Entry 1:

Dear Ruben:

First of all, let me make clear that it's an honor to exchange book reviews with you. Despite your terrible habit of killing the pitcher and sprinting to the men's room when it's time to reorder (OK, that's me), you draw the only cartoon in America (Tom the Dancing Bug) that I'm jealous of week after week. I know from experience, however, that we don't share the same taste in comic books, so this week's back-and-forth should prove interesting.

OK, enough butt-licking. On to this week's first selection: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District, by Ben Katchor.

Readers of East Coast alternative weeklies are long familiar with Katchor's weekly strip, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, which leaves it to me to describe his work for the other 99.99 percent of readers of this review.

Before I do that, however, please allow me to begin what merely commences a series of tedious journalistic disclosures relevant to the cartoon books Ruben and I will be reviewing this week. First and foremost, I am a cartoonist, and that automatically makes my opinion suspect. While all reviewers of creative work toil under the burden of whole lifetimes of biases, half-baked truisms, and other conceits, we cartoonists are parochial, petty, and vindictive. Our tiny profession is divvied up into countless inane fiefdoms (autobiographical comic books by handicapped lesbian taxi drivers, semiautobiographical editorial cartoons by Ivy League-educated African-Americans) and further split among those categories into subcategories of artistic preferences and drinking-buddy alliances, all of which are ultimately reduced by petty bickering and backstabbing to groups containing one cartoonist, who invariably dies broke, despised, and most pathetic of all, remaindered.

Happily, journalistic integrity dictates that I state my biases here for all to see, so here goes:

1) Ben Katchor won this year's MacArthur Fellowship, a prize that enhanced his bank account by no less than $500,000. This pisses me off, as every last cent is rightly mine.

2) Ben Katchor, like me, lives in New York, yet has never seen fit to call me to shoot the shit and has never ever invited me over to his Love Pad for Insane Post-MacArthur Drug and Free-Love Orgies.

3) There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Ben Katchor has a Love Pad or that Insane Post-MacArthur Drug and/or Free-Love Orgies have ever transpired at such a Love Pad, were it to exist.

There.

Katchor draws his hopeless, McSweeneysesque-Arthur Miller-inspired characters using a distinctive ink-wash style that displays his New York That Never Was cityscapes in countless textures of gray, darker gray, and black. His style is scratchy and seemingly uncertain--a non-cartoonist might jump to the conclusion that he does that to elicit the alienated hopelessness of his anti-heroes and the dirty grime of urban reality, but he probably just draws that way because he likes to. (I would have asked him myself had he ever bothered to call.)

Anyway, the standard Julius Knipl strip concerns an aging (55 seems dead on) has-been salesman/weirdass entrepreneur dressed in odd blends of old hat and pomo (suit with carnation, fedora, and those eeny teeny backpacks from Japan that chicks like) loquaciously ruminating on such arcana as nonexistent professions, nonexistent religions, and nonexistent concerns that seem of great import to the participants. Katchor's writing is grandiloquent, playful, and, well ... arcane. In Chewing Gum Removal, a shyster clerk--in Katchor's world, they're nearly all guys and they're nearly all low-grade, mildly amusing scum--"pretends to understand the power of industrial solvents and, in many cases, to dispense false hope."

"From the bottom of my shoe to the elbow of my jacket," a female customer (OK, she's a she, but that's an exception) says. "It's nothing. I've seen worse. It'll be like new again," the clerk assures, grinning fiendishly.

Unlike the wretched popularity of, say, Jewel and George W. Bush, I fully comprehend the appeal of Katchor's work. Week after week, Katchor creates a fully realized world, one that reflects the dreary hopelessness of the vast oceans of humanity who drag their collective asses to their stupid fucking jobs every fucking day and then repeat that act for 45 years more or less until they drop dead of a heart attack. In some ways it's the graphic realization of the Woody Allen vibe circa 1988. It's also a tip of the hat by a baby boomer to the parents thereof; America somehow just isn't the same without those cranky old bastards and their cheap cigars and their bulldogs playing pool on velvet ... personally, I'd pay at least five bucks right now to walk by an old coot with a red feather in his cap. That generation that made it through the Depression and World War II or whatever the hell it was is gone, but it lives on in Katchor's strip.

Yeah, but is it worth 22 bucks, or roughly a quarter per strip?

Well, the publisher sent me my copy for free, so hell if I know. But Julius Knipl has never really clicked with me. Like countless other alt-weekly strips (including mine, doubtlessly), it's pretty much the same thing every week. Once you've read, say, six Knipls, you're pretty much done. Personally, what I look for in comics--as with film, music, and literature--is to learn something or, at the very least, to see something I've never seen before. I'm mildly pleased that I've experienced Katchor's talent, but now that I have I'm ready for something else. I can't help it; such is the bane of a household that subscribes to 22 magazines, three daily newspapers, and a pretentious Marxist political review.

Certainly, there's great joy to be found in repetition. The Ramones are one of my favorite bands, and all of their songs largely sound the same. And as a cartoonist myself, I like tackling topics and characters I've already done over and over again in a constant effort to finesse aspects of a cartoon that I might have handled better. Katchor's been honing his ink-washed paeans to American despair for the better part of two decades now, and he's clearly having a good time doing it. That being said, I doubt that his work appeals to Mainstream America, or even if it should. This ain't Calvin & Hobbes, much less Life in Hell--but it also doesn't enjoy the hip cachet of Robert Crumb or Peter Bagge. In the end, my beef is ultimately about money: This book would make a fine addition to any bathroom library, but it isn't essential. Release this sucker in a $9 paperback edition, and it would make a nice spontaneous purchase. I don't know about you, but my stock portfolio isn't kicking so much ass that I'd pay $22 for a bunch of cartoons that all read and look the same.

Which brings me to Full Disclosure No. 4: I sure wish someone would print MY stuff in such a beautifully packaged, extravagantly-priced edition.

Very truly yours,
Ted