Ben Katchor

The Cardboard Valise by Ben Katchor is bizarre and very funny, while being a scathing commentary on the obsessions, priorities and carelessness of our modern world. It's a surreal, or maybe all too real, travelogue to imagined places like Tensint Island, the home of ancient restroom ruins that have become a popular tourist attraction. Emile Delilah, a xenophile, is our main tour guide, although there are others.

Thanks to his (Katchor's) imagination, there are laughs and twisted recognition show more on every page. Some reference works we encounter along the way: The Marrowbone Backseat Bible of Contraceptive Techniques, The Marrowbone Directory of Commonly Dialed Wrong Numbers, The Marrowbone Desk Reference To Nauseating Food Combinations. Whole philosophies are built on everyday objects like orthopedic shoes. He spotlights fixations on the importance of urban detritus that we take for granted and probably don't even notice anymore. At the end the reader may realize we're surrounded by mystery and absurdity and odd, accepted choices, and that much of it is very amusing if we pay enough attention. show less

Guest editor Ben Katchor has terrible taste. This is the worst volume I have read in this series.

There are maybe three dozen pages in this 400 page brick that are worth reading. Kudos (and exemption from the one-star rating) go to Joe Sacco, Bjorn Miner, Eli Valley, Sam Alden and Bill Griffith. Everything else suffered from illegible lettering, horrible art, gibberish writing and/or pure crappiness.

I think this volume makes a good case for having a committee choosing the entries so there is show more more of a check on what goes into the book. When the majority of the entries presented are outliers, one has to wonder if the mission statement implied by use of the word "best" has been discarded in order to create a showcase exclusively for the avant garde regardless of the quality of the work. There might be a real truth-in-advertising violation going on here. show less

Time for a naysayer to enter this wall-to-wall palace of 5-star reviews.

To me, reading Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer is a slog. And a slog is the opposite of what the comics medium should deliver.

Comics - with its combination of words and pictures - allows writers the ability to convey information in a way that is far more efficient and readable than prose text. See: Scott McCloud's excellent book on the subject.

Ben Katchor chooses not to use this potential. He instead opts to make show more the reading experience more taxing than it ought to be.

These Julius Knipl stories are over-written, and and told in deliberately reader unfriendly ways. My biggest irk is the constant use of both narration captions and speech balloons in almost every single panel of the comics. By doing this, Katchor provides his readers with more information than they can absorb at once, forcing them to read and re-read the comic multiple times until they understand what is happening on each of the three layers of narration, dialogue and artwork.

The problem is that Katchor writes his narration and dialogue so that they clash with each other, rather than feed into each other. Masterful works like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home show how comics writers can seamlessly combine the full gamut of narrative and dialogue tools, provided that they are employed with the reader in mind. Katchor seems to write with himself in mind, or anyone else who has a spare couple of minutes to reread the comic and unpick the logic of each strip.

To understand what I mean, read the strip "The Impresario of Human Drudgery" on page 49 of this book: a rare example of a Julius Knipl comic that is told primarily through dialogue, without the narration constantly derailing the reader's attention. Notice how easy and pleasurable that strip is to read! It is a rare contrast to the heavy-handed writing of most Julius Knipl comics. Why couldn't more strips have been written in this light-handed way?

In conclusion: I love the artwork, I love the style, and I usually love the underlying jokes. But I hate the execution.

Then again, the people who love Julius Knipl seem to delight in their dense, cerebral style. So maybe I'm missing the point altogether.

PS: please note that this book is a collection of 89 one-page 'Sunday'-style comics, with an additional 17-page storyline tacked on the end. Despite some readers listing it in their lists of 'favourite graphic novels', this is not a graphic novel. show less

One review I read criticized the book by calling it a "book of ideas." Yes, exactly! And not your run-of-the-mill ideas either. I found it very inventive, original, thought-provoking, and culturally/historically accurate. That's a lot to pull off in less than 100 pages--and pages that are largely taken up by drawings. Pictures do say 1,000 words. Another reviewer noted that you have to know something about Jewish stereotypes in the 1820s to understand this book. I'm a black African female show more living in 21st century America, and I had no difficulty understanding the stereotypes or warped values behind them. Maybe it would be safer to say that you need to have been the victim of some type of stereotype in your lifetime. But I have to think that most people who would even pick up this sort of book, would be literate enough to know that the stereotypes depicted, are exactly that. I even disagree with readers who say that the page layouts were difficult to read. I think if you have ever read sequential art, it's pretty straight-forward. And if you haven't, the process of figuring it out--and it really does become intuitive very quickly--adds to the telling. You *do* find the significance of certain details by kind of puzzling over the images and layout. So I guess if you need hand-holding narratives, then this probably isn't the book for you. But this is the first work by Katchor that I've read, and I am very impressed by his ability to say so much in so few words about capitalism, nature conservancy, race relations, religiosity, sexuality, theatre, etc. and how these things comprise /conflict with "progress" and the belief every age has that it is the epitomy of advanced human development.

I first heard of Katchtor when reading The Narrative Corpse, a story told by 69 artists and edited by [author: Art Spiegelman]. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who had a negative reaction to that book, had similar comments that the "story," as such, wasn't linear, etc. But again, I feel like those readers really missed the point. If you're not so hung up on context, The Narrative Corpse is another that you might enjoy, though the two books couldn't be more dissimilar. show less