lot of his new neighborhood uptown.

But although Katchor has been praised by the likes of Luc Sante and The New Yorker, when the conversation swings back to his work, he resumes the air of a man who is perhaps surprised to have found stumbled on an ideal creative vehicle, let alone an audience for it. This is understandable: Ten years ago, he was a small businessman who dabbled with the comics form, but hardly expected to make a living at it. As an adolescent in Brooklyn he'd read comics a great deal-favoring Spider-Man, more for Steve Ditko's art than for the stories-and went on to study painting and drawing at Brooklyn College and New York's School of Visual Arts. In 1978, “I did this thing Picture Story,” consisting of comics by Katchor and a few friends. “Kind of a fanzine,” he says. “It went out into whatever the world was then of comic stores . . . and completely disappeared.”

At about the same time, he and two friends started a typesetting business, printing menus and the like. Katchor had essentially given up on the idea of doing comics at all when he received a call from a stranger named Art Spiegelman. “He said, 'I saw this thing [meaning Picture Story]. I'm starting this magazine [meaning Raw]. How come you never contributed to underground comics?” says Katchor, who still seems vaguely amazed the Spiegelman happened across Picture Story. “He was probably the only person who bothered to read it.”

For the next ten years or so, Katchor became a Raw regular, producing long, complex stories that play out in a Knipl-like atmosphere. He did a second issue of Picture Story in 1986. Other than that, he says, “I didn't have a reason to produce much work.” Then, with the 1988 launch of the New York Press, he got a chance to do a weekly strip, and Knipl (a name that derives from a Yiddish word than can be roughly translated as “nest egg” ) was hatched. Each week he would tell a short, self-contained tale in essentially the same style he had always used: elliptical captions, sparse dialogue, noir-ish ink wash images. At the beginning, at least, most of these tiny tales involved the real estate photographer named in the title. “That was the one concession to a weekly strip,” Katchor says of the first recurring character he had ever created. “It would have the same name every week

“I wanted to take these two fields of business-photography and real estate-that had all these powerful connotations, put them together in this pathetic job, that had neither connotations of money nor power,” he continues. “But I decided not to make it a continuing story, so you don't have to know what went on before. It meets the reader halfway. Before, when I did longer strips, people found them very hard to read. There's an advantage to this shortness. Even if it's dense, people can take it in, in one sitting.”

Even a cursory look at the two anthologies makes it clear how much more ambitious Katchor has gotten with the single-strip form. The Knipl character appears now only when needed. And the episodes grew more complex, around the time the strip jumped to The Village Voice, which printed it larger. “I started feeling that I could put more information into each drawing. Sometimes, with the early strips, the whole strip was one sentence. I sort of slowed it down.” (The move to Forward came about a year ago, when the Voice began paring back on comics; Jules Feiffer is currently its only regular cartoonist.) Now each strip weaves together as many as three apparently separately narrative ideas in eight panels, all evoking one . . . feeling.

That, really, is what Knipl comes down to: a feeling.It isn't exactly nostalgia, at least not in the sense of a lament for some better time. “It has to do with that pleasure of retrospection, it doesn't matter what it's about,” Katchor says. “It's not that things were more well-designed once than they are. No. I think you can have nostalgia about something very ugly. In fact, there's a sleazy business of nostalgia now, that's not even real nostalgia-phony memories of what things might have been like, or cleaned-up versions. Doing period movies, I mean, all this Merchant-Ivory about a nostalgic world. People are sick of that. It's like going to an antique store. The past didn't look like an antique store."

That feeling also isn't — as so many observers have tried to argue — tied to New York City per se. “People read it in Iowa City,” Katchor points out. “It's in a paper there. Maybe they've never been to New York or a city like New York. I mean they know this symbol — this mythological symbol. I don't know, they maybe get more out of it.

“I don't know,” Katchor says again. “I'm the last person to know how to read it.”

* * * * *

Whatever it is that defines Katchor's work in general, and Knipl in particular, he has without question found an audience that's quietly growing. In fall, 1988, Pantheon will publish another a collection of strips called "The Jew of New York" that Katchor drew for Forward a couple of years back. A continuing story that ran for a year (and will supplemented by another 50 or so installments of new material) in that paper, it's set in New York in the 1830s, following a series of events set in motion by a man who wanted to set up a national Jewish homeland in Niagra Falls. (Pantheon will also publish the next Knipl collection in about two years.)

Knipl, interestingly, briefly found another outlet on radio. About thirteen adaptations of Knipl episodes were produced by National Public Radio, by a cast that included Jerry Stiller as Knipl, and Katchor himself as the perfect weary-voiced narrator. "I enjoyed it, yeah. They're very different. Funnier, in a certain way. More burlesque, maybe, than the strip. If they were done more in the spirit of the strip they would've been incredibly . . . slow. So they had to be done this way." These productions have resurfaced in another surprising Katchor sideline-lecturing. He worked up two presentations for specific speaking requests, and has now given them for college students, urban planning experts, and the like. He uses the radio tapes as part of a lecture called “The Wonders of Salvage,” the talk he did at CUNY this past January.

Meanwhile, he has no plan to give up the weekly strip, and in fact seems to relish its primary venue-free weekly newspapers. “It's sort of there, like a public utility,” he says. “You don't have to go to a special place to see it. You don't have to go to a gallery, even a bookstore. It's just laying there at the front of your local delicatessen. Just pick it up. That's a great thing. It creeps into your consciousness.”

On some fundamental level, much of Katchor's work derives precisely from this interest in things for which a casual observer might find little use-like an out-of-date directory from another part of the country. ("Someone sent me some old Chicago phone books, from the sixties," he explained during a conversation about his CUNY lecture, "and I read them. For weeks that was my bedtime reading. I haven't finished them yet. They're fascinating.") What Katchor does is not just find what is fascinating in such things, but extract it, twist it, fictionalize it, and make it just as fascinating to his readers. After a while, a world that contains things like the Verile-Hinge Building, Hoyvel's Coconut, and the occasional mustard fountain, becomes addictive in its perfect absurdity; after a while, those absurdities seem to creep not only into your consciousness, but into the actual world around you. And, eventually, you find yourself in the Proshansky Auditorium listening to a cartoonist read from the Yellow Pages. And then you start to wonder.

This story appeared in the Spring 1998 issue of World Art.