Here are a few of the businesses located around the corner from cartoonist Ben Katchor's Manhattan apartment: Donut Connection, Lucky Star Grocery Candy, World of Wireless, Buddha Inc. Laundromat, Anita Nail, Uneeda Check Cashing. Katchor can see most of these colourful shops from his window.
But the local building he's more fascinated with is a couple of blocks farther down Broadway.
Strolling around his Upper West Side neighbourhood, Katchor pauses in front of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, its shabby Roman façade defaced by a makeshift entranceway and cloudy Plexiglas. "This seems like a very mysterious business," he muses, peering inside. "You can see there's a person sitting at the desk . . . a flowerpot . . . "
Katchor has never actually gone in, and standing out front, his face betrays bemusement and longing, as though he were a dazed graduate student who's found himself locked out of the library. "Sometimes you'll walk by here at night," he says, "and in the upstairs window, you'll see a man walking around in his undershirt."
The Ukrainian Academy's nighttime inhabitant may not realize that Katchor's oddly surreal description makes him sound a lot like Julius Knipl, the eponymous "real-estate photographer" of the cartoonist's most celebrated strips -- and not a lot unlike several of Katchor's other characters: donut tycoon Konrad Mannuh, theatre decorator Samson Gergel, sculptor Manny Brellelah.
For that matter, the academy -- an anonymous grey edifice trafficked by infrequent patrons -- wouldn't be out of place in Katchor's imaginary cartoon city, in which live the odd cast of his dreamy comic-book world. Home to the Thycordia Building, the Municipal Birthmark Registry and Blonje's Ambiguity Warehouse, it is a kind of transmogrified New York, part part Hieronymus Bosch, part Martin Scorsese -- a place both everyday and otherworldly.
Katchor will be bringing that imaginary world north tomorrow evening, to the University of Toronto's Innis Town Hall, where he will give a slide show and reading, and screen The Pleasures of Urban Decay, an 18-minute documentary on Katchor by filmmaker Sam Ball.
For two decades, Katchor, 49, has drawn highly evocative, eight-panel comic strips in series with such names as Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise and Hotel & Farm, documenting along the way the ordinary heroism and humour of life in mysterious urban landscapes. Katchor's illustrated narratives -- syndicated in 11 U.S. weeklies and collected in such anthologies as The Beauty Supply District and The Jew of New York -- evoke an Old World America, blending Saul Bellow's streetwise hustle, Horatio Alger's enterprising acumen and Edward Hopper's haunted distance.
In the process, they have turned Katchor into what might be called the Walter Benjamin of the cartoon strip: His hundreds of illustrations, with their tentative construction and black-grey watercolours, suggest a half-recalled memory rather than a literal image.
"With Ben's work, there's no hard-line difference between real life and imagined life," says Françoise Mouly, an art director at The New Yorker magazine. "He's thought of an imagined world for so many years, and it still remains very rich for him. He was able to retain a perception that seemed somewhere between that of a child and an adult who has not become cynical."
Yet Katchor's writing is authoritative and omniscient, giving his imaginary sociology of extremely odd jobs (hair tamer, symmetry shopkeeper, professional expectorator) the plainspoken simplicity of a reference guidebook.
"On the first hot day of the summer," one Knipl strip begins, "Abraham Cuzor, the de facto president of the Metropolitan Tap-Water Runners' Association, inaugurates the club's 105th season . . . His wife's anguished complaints only confirm the importance of his office . . . Cuzor calculates the speed at which the water in his glass had traveled from reservoir to sink . . "
Katchor's strip has a slightly noir sheen, but his influences come more from handbills than from Mickey Spillane. Says Katchor: "I read a lot of utilitarian prose, not art prose -- but there's poetry found in the prose of an ingredients list or the prose of a label or the prose of a catalogue or the text on a bus transfer, things like that."
Katchor grew up in a Jewish section of Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighbourhood with parents who'd made it out of Warsaw before the Second World War. After finishing his studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he became a self-employed typesetter, trading in the kinds of reading matter we're supposed to glance at, ignore or discard: coffee-shop menus, wine lists, labels of canned goods. (The endpapers of The Beauty Supply District feature typeset detritus from products featured throughout the book: a label from a bottle of Normalcy Parfum, a ticket stub from Foyer Hall.)
