Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor, born on November 19, 1951, is an American cartoonist and illustrator. He is best known for his comic strip titled Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Katchor has shared his comics and drawings in well-known publications such as The Forward, The New Yorker, Metropolis, and various weekly newspapers across the United States.

Katchor's work has earned him prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Author Michael Chabon praised him, calling him "the creator of the last great American comic strip." His unique style and storytelling continue to make him an important figure in the world of comics and illustration.

Career

Ben Katchor is an American cartoonist and illustrator. He began his career by contributing illustrations to The Kingsman, the student newspaper of Brooklyn College, and was an early contributor to RAW.

In 1993, he was featured in The New Yorker, and his work has been translated into several languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Katchor has also written and illustrated for Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. He served as the guest editor of the 2017 edition of Best American Comics.

Katchor created several comic strips, including Julius Knipl, which imagines a fictional New York City, and The Cardboard Valise, which follows the adventures of a traveler named Emile Delilah. Other strips include Hotel & Farm, Shoehorn Technique, and a series for [Metropolis]( magazine about architecture and city design. He also wrote works of musical theater and has been a professor at Parsons The New School since 2007, where he gives illustrated lectures and runs a symposium for studying comics and picture stories.

Awards

Ben Katchor received an Obie Award for working with Bang on a Can on The Carbon Copy Building, a special "comic book opera" that first showed in 1999. That same year, a documentary about him called Pleasures of Urban Decay was made by a filmmaker from San Francisco. Katchor was the first cartoonist to earn a MacArthur Fellowship. He also got a Guggenheim Fellowship and became a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.