Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District

Julius Knipl #3

by Ben Katchor

Join Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, on a leisurely stroll past The Institute for Soup-Nut Research and The Municipal Birthmark Registry. Savor the smell of a phone booth, circa 1961. Sign up for a guided tour of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America. Attend a championship grave-digging competition, or, should you feel you've wasted yet another day, you can check in for help at a local Misspent Youth Center.

In "The Beauty Supply District," a new twenty-four-page story, Knipl attends an evening concert and unwittingly enters the world of wholesale empathizers and chiaroscuro brokers who make the decisions critical to the production of aesthetic pleasure in all its forms -- from the shape of an olive jar to the score of a string quartet.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Comic Strips

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Ben Katchor (born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY) is an American cartoonist. His comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer paints an evocative picture of a slightly surreal, historical New York City with a decidedly Yiddish, sensibility. Julius Knipl has been published in several book collections including Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay and The Beauty Supply District. Other serialized comics by Katchor include The Jew Of New York (collected and published in 1998), The Cardboard Valise (2011) and Hotel & Farm (2026). He has also collaborated on music-theater productions with Mark Mulcahy and Bang on a Can.

Reviews

[Rex Hurst]

The extension fallacy is when an arguer takes a statement and exaggerates the parameters so much that it becomes completely ridiculous idea. This perfectly defines the humor in The Beauty Supply District. The strips revolve around the nuances of city life. Much of them are concerned the variances of architecture in a New York City-esque environment. The constant raising and destruction of buildings, as depicted in this book, paints a picture of a city landscape that drifts back and forth like an ocean current, where the occupants try to find stability and meaning in a chaotic ever shifting concrete jungle.

The stories take mundane aspects and illuminate them to ridiculous heights. From tours of a shop that had been vacant since 1964. To a group of men at an office obsessed with their fire extinguisher. To a rich man who owns a private vintage bus and, for kicks, drives along an actual route picking people up. To the longer story of The Beauty Supply District, where many obsessions collide in a bizarre manner.

[Philip Athans]

I just LOVE Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and have since I first encountered it in the Chicago Reader in the early 90s. This is the most literary comic strip on Earth while still remaining accessible, funny, heartwarming, and genuinely devoid of pretense.

[Molly]

like a subtler, gentler welcome to nightvale.

[Helen]

As usual, this is a wonderfully entertaining, whimsical graphic novel -- or, rather, a collection of vignettes/strips that first appeared in newspapers. Katchor seems to have a boundless imagination which is used to obliquely comment on social foibles and ills. This book is a joy to read - the final portion is a more or less stand-alone very funny narrative, all of which represents a wry commentary on an ultra rarefied, aesthetically elite crowd at a concert featuring a unique musical instrument, which must be read to be believed. I've been a Katchor fan for many years - long before I joined GR - and found this volume of his work amusing, insightful, truly a panacea for these dispiriting times. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to laugh, get a break from the seemingly unremittingly grim news of today.

[Drew Canole]

A high-brow weekly comic strip takes the mundane aspects of city living and cranks it up to a near surreal level. For example, one of the better strips is about a store front that has been vacant for a long time. It's a common site in every city, but here it's been so long they do tours of the site!

Another strip has a family living in a high-rise but they always drop food and stuff off the balcony by accident. Our character gets fallen ice-cream on his jacket, but the family pays for his dry-cleaning and invites him up for dinner.

Many of the strips went over my head. I just didn't really understand the point at times.

[Evan Pincus]

Love Katchor's management of scale/scope in these - the way the focus shifts from panel to panel can be truly remarkable, especially in the longer-form stories.

[Frederic]

For me, this collection is not quite as strong as Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer -- but still quite good. I love the immersion and depth of these short stories (most are single-pagers, with a few 2- or 3-page ones and one longer one at the end, the titular "The Beauty Supply District"). Those who love big-city urban life as it used to be before gentrification will appreciate a lot of these, and especially the detail embedded in them.

[Kirsten]

A series of one-page vignettes, some starring Julius Knipl, that take place in a city kind of like NYC, but more surreal. They're apparently set in the modern day, but everyone has a sort of 1950s look to them; the men tend to wear suits and hats, the women all wear dresses and heels. People buy perfume that smells like mundane things. They make maps of mud puddles. They go to bizarre concerts where music is made by a fake tongue lapping at cream. The stories are odd, whimsical, sometimes funny and sometimes oddly touching. Sometimes I found the briefness of each vignette to be a little taxing; I wanted to find out more, I wanted it to expand into a story, but most of them are sort of one-shot deals. The section titled "The Beauty Supply District" tells a story, but it's an odd one, with a lot of intertwined elements. This is a very strange comic collection, and I'm glad I read it, but I need to mull it over more, I think.

