Cheap Novelties The Pleasures of Urban Decay

by Katchor, Ben

• ISBN13: 9781770462632
• ISBN10: 1770462635
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-09-27
• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly

Summary

The classic graphic novel by the landmark cartoonist is back in print for its twenty-fifth anniversary

Cheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchor's extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city--an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor's signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago.

In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius. Drawn & Quarterly's twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover.

Author Biography

Ben Katchor is the cartoonist of Hand-Drying in America, The Jew of New York, The Beauty Supply District, and The Cardboard Valise. He has received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Katchor has created comics for The Forward, Metropolismagazine, and The New Yorker.

Katchor has collaborated on works of musical theater with the composer Mark Mulcahy and he is the only cartoonist to have won an Obie. His TED Talk is titled "Comics of Bygone New York."

Katchor lives in New York, where he is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design.