In the early 1980s, Katchor self-published a zine called Picture Story that caught the attention of cartoonist Art Spiegelman (who is now married to The New Yorker's Mouly). Spiegelman and a colleague, Bill Griffiths, were trying to amass material for the first issue of Raw, which became the seminal underground comics magazine of the 1980s, and Katchor contributed to several issues before he introduced Julius Knipl in 1988.
"I really built my readership through newspapers, not the comic world," Katchor says. "In the comic world, I never had much appeal. But weekly newspapers get picked up by people looking for apartments, or people who want to read listings, or want to read an article, and they'll just happen to read a comic strip."
Not that he doesn't place importance in such an audience. "The reader of a weekly strip is expecting to have a revelation or observation every week, and like any utility, you have to supply it -- just like your phone bill comes every month."
In 1993, Katchor introduced a series for The Forward, an English-language Jewish weekly, called The Jew of New York. The story, set in 1830, combined tales of such eccentrics as Nathan Kishon, who has returned from the frontier to wander Manhattan wrapped in a blanket, and Francis Oriole, president of a soda-water company hoping to carbonate Lake Erie.
"Around that time, the National Yiddish Book Center asked me to design their murals, up in Amherst, Mass., and the photographer Jill Krementz was doing a book of photographs of Jewish authors, and I wound up in that book," he recalls. "All those things happened around the same time, and it looked like I was the most Jewish cartoonist you could be -- in the Jewish paper, doing these murals about Yiddish literature, doing this book called The Jew of New York. But it was sort of an accident of timing."
Accident or no, his peers are awed by his gentle imagination. Chris Ware, author of the comic series Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, simply demurs from trying to describe Katchor's work. "I think I almost revere the man too much," he says, "to say anything substantial about him."
Chip Kidd, the Random House art director who designed the covers of the Pantheon Books anthologies of The Jew of New York and The Beauty Supply District marvels at Katchor's touch: "The writer he reminds me of most is Joseph Mitchell," he says, referring to the legendary New Yorker reporter played by Stanley Tucci in the film Joe Gould's Secret, which came out last year. "He somehow does with cartooning what Mitchell does with words, this wonderful urban archeology. It takes me to another time that I wish I knew but don't."
Katchor might argue that his work is not of another time at all. "I think of it as current -- it takes place in cities that are old, with old buildings. I live in a city that's primarily old; the room I work in is from the 1890s." Not that he's sentimental about the artifacts that comprise urban spaces: "Most of a city is preserved," he offers, "through disuse and neglect."
Although the city is what he knows best, Katchor doesn't shy away from making use of material outside his realm of experience. For Hotel & Farm (which alternates between the two settings), he reads books on agriculture. Lately, he's also been exploring entirely other media: The Carbon-Copy Building, his 1999 opera, had its premiere in Turin with live music by the avant-garde collective Bang on a Can; and he is working on a musical-theatre collaboration with Mark Mulcahy, who led the 1980s college-rock band Miracle Legion.
With so much creative energy, perhaps it is fitting that Katchor was a startled recipient of a $500,000 (U.S.) genius grant by the MacArthur Foundation last year, the first cartoonist to receive the award. "They give it to odd people," Katchor shrugs. "They usually give it to things that aren't publically noted, like the first puppeteer. There are a lot of firsts. Ornette Coleman was the first jazz musician to get one. It's a strange award." Indeed, it's the kind of award that an enterprising character in Julius Knipl might have conceived.
Talk of genius aside, Katchor says he doesn't know what kind of audience to expect in Toronto. Nor does he know exactly what he'll discuss in his talk. Of course, even he agrees that anything could happen: Who knows, maybe when he returns home, waiting in his mailbox will be an invitation for him to lecture, sent by the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ben Katchor appears tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Innis Theatre, 2 Sussex Ave., at the University of Toronto. Admission is free. Todd Pruzan is a writer and editor in New York.