Ben Katchor
Ben Katchor (born November 19, 1951) is an American cartoonist and illustrator best known for the comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He has contributed comics and drawings to The Forward, The New Yorker, Metropolis, and weekly newspapers in the United States. A Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Katchor was described by author Michael Chabon as "the creator of the last great American comic strip."[1]
Ben Katchor
Benjamin Katchor
19 November 1951
New York City, U.S.
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1995
MacArthur Fellowship, 2000
Career[edit]
Cartooning[edit]
Katchor contributed occasional illustrations while on staff for The Kingsman, the student newspaper of Brooklyn College, and he was an early contributor to RAW. He edited and published two issues of Picture Story, which featured his own work, with articles and stories by Peter Blegvad, Jerry Moriarty, Mark Beyer and Martin Millard.
In 1993, Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by Lawrence Weschler in The New Yorker[2] and an extended essay by John Crowley in The Yale Review (1998).
His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese.
Katchor wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" for Slate in 1997,[3] he contributed articles to the now-defunct Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress, did illustrations for the New Yorker and occasionally The New York Times Book Review.
Katchor was the guest editor of the 2017 edition of Best American Comics.
Awards[edit]
Katchor won an Obie Award for his collaboration with Bang on a Can on The Carbon Copy Building, a "comic book opera" based on his writings and drawings that premiered in 1999. The same year, he was the subject of Pleasures of Urban Decay, a documentary by the San Francisco filmmaker Samuel Ball. The first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Katchor has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.