[Douglas Gorney]

What can I say? Quintessential Katchor.

In an interview I read he once said he had to get away from Julius Knipl character as he was beginning to assert himself too much, but Katchor himself will never break out of the seedy, sooty, urban core he's so brilliantly constructed…the postwar Brooklyn of second-floor, drayage and dry goods offices filled, one by one, with lonely men and their dried-up dreams.

"A poor turnout for the funeral of the internationally renowned hair tamer, Professor Domby Fecol."

"Kuros Vander, noted antique dealer, age 69, died last night of complications following a severe bout of disillusionment."

"The developer, Joseph Potch, assured of the numerical odds of failure, kisses his third wife good night."

Hand-Drying in America, Katchor's recent, full-color paean to the built environment, is a wonder, but his world's joyfully bleak, off-center roots will always be found in the Knipl strips.

Cannot highly enough recommend.

[Alan]

Like the proprietor of Sensum's Symmetry Shop, in the Beauty District of the unnamed metropolitan area where puddle maps are sold and Julius Knipl reportedly photographs real estate, Ben Katchor himself is a "humble facilitator of felicitous accidents" - he creates odd juxtapositions of image and text, that tease the eye with familiarity but turn out in the end to be utterly strange and new.

I've already read (and been amazed by) Katchor's earlier Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, so the shock of the new was somewhat muted in this volume from 2000, but I still very much liked being led into Knipl's world again.

[Abe Kazemzadeh]

I liked this book a lot and it was a pleasure to read. Like the funny, ironic, surreal city that Julius Knipl inhabits, the book needn't be explored linearly, and pages can be revisited because it's not a necessarily a single idea or punchline that makes the comics funny but rather a lot of detailed artwork and mind-bending mix of funny situations, caricatured characters, and ironic urban planning. Most of the comics are independent one-pagers, but some are 2-3 pages, and the last one is more of proper chapter. Several characters, especially Julius Knipl, and the strange mood tie the independent parts together. This book definitely makes me want to read other works by Ben Katchor.

[Mixter Mank]

Ben Katchor has been added to my list of heros. This book is wonderfully absurd and literate, poking around the lesser-explored corners of our unintentionally ridiculous consumer culture. This is the logical conclusion to the modern world of yesteryear. Details otherwise unnoticed get exaggerated to comic proportions. Katchor playfully combines and invents words with impressive ease. Yes, I really, really loved this and yes, am sad that I don't know anyone else who might enjoy it half as much as I did.

[Frank McGirk]

This reminds me of a fictional "Mezzanine" except that it's interesting and engaging. BSD takes some bizzare premise, but then explores it minutely and with a bizzare logic that makes these one page stories some of the most compelling and creative comics I've read in years.

They are prose dense and the captions and word balloons are sometimes not-complimentary in a given panel, so it actually takes a little practice to be able to read these pieces effectively, but the effort is worth it.

[C.]

Katchor is one of the most original comic artists ever, both in his scripts and his illustrations. He creates a bizarre yet recognizable parallel New York which is a bit more 40s than the 40s ever were, a bit more Jewish than even Brooklyn, and a bit more New York than the city itself. Somewhat surreal and wryly humerous, I have reread this many times.

[Melissa]

Fun to re-read in light of seeing The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island (which was not so much successful as a musical, but, when charming, was charming in Katchor's typical way). The long piece at the end of this collection is particularly fine, intertwining aesthetics, dwindling concert attendance, olive jar design, trash-picking, and the difficulties of contemporary music.

[Tyler McGaughey]

This book hit several of my most potent literary sweet spots: American Jews; fantasy versions of New York City; illuminations of the forgotten, the almost-real and the generally out-of-the-way. It has been a long time since I wanted so badly to live in the world created by a particular work of art.

[Harvey]

- read back-to-back with Katchor's other collection (entitled 'Stories'), these odd cartoons are just as entertaining, although two books in a row might be too much of a good thing.
- a very unique comic style

[Abraham]

Ben Katchor is endlessly wonderful. The Coeval Coffee Shop! Dry Cleaning communities! Undertaking as a spectator sport!

[Alex]

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor (2000)

[Kamakana]

.??? 2000s: my sense of humour. deadpan images

[Sarah]

This is very surreal; the art is excellent but the stories are more snapshots of the town and its inhabitants. Funny, but difficult to read more than a few pages at a time.

[Ben Schaffer]

False

[mark]

More great strips; New York Jewish dada.