Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories

these haunting stories are a notch above the first julius knipl book. one can only wonder where katchor is taking us with this series. his comic stories bounce around between the panels and the reader is forced to create other stories that are only hinted at on the page. it's totally beautiful. great book for anyone into old new york, american yiddishkeit, or gorgeous comics.

It's like a hilarious dream that makes perfect sense but you can't explain it, and it permeates your whole day. You have to put the book down and stare into space every little chunk or so. It's rich. I can't explain it. There's probably a German word for it.

I lived in New York between 1986 and 1989. Knipl's city is that city as much as it is the "Depression Era" city of a reader below's father. Katchor manages to draw timeless landscapes, give voice to people who are eternally present and asks us to dwell on topics that we would ordinarily focus on only in passing, if at all.Perhaps those who find his strip tiresome and/or irritating are those people who never think about what happens to calendar salesmen in February and simply don't care when given the opportunity. NPR was forced to stop broadcasting "Julius Knipl" because of an avalanche of complaints from the listening audience.If you have no use for or interest in the humanity that lives and works beyond the numbered avenues that are considered so important that they had to be given names too, then this book is not for you.

This is just about my favorite book. I read the review in the New York Times, which was a rave. I went out and bought it, struggled with the panels at first, but once I got the hang of how to read the narrative along with the inter-woven dialogue, I was simply entranced. Katchor's world is the world I imagine my father grew up in -- the big noisy depression-era city. Katchor has an almost surreal ability to see how unrelated events and moments are connected. Each page is a wonderfully crafted short story, and each panel drawing is packed with humor and nuance, almost as if it were itself drawn by one of Katchor's fallen characters.