Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay

by Ben Katchor

Overview

"Twenty-five years on, [Cheap Novelties'] observations of what is lost as cityscapes evolve and shift due to gentrification and changing demographics are still fresh and relevant."—The Guardian

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770462632
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	09/27/2016
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 10.80(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"How can we yearn for something that never was? For little things forever lost that were never ours? Ben Katchor’s melancholy impregnates every frame of these beautiful stories. Silent despair, obscure industrial minutiae, memories of lost diners, the whispered prayer of multi-dwelling laws are but a fraction of the many enigmas pondered in Cheap Novelties. Under Katchor’s pious, amorous gaze wonder blooms in this urban Babylon. Novelty items transmogrify into prodigies that encapsulate our fragility, beauty and fleeting existence. A masterpiece of graphic narrative."—Guillermo del Toro, filmmaker

"The staccato vignettes, where narration and dialogue noisily intermix with one another like the cacophony of a busy street, are about pure pleasure."— Vulture

"Ben Katchor’s distinctive comic strips tell the singular story of a surreal city and the people who live and work there... Attempting to describe these strips isn’t easy: they broadcast on an exclusive frequency and, like the works of novelist Steven Millhauser, turn the odd minutiae of urban life into the stuff of strange and compelling narrative."—Paste Magazine

"Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay is one of those magical books that changes the way the reader views the world after its been consumed."— AV Club

"A wonderful peek into an old yet new world, Katchor’s work pleasantly combines art and character, opening readers’ eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of this metropolis in a way that is simultaneously relaxing and thought provoking. Recommended for those who enjoy urban history, nostalgia, and social commentary."—Library Journal

"Ben Katchor’s sublime collection…chronicles the wanderings of Julius Knipl, a rumpled photographer-for-hire taking pictures of buildings in a gently surreal streetscape that vaguely resembles Manhattan’s financial district of old. Knipl laments a fading world of dairy cafeterias, tchotchke salesmen and trophy manufacturers."—Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

Deadpan and literate, the strip is like a dream of some black-and-white forties movie stumbled across on late-night TV, full of high angles looking down on vacant streets, jarring close-ups, and dated colloquialisms.

New York Magazine