Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories
"Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" is a comic strip series created by Ben Katchor, which first appeared in 1988 and continues to be published in alternative newspapers, most notably The Forward. The series is set in an unnamed urban environment reminiscent of New York City and follows the adventures of Julius Knipl, a passive observer and real estate photographer. Each strip typically features self-contained stories, although some arcs may span a few strips, showcasing eccentric characters and surreal scenarios that reflect a nostalgic view of urban life.
Katchor's artistic style is characterized by a distinctive gray watercolor wash, evoking the cityscape and creating a dreamlike atmosphere that complements the narrative. Themes in the comic often revolve around nostalgia for a bygone version of New York City, infused with Yiddish cultural elements, presenting a whimsical yet melancholic portrayal of urban existence. While it has not achieved mainstream fame, the strip has garnered a loyal following and is regarded by some as a significant work within the realm of American comic art. Katchor's unique approach to storytelling and artistry has made him an influential figure, particularly among those interested in preserving Jewish heritage.
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories
AUTHOR: Katchor, Ben
ARTIST: Ben Katchor (illustrator)
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1996
Publication History
Ben Katchor created Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer at the urging of Art Spiegelman, who had previously worked with Katchor at RAW, the comics anthology that Spiegelman edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly, from 1980 to 1991. Spiegelman had been contacted by the publisher Russ Smith, who was looking for alternative comic strips for his fledgling weekly, New York Press; Spiegelman recommended Katchor for the job.
The first Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer comic strip appeared in 1988. Katchor has been writing it weekly ever since, and it is published in numerous alternative weekly newspapers, most notably The Forward. Although the comic strip has never achieved mainstream success, it does have a devoted following, particularly in New York City. For example, there was a minor uproar when the new editor of The Village Voice decided to drop the strip from the paper in 1995. From 1995 to 1996, the National Public Radio news show Weekend Edition produced audio versions of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, narrated by Katchor with comedian Jerry Stiller as Julius Knipl.
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer is the second anthology of Katchor’s comic strip, following the 1991 publication of Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay by Penguin (as a RAW one-shot.) It has since been followed by a third anthology, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District, published in 2000 by Pantheon Books.
Plot
There is no central plot to Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Since the book is simply a collection of Katchor’s weekly strips, the individual stories are often concluded within a single page of the book. On occasion, a story arc will continue across two or even three weekly strips, but this is the exception rather than the rule. The only two consistent elements throughout Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer are the unnamed city in which all the strips are set and the character Julius Knipl, who appears somewhere in every strip (even if just in the background of a panel). Most of the strips depict a forgotten corner of an unnamed urban center, based on New York City. During his travels, Knipl comes upon the Holey Pocket League, a group of men who ruminate on the cosmic significance of their pockets; a physiognomist in search of an authentic facial expression; the Public Directory of the Alimentary Canal, which lists the gastrointestinal condition of all the city’s residents for a given week; and the Stasis Day Parade, where the city celebrates the most quotidian elements of urban living.
At the end of the book, Katchor does create one sustained narrative, “The Evening Combinator,” which extends for seventeen pages. In this story, Julius Knipl comes to believe that his apartment is no longer conducive to sleep and begins sleeping in his office instead. On the way to his office one night, Knipl finds a discarded copy of The Evening Combinator, a newspaper that reports on dreams of the city’s residents, on a subway seat and begins to read it. Once he arrives at his office, Knipl discovers Victor Rubicon, who has similarly decided to sleep in his office that evening. Rubicon explains something has seemed amiss ever since he purchased a new mattress and his dreams started being printed in The Evening Combinator.
Meanwhile, across town, Ormond Bell is speaking to his followers in the Stay-Awake-Atorium of the perils of sleep and his mission to provide every man, woman, and child in the city with a daily moment of wakefulness. He eventually reveals that he has organized a series of coordinated explosions intended to wake up the entire city. At the same time, Selladore, a highly eccentric architect, is searching for Rubicon, whose published dreams often involve a man named “Selladore” who engages in salacious and vulgar acts; the publication of these dreams has resulted in funders backing out of Selladore’s new design, “Carfare City,” believing he is the same man as in Rubicon’s dreams. Selladore eventually finds Rubicon and Knipl in Rubicon’s office, and Rubicon apologizes for the mix-up. As the three men decide to walk to an all-night cafeteria, they hear the sounds of one of Bell’s explosions in the distance—two of Bell’s followers have set a bomb in the foundation of Carfare City.
Characters
•Julius Knipl, the protagonist, is a real estate photographer. He is noted for being a mostly passive observer of the curiosities of the city and makes an appearance in every strip.
•Victor Rubicon is a brassiere-strap adjuster whose office is in the same building as Julius Knipl’s. The two meet when they both decide to sleep in their offices.
•Ormond Bell is the proprietor of the Stay-Awake-Atorium. He goes days without sleeping and spreads a gospel of wakefulness and awareness across the city.
•Dr. Pharos is the editor-in-chief of The Evening Combinator, a newspaper that prints stories about people’s dreams.
•Selladore is an architect who concocts elaborate and surreal ideas for buildings, few of which are actually built. Coincidentally, he has the same name as a figure who appears in Victor Rubicon’s dreams.
