BOOK
Cartoonist Ben Katchor relishes the details of big-city life, dissecting storefronts, all-night coffee shops, and merchandise districts until they take on a mystic aura.
In his latest collection, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District, Katchor's characters are defined by the urban minutiae that obsess them. One man compulsively calculates the velocity of tap water and seeks compatriots for water-drinking rituals. Another arranges sightseeing tours of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America.
The lone exception to this detail-oriented cast is Julius Knipl, a middle-aged everyman who is barely discernible amid the city's potato-shaped populace. Knipl spends the majority of his time doing nothing more than listening to the bizarre, impassioned monologues of his acquaintances.
Reducing his title character to a bystander is just one way Katchor subverts the obvious; he structures the book toward the same end. The bulk of Beauty Supply District consists of reprints of cartoons published between 1994 and 1999. He places the title story, the book's longest single section, in the final 24 pages - upsetting the relationship between main event and afterthought.
Katchor's storytelling style reflects the market where he made his name: alternative weeklies whose urban readers tend to appreciate absurdism and nonlinear storytelling. So it's not surprising that Knipl never visits the Beauty Supply District. He does, however, attend a concert with former district denizens, at which the music is produced by a mechanical tongue lapping at bowls of cream. There he accidentally inseminates the woman sitting in front of him. Later, he eats olives from a jar that was designed in the district, though he never realizes this.
I finally came to understand, through the strip's series of flashbacks and digressions, that this defunct neighborhood existed for a reason: Artists and designers visited when they were struggling with their craft, and the wise old shopkeepers helped them restore aesthetic balance to their work.
Katchor uses gray wash and irregular black lines to create a smudged, decrepit universe, a world that belongs in the remainder bin. After reading Beauty Supply District, I found myself noticing phrases on street signs and in old storefronts that had that self-contradictory, Knipl-like quality. Katchor's characters are right: You can find meaning in a world of factory seconds.
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor: $22. Pantheon Books: (800) 726 0600, www.pantheonbooks.com.
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Buck Stops Here
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