Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Cheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchor's extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city - an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor's signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago. In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius. Drawn & Quarterly's twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover reformatted to Katchor's original vision.

Reviews

Ben Katchor's sublime collectionchronicles the wanderings of Julius Knipl, a rumpled photographer-for-hire taking pictures of buildings in a gently surreal streetscape that vaguely resembles Manhattan's financial district of old. Knipl laments a fading world of dairy cafeterias, tchotchke salesmen and trophy manufacturers. -Wall Street Journal

Author Bio

Ben Katchor lives in New York, where he is an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design-The New School. As director of Parsons' Illustration program, he runs The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium, a weekly lecture series for the study of text-image work. He has been the recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Along with his long-running comic-strip work-Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise, Hotel & Farm, The Jew of New York, and a monthly strip for Metropolis magazine-Katchor has also collaborated with musician Mark Mulcahy on a number of works for musical theatre, including The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, The Rosenbach Company, A Checkroom Romance, and Up From the Stacks.