•Morris Borzhak is a friend of Julius Knipl with an addiction to putting various goods on layaway.
•Arthur Mammal is a retailer of surgical supplies who cannot help but see and diagnose the ailments of each person he passes during the day.
•Fetor Maracas composes music to be played using the steam that escapes from a building’s radiator.
•Harold Alms is a lecturer who only decides upon the subjects of his lectures by listening to the conversations of the crowd in the hour before his lecture. He goes to great pains to ensure that he does not think about the subject of his lecture any earlier than this.
•Gustave Vint is an inventor who has created a briefcase that doubles as a wastepaper basket.
•Doctor Tarmooti is a man that Julius Knipl meets at the toothpick resort. The two become lost in the woods and despair after running out of toothpicks.
Artistic Style
The most distinctive element of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer is the gray watercolor wash that Katchor uses to illustrate all of his strips. Instantly evocative of the cityscape in which Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer is set, the images that Katchor creates are often reminiscent of Edward Hopper paintings in their composition and tone. The eight or nine sketched panels that compose each strip frequently depict loosely drawn men in baggy suits shambling their way across shadowy sidewalks and run-down stores and warehouses.
While Katchor’s figures may seem quickly sketched, the city they inhabit is depicted in deep perspective. While many newspaper strips use their backgrounds almost like dioramas, in Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Katchor will often use a variety of different viewpoints within one strip. The first panel could begin by surveying the action from the rooftops of the city from a bird’s-eye point of view, and then move into a street-level view of a shop in the next panel, before the perspective settles over the shoulders of men engaged in conversation.
Katchor’s illustrations often act in concert with the text of the strip. Many of the strips are narrated in horizontal boxes that burst with crooked, handwritten lettering. Along with the narration, Katchor uses dialogue lettered in a diagonal and captured in clunky balloons. One of the most interesting things about Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer is how the artwork, narration, and dialogue function alongside one another. Instead of using the artwork to illustrate what the words are describing or having the dialogue reinforce the story of the narration, Katchor allows each element to function independently of the other two. Occasionally, the three elements will complement one other, bringing the reader to a single point. More often, however, Katchor explores the tension between word and picture as well as narration and speech by having the elements contradict or comment ironically on one another.
Themes
The central theme of many of the Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer strips seems to be nostalgia for a bygone (and distinctly Yiddish) version of New York City that, if it ever existed in the first place, has been forgotten. In the place of large corporations, skyscrapers, and franchise restaurants that fill the modern city, Katchor creates a simpler, more idiosyncratic city full of eccentrics, oddities, and surreal businesses selling perversely specific goods that is reminiscent of a time when New York was a city made up of European immigrants. Although the residents of Katchor’s city are not without their own dissatisfactions and difficulties, there is a palpable air of longing on Katchor’s part, a willful desire to inject an Old World European charm into the modern, relatively sterile urban spreads.
Perhaps most interesting, in Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Katchoris not necessarily nostalgic for a New York City that once existed, but, rather, a version of New York City that never existed. In a sense, Katchor has rewritten history and created a version of New York cut from the same fabric as the Yiddish New York for which he has affection; however, this Yiddish New York is rearranged and reassembled in such a way that the city of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer could never actually exist. What makes Katchor’s city impossible is how staunchly quotidian it is. Drawing from the most forgotten corners of modern life (all-night cafeterias, salesmen of forgettable products, hard-luck office buildings) Katchor creates a dreamlike New York of a parallel universe.
Impact
As Michael Chabon points out in his introduction to Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Katchor is the creator of arguably the last great American newspaper comic strip. Eschewing many of the staples of modern newspaper comic strips—such as the setup and punch line, an emphasis on the text, art that serves to simply reinforce the dialogue, the diorama-like backgrounds—Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer traces its heritage to a more traditional type of comic-strip artwork and storytelling that began with Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid at the turn of the twentieth century. That this return to an older, forgotten form of graphic storytelling meshes perfectly with Katchor‘s nostalgic subject matter only adds to the substance of Katchor’s mission.
As the last practitioner of a perhaps lost art, Katchor has attracted many fans, though few imitators. Reacting to the strong Yiddish influences in his work (“knipl” itself is a Yiddish word that roughly translates to “nest egg”), he has become a particularly important artist to those concerned with preserving Jewish heritage. In particular, The Forward, a weekly magazine that was once a daily Yiddish newspaper, has championed Katchor by not only publishing Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer but also by commissioning Katchor to write a second serialized comic, The Jew of New York, in 1992 and 1993. In 2000, Katchor became the first cartoonist to be awarded a MacArthur Genius grant.
Further Reading
Auster, Paul, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzucchelli. City of Glass (1994).
Eisner, Will. Invisible People (2000).
Katchor, Ben. JuliusKnipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (2000).
Bibliography
Buhle, Paul. “Walker in the Imagined City.” The Nation 271, no. 11 (October 16, 2000): 29-32.
Chabon, Michael. Introduction to Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. New York: Little, Brown, 1996.
Op de Beeck, Nathalie. “Found Objects: (Jem Cohen, Ben Katchor, Walter Benjamin).” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 807-831.
Weschler, Lawrence. “A Wanderer in the Perfect City.” The New Yorker 69, no. 25 (August 9, 1993): 58-66.