Ben Katchor
Robert
Birnbaum speaks with "the most poetic, deeply layered artist ever
to draw a comic strip."
Posted: (Date Unknown), 2000
Copyright 2000 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Print this interview.
Ben Katchor was raised in Brooklyn by parents
who were committed Communists in a Yiddish household. He studied
art at Brooklyn College and attended the School of Visual Arts.
He was a contributor to Art Spiegelman's legendary 'cutting edge'
graphics magazine Raw, and his strips Julius Knipl Real
Estate Photographer and The Cardboard Valise have been
syndicated in alternative papers and magazines around the United
States since 1988. He has published three books, Cheap Novelties:
The Pleasures of Urban Decay, Julius
Knipl Real Estate Photographer: Stories and The
Jew Of New York. In April 2000 Julius
Knipl and The Beauty Supply District was published, and
a documentary film in which Katchor and Knipl are the subjects [Ben
Katchor: The Pleasures of Urban Decay] was released. The
New York Times has referred to Ben Katchor as "the most poetic,
deeply layered artist ever to draw a comic strip." He lives in New
York City.
Robert Birnbaum: Does it seem to you there are a disproportionate
number of Jews in cartooning?
Ben Katchor: No...
RB: I'm thinking of Edward Sorel, Art Spiegelman, David
Levine, Stan Mack, Jules Feiffer, you...
BK: No, that's a recent thing. I don't think years ago,
in the earlier part of the century there weren't too many. I was
just talking to a historian of that period and he said Jews didn't
go into it...the golden age of newspaper strips. There weren't many
except for Harry Hirschfield. No, so there aren't that many. There
are a lot of cartoonists in the world. So I don't think it's a big
proportion. There are just a few of them.
RB: Can you make a living being a cartoonist?
BK: I do. Someone told me that there are only six people
doing alternative comics who make a living. Very few.
RB: Who said that?
BK: I don't know. Somebody who was in a position to know
had this number. A publisher of these kinds of things. I did many
other things a long the way, but now I make a living doing comics.
I do a monthly, I do a weekly. I do a monthly for Metropolis
magazine. I do books. It all adds up.
RB: Are you published in New York?
BK: I'm in The New York Press and the [Jewish] Forward.
RB: Which is where you started.
BK: Yeah, I'm back there.
RB: Did you ever entertain doing things other than cartooning?
BK: Well, uh...for a living I did typesetting and design
work. I don't know...I drew comics since I was a small child. Almost
his [points to young Cuba Birnbaum] age. Before I could read them
I was making them. I remember asking my mother to read comics to
me...before I could read. So, I've been doing them all my life.
In the last ten years making more and more of a living from them.
But it's a lifelong calling...why else would you do it? It's a tricky
thing to do for a living. At least the kind of comics I do. Lots
of people make a living doing superhero, mainstream, syndicated
comics. But to do these kind of comics, it's like making a living
writing poetry. People do it, a few people make a living at it.
RB: Your drawings are very detailed. Were earlier comics
as detailed and include complex perspectives?
BK: The percursors of American comics ...these broadsheets
that were published...there is a long tradition of narrative art
that parallels the history of high art. There was always popular
prints of narratives. In the 17th and 18th centuries they were rivaling
the density of descriptive drawing...
RB: Daumier?
BK: He didn't really do comics strips. People like Rudolph
Puffler. A lot of them are anonymous. They were such low art. They
were like newspaper photographers. Anonymous people. There's a book
of it called the Early Comic Strips by David Kunzle. A collection
of these things. What they boil down to today, these tiny things
with no image, almost icons, almost symbols, almost words with symbols
of things. The great thing about comics is that it can mix words
with these concrete images. Once you reduce the image to a symbol,
you don't have that strange tension. It's all working on this level
of symbols. Words with symbolic drawings and are really concrete
descriptions of the world. That's the interesting tension of comics.
When you can have the real world or a representation of it. And
then a layer of words, of abstractions riding above it. That's what
an ideal comic strip should be...
RB: When you mentioned newspaper photographers you reminded
me that other photojournalists and 'graphic narrators' have fluctuating
popularity. Art Spiegelman. Weegee...
BK: I don't see it that clearly. There are strange parallels.
There is an industry of photocomics that were done in Europe, a
lot of them done in Italy and now South America. And there is the
tradition of the picture story that Life magazine would do.
They would have someone cover an event with photographs and small
captions. It's all sort of the same impulse.
RB: Weegee [legendary New York City newspaper photographer]
wasn't considered an artist. And now there are books and exhibitions.
BK: I don't know what he thought of himself. Elevating
something that doesn't have intentions of being poetry to that level...like
all of this outsider art, things that are made outside of the mainstream
of art, commercial art, newspaper photography. That goes on all
the time. I don't think I'm in that [category]. Spiegelman and myself
are very conscious of the world of art.
RB: I'm not talking about your point of view, but about
public tastes and perceptions.
BK: The public? I don't know. The knowing public knows
that these things go on at different levels. There's commercial
comics, there's greeting-card poetry, there's serious poetry and
newspaper comics and there are my comics. People may lump
them together, but there are distinctions. It's hard to say. Whether
they come and go in cycles...when a book gets press [like Maus]
there's interest again in that medium, as an art medium or literary
medium. If you're in that field there are always people following
this kind of material.
RB: I'm thinking of the obstacles you must overcome to
be able to do what you love to do. When there's more acceptance
and value placed on comics, when it becomes 'narrative art' or 'graphic
literature' it must be easier to be published.
