Graphic Novel Reviews

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer:

The Beauty Supply District

Pantheon, 116 pp., $22

Before you ever hit a strip in this new collection of offbeat tales featuring Ben Katchor's off-the-beaten-track shutterbug Julius Knipl, you'll come across a drawing spread across several pages, a long ink rendering of an urban district at street level. You're advised to pause over this panorama of jammed-up storefronts and offices, and absorb the names on them -- the Intellectual Fashion Showroom, the Senseless Elaboration Parlor, Blonje's Ambiguity Warehouse, Understatements Made to Order, the Phallocentric Supply Company -- for here is not only a treasure trove of comical names you won't find anywhere else in the book, but the choicest point of entry to Katchor's fanciful city, the rabbit hole to his Wonderland, a place that holds the essence of this artist's work: the brilliantly mad mix of urban living and commerce, of niche businesses, concrete canyons, and philosophic merchandise-crazed dreamers.

In the Julius Knipl strips, which have been running weekly in various free papers for several years, Katchor takes us meandering through a metropolis populated with street-corner statisticians, fringe product entrepreneurs, market fad historians, sloganeers, shopkeepers, and customers with a wild-eyed devotion to the wares they buy. Each eight-panel strip introduces some dweller on the edges of the economy and, in elegantly ornate prose and sketchy but vivid ink-wash images, examines his relationship to something in the commercial life of the city. But this is no city with a commercial life we know; it's a fun-house version of an urban economic landscape, with professions, industries, and products that range from the amusingly peculiar to the hilariously surreal. We meet a professional mingler, an architect of canapés, and an internationally renowned one-armed hair tamer. We observe semiprofessional competitive gravedigging and a cult of young unmarried men who admire brass fire extinguishers. We tour the oldest continually vacant storefront in America and, yes, the Beauty Supply District, the setting for a new 24-page story, where citizens go for all their aesthetic and philosophical adjustments.

Obviously, Katchor's strips have a satirical bent, lampooning America's almost psychotic faith in private enterprise and patriotic fealty to consumerism. But they also exude an air of affection for the mercantile engines of our society, or at least certain aspects of them: the ingenuity of the business impresario, the doggedness of the salesman, the intimacy of shops and diners, the sensual qualities of products. Katchor's characters may be sad sacks or obsessives, luckless visionaries or toilers in the margins of society, but they nonetheless represent certain virtues that exist in urban commerce -- or that did exist at one time, in an era of sample cases and door-to-door sales, mom-and-pop businesses and loyal customers. Certainly, with his use of black and white (with which he lovingly captures a kind of harsh city light and gloomy shadow), postwar fashion sense, and sweetly formal prose style, Katchor suggests a time past, with an autumnal, nostalgic tang. And therein may lie these comics' genius: In shading his absurdly imagined present with a fondly recalled past, Katchor gives his eccentric Gotham an unexpected substance, a taste of humanity that lingers long after that last panel and makes the Beauty Supply District a place to visit again and again.