What can I say? Quintessential Katchor.

In an interview I read he once said he had to get away from Julius Knipl character as he was beginning to assert himself too much, but Katchor himself will never break out of the seedy, sooty, urban core he's so brilliantly constructed…the postwar Brooklyn of second-floor, drayage and dry goods offices filled, one by one, with lonely men and their dried-up dreams.

"A poor turnout for the funeral of the internationally renowned hair tamer, Professor Domby Fecol."

"Kuros Vander, noted antique dealer, age 69, died last night of complications following a severe bout of disillusionment."

"The developer, Joseph Potch, assured of the numerical odds of failure, kisses his third wife good night."

Hand-Drying in America, Katchor's recent, full-color paean to the built environment, is a wonder, but his world's joyfully bleak, off-center roots will always be found in the Knipl strips.

Cannot highly enough recommend.

- read back-to-back with Katchor's other collection (entitled 'Stories'), these odd cartoons are just as entertaining, although two books in a row might be too much of a good thing.
- a very unique comic style

This is very surreal; the art is excellent but the stories are more snapshots of the town and its inhabitants. Funny, but difficult to read more than a few pages at a time.

More great strips; New York Jewish dada.

Like the proprietor of Sensum's Symmetry Shop, in the Beauty District of the unnamed metropolitan area where puddle maps are sold and Julius Knipl reportedly photographs real estate, Ben Katchor himself is a "humble facilitator of felicitous accidents" - he creates odd juxtapositions of image and text, that tease the eye with familiarity but turn out in the end to be utterly strange and new.

I've already read (and been amazed by) Katchor's earlier Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, so the shock of the new was somewhat muted in this volume from 2000, but I still very much liked being led into Knipl's world again.

I just LOVE Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and have since I first encountered it in the Chicago Reader in the early 90s. This is the most literary comic strip on Earth while still remaining accessible, funny, heartwarming, and genuinely devoid of pretense.

This book hit several of my most potent literary sweet spots: American Jews; fantasy versions of New York City; illuminations of the forgotten, the almost-real and the generally out-of-the-way. It has been a long time since I wanted so badly to live in the world created by a particular work of art.

I liked this book a lot and it was a pleasure to read. Like the funny, ironic, surreal city that Julius Knipl inhabits, the book needn't be explored linearly, and pages can be revisited because it's not a necessarily a single idea or punchline that makes the comics funny but rather a lot of detailed artwork and mind-bending mix of funny situations, caricatured characters, and ironic urban planning. Most of the comics are independent one-pagers, but some are 2-3 pages, and the last one is more of proper chapter. Several characters, especially Julius Knipl, and the strange mood tie the independent parts together. This book definitely makes me want to read other works by Ben Katchor.

Fun to re-read in light of seeing The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island (which was not so much successful as a musical, but, when charming, was charming in Katchor's typical way). The long piece at the end of this collection is particularly fine, intertwining aesthetics, dwindling concert attendance, olive jar design, trash-picking, and the difficulties of contemporary music.

like a subtler, gentler welcome to nightvale.

This reminds me of a fictional "Mezzanine" except that it's interesting and engaging. BSD takes some bizzare premise, but then explores it minutely and with a bizzare logic that makes these one page stories some of the most compelling and creative comics I've read in years.

They are prose dense and the captions and word balloons are sometimes not-complimentary in a given panel, so it actually takes a little practice to be able to read these pieces effectively, but the effort is worth it.