Julius Knipl - Real Estate Photographer - Ben Katchor

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Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer was a weekly comic strip written and drawn by Ben Katchor from 1988 to 1998. It was first published in the New York Press and subsequently self-syndicated to various alternative weeklynewspapers including The Washington DC City Paper, Chicago NewCity, Philadelphia City Paper,San Francisco Weekly, The Forward (English-language), The Village Voice and others.

Katchor embodies his love of the fading small-business community in an imaginary East Coast city in the title character, a small businessman who wanders the streets taking pictures and being sidetracked into surreal escapades. Strips often depict Knipl's chance encounters with obscure, marginal businesses (e.g. a company that distributes newspaper weights to newsstands), eccentric hobbyists, and enigmatic details of the urban landscape. There is rarely continuity between the strips, and Knipl is the only recurring character.

Julius Knipl, the rumpled antihero of Ben Katchor's cult cartoon strip, comes alive in this all-new collection of strange and strangely absorbing urban adventures. The Knipl stories collected here resurrect a lost metropolis and its residents, summoning up half-forgotten yesterdays and celebrating the surreal substrate of the quotidien.

Amazon.com Review

Ben Katchor's dreamscape is peopled by transistor radio listeners, door-knob triers, false eyebrow importers, and a late-night-perambulating real estate photographer named Julius Knipl. The vaguely melancholy stories in his eight-panel comic strips reflect a fondness for the forgotten, the obscure, and the merely overlooked. What happens to the city's wholesale calendar salesmen in February? Who buys last year's tinned seedless grapes? Katchor's shadowed line drawings of a gray metropolis evoke musty smells, the shuffling steps of retirees, and a proliferating autumnal chill. Readers who enjoy his work in their local weekly papers, as well as NPR listeners who have been held captive by the "Knipl Radio-Cartoons" will be glad to linger a little longer in the dream life of Katchor's world.

Review

[A]fter 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 ... sort of a Max Beckman with dialogue balloons.... Mr. Katchor should take comfort and a great deal of pride in knowing that he has created perhaps the most original comic strip since ... "Krazy Kat" more than 80 years ago. -- The New York Times Book Review, Edward Sorel