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| Ben Katchor | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Benjamin Katchor 19 November 1951 New York City, U.S. |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist |
Notable works | Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, 1995 MacArthur Fellowship, 2000 |
| www | |
Ben Katchor (born November 19, 1951) is an Americancartoonist andillustrator best known for thecomic stripJulius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He has contributed comics and drawings toThe Forward,The New Yorker,Metropolis, and weekly newspapers in the United States. AGuggenheim Fellowship andMacArthur Fellowship recipient, Katchor was described by authorMichael Chabon as "the creator of the last great American comic strip."[1]
Katchor contributed occasional illustrations while on staff forThe Kingsman, the student newspaper ofBrooklyn College, and he was an early contributor toRAW. He edited and published two issues ofPicture Story, which featured his own work, with articles and stories byPeter Blegvad,Jerry Moriarty, Mark Beyer and Martin Millard.
In 1993, Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile byLawrence Weschler inThe New Yorker[2] and an extended essay byJohn Crowley inThe Yale Review (1998).
His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese.[citation needed]
Katchor wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" forSlate in 1997,[3] he contributed articles to the now-defunctCivilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress, did illustrations for theNew Yorker and occasionallyThe New York Times Book Review.
Katchor was the guest editor of the 2017 edition ofBest American Comics.
Katchor has written several works ofmusical theater, includingThe Rosenbach Company (a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century);The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower, an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island;A Checkroom Romance, about the culture and architecture of coat-checkrooms, andUp From the Stacks, about a page working the stacks of the New York Public Library c.1970. All feature music byMark Mulcahy.In 1999, he collaborated with Bang on a Can on an opera entitled,The Carbon Copy Building.
Katchor has been an associate professor at Parsons The New School since 2007.[4]He gives "illustrated lectures" at colleges and museums accompanied byslide projections of his work. Since 2012 he has run theNew York Comics & Picture-story Symposium, a weekly symposium for the study of text-image work.
Katchor won anObie Award for his collaboration withBang on a Can onThe Carbon Copy Building, a "comic bookopera" based on his writings and drawings that premiered in 1999. The same year, he was the subject ofPleasures of Urban Decay, adocumentary by theSan Francisco filmmaker Samuel Ball. The first cartoonist to receive aMacArthur Fellowship, Katchor has also received aGuggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of theAmerican Academy in Berlin.[citation needed]
