BIOGRAPHY:

"The drawings were so warm, so passionate and so evocative of the New York City I remembered from my youth that I kept returning to them. In time, I was able to give myself over to the strip's peculiar enchantment and enter into its chiaroscuro metropolis. Now, after years of peregrinating with Knipl in search of vanished places and forgotten dreams, I'm convinced that his creator, Ben Katchor, is the most poetic, deeply layered artist ever to draw a comic strip."
Edward Sorel, New York Times

Ben Katchor (1951- ) was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and originally trained as a painter and ran his own typesetting business before making his reputation as the creator of his Picture Stories (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise and Hotel & Farm) which have been appearing in newspapers and magazines since 1988 (including RAW, Escape, The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Forward). He names his main sources of inspiration as Steve Ditko ("I stopped reading comics the day Steve Ditko stopped drawing Spider-Man") and the 17th century painter, Nicolas Poussin. He also produces a monthly strip for Metropolis magazine as well as teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

In 2000 he was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award $500,000 Genius Grant, an award aimed at gifted but largely unrecognized talents. This financial freedom has allowed him to explore the world of musical theater, resulting in him writing the libretto for the opera The Carbon Copy Building. He has also been awarded the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 1994 was named Best Cartoonist by New York Magazine. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, a school teacher.

Interviews:
The Morning News (2004)
Identity Theory (2000)
Random House (2000)
Jvibe (2000)

Resources:
Katchor.com
Ben Katchor at Pantheon
Ben Katchor at Metropolis Mag.com
Julius Knipl Radio Show

Reviews:
Indy Magazine: The Jew Of New York
The Nation: Walker In The Imagined City
The National Post: Beauty Supply District

The Beauty Supply District
Pantheon, 2000
Join Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, on a leisurely stroll past The Institute for Soup-Nut Research and The Municipal Birthmark Registry. Savor the smell of a phone booth, circa 1961. Sign up for a guided tour of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America. Attend a championship grave digging competition, or should you feel you've wasted yet another day, you can check in for help at a local Misspent Youth Center. Named by The Comics Journal as one of the best comics of 2000.

"Mr. Katchor captures not only the poignancy of lives that have fallen short of expectation, but also the poetry of those seemingly inconsequential lives, sunk in the everydayness of ritual, routine and habit. [Katchor] has written a funny, touching and compassionate ode to the city and the anonymous people who live there."
New York Times

The Jew Of New York
Pantheon, 1998
In 1825, Mordecai Noah, a New York politician and amateur playwright possessed of a utopian vision, summoned all the lost tribes of Israel to an island near Buffalo in the hope of establishing a Jewish state. His plan failed, a mere footnote in Jewish-American history, but this authentic historical figure is shanghaied by Ben Katchor into an irreverent and fictional story that unfolds on the streets of New York a few years later. A disgraced kosher slaughterer, an importer of religious articles and women's hosiery, a pilgrim peddling soil from the Holy land, a latter-day Kabbalist, a man who plans to carbonate Lake Eire - these are just some of the characters who move through Katchor's universe, their lives interwoven in a common struggle to settle into the New World even as it erupts into a financial frenzy that could as easily leave them bankrupt as carry them into the future.

"The Jew of New York is a rich, heaping, and delicious meal, and the only proper response, really, is thank you."
1998 Books Of The Year, The Comics Journal #211

The Beauty Supply District (2000)
The Jew Of New York (1998)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (1996)
Cheap Novelties : The Pleasure of Urban Decay (1991)