About this item
The classic graphic novel by the landmark cartoonist is back in print for its twenty-fifth anniversaryCheap 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.
About the Author
Ben Katchor's picture-stories and drawings have appeared in the Forward, Metropolis Magazine, and The New Yorker. His weekly strips include: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Jew of New York, The Cardboard Valise, Hotel & Farm and most recently Shoehorn Technique. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, was a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Katchor's libretto and drawings for The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with Bang on a Can, received an Obie Award for Best New American Work.More recently, he has collaborated with musician Mark Mulcahy on "The Rosenbach Company," a sung-through musical biography of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century, "The Slugbearers of Kayrol Island," which won an Obie Award in 2008, "A Checkroom Romance," a love story about the culture and architecture of the coat-check room and most recently, "Up From the Stacks," the story of a page retrieving books from the stacks of The New York Public c. 1970.He is an Associate Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City.For more information visit www.katchor.com