BK: No, no. People look at a manuscript and they read it
and they look at things. Editors realize there are the most commercial
comics and there are all kinds of comics. There is a whole spectrum
like in any medium. There is some level of discrimination among
editors and people who make publishing decisions. There has to be.
RB: Is there a ready market for your work?
BK: For me? This is [The Jew of New York] part of
a two-book contract...and the next book is in the works and I have
books in mind and other collections. There is some recognition of
it [my work] being something of interest done in that medium, and
if the book sells, which is the bottom line, then it's very easy
to publish books. The newspaper thing is...there are these weeklies
all over the country, some of them pick up your strip. Others will
never pick it up. The monthly thing is a magazine [Metropolis]...
an urban design magazine. It was a perfect fit for me to do a strip
for them. Everything I do is exactly what they want.
RB: As you were creating individual Jules Knipl strips,
did you think that you would end up doing a book?
BK: I was accumulating a lot of strips. It's standard format
in mainstream comics to collect dailies or weeklies an publish them
in a book form. I thought it was a possibility. It wasn't easy at
that time. I wasn't known. I think it all hinges on the individual
cartoonist's reputation. Who they are, what they do. I don't see
it as a trend.
RB: What's the end use of these strips?
BK: Newspapers are the immediate use. The public utility
of weekly newspaper. Books...I don't see comics needing a long form.
I like it as short form. I do short strips. It just another way
to make the strips available. Newspapers are so ephemeral, lots
of people don't see them, don't save them. They yellow and they
crumble. So there's a practical reason to make a book out of them.
And a commercial reason.
RB: Have you done and/or are you interested in animation?
BK: No, Knipl was optioned for a live action film but not
animation. I'm not an animator. That's a specialty. It's about motion.
It's almost like ballet. There are slow-moving animated films that
are not really about motion, [R.O.] Blechman's animation, telling
a story. I'm not an animator. It would have be a collaborative effort.
It's a lot of work. Somebody would have to say, "We want you
to do this." I like them in print. All these things have their
own feeling. I'm working on a musical thing...it's not really an
opera. It's a musical version of one of my strips. That's another
kind of collaboration. With projected images and singers and a band.
A group called Bang on A Can, three composers in New York.
The thing exists as a story, and you can do anything you want with
a story. Or people think they can. Sometimes they don't realize
how fragile a story is. They think you can rip apart a story like
a building and salvage it. You can't, it all evaporates when you
start breaking it apart. That's how all these bad adaptations of
books are made. They call them properties like they are this thing
like a piece of real estate. You can cut up and somehow it is still
that thing. Once you cut it...it's an odd idea but it can be done
-- but usually not done very well.
RB: Does anything like Raw magazine exist today?
BK: Nothing that I think is as good. There's Drawn and
Quarterly up in Montreal. Phantagraphics was publishing an anthology
magazine called Zero Zero. Raw happened to be designed
and edited in an unusual way. It went out of the realm of comics,
it became a literary magazine that happened to mainly comics. Nothing
that I know of. A very arty thing out of Italy...I think it's called
Mono(??).Nothing that has the feel of the old issues of Raw.
RB: Why aren't Francois Mouly and Art Spiegelman still
publishing it?
BK: It's a very dirty business being an editor. He did
it. And he was brilliant as an editor. He wants to be a cartoonist.
Also, there is a long history of comics not being a product that
you can sell upscale ads for. The illiterate, the poor, or the downtrodden...there's
never been a comic magazine that could get the right kind of advertising.
Raw hardly had any ads. So, if there were a commercial way
to do it someone would do it. In France there are a few, they mix
it with pornography.
RB: Are you surprised that more literary magazines don't
include graphic literature?
BK: No, there's funny thing. If you go to a small press
fair, it's like world of publishing for the visually blind. They
don't really want to look at anything. If there are graphics they
are very tasteful and visible. The design of most small press magazines
is not to look like its fun and not to look like it's graphically
interesting. That's the weird thing. There are very good writers
who are not visual. They are so intent on the Word, they don't want
the distraction of graphics or exciting graphics. In the sixties
there were underground comics. There were these viable things for
a while...since Raw nothing...There's a whole strange history.
Harvey Kurtzmann did a few magazines after Mad — Help,
Trump. Hugh Hefner published Trump for a few issues.
There's a schism between the literary world and the graphics world.
And comics fall in between. They're not the art world, they're this
picture-writing world.
RB: It doesn't strike me that magazine readers object to
comics, it's more likely highbrow editors...
BK: When somebody shows an advertiser a magazine with a
lot of comics, they will ask if this magazine is for children. The
reality is that comics are heavily identified with adolescents and
children.
RB: What about the evolution of contributors to Raw
that brings them to mainstream publications like the New York
Times Magazine or The New Yorker... Charles Burns, Spiegelman...
BK: But not strips. Using cartoonists to do illustrations...illustration
is still this serious-looking thing because it's next to text...a
serious article. But if you say that the cartoonist becomes the
serious content, it becomes very fishy. For a while The New Yorker's
Talk of the Town had a strip at the top where they assigned a cartoonist
or illustrator. It ran for a half a year. What they found that people
who were not cartoonists really didn't have the literary idea of
how to do this. They weren't very interesting. There aren't enough
good cartoonists...that's one of the problems...to fill this thing
week in and week out with different people. So it was dropped. There
has to be a body of people to fill a magazine...you don't want to
see the same people every week or month. You want some variety.
RB: Do you teach?
BK: I teach one class at the School of Visual Arts. A Comic
Strip Workshop. It's writing...you do a piece of writing and then
you turn it into a comic strip. I have great students. A very small
class, but very good cartoonists. Unlike film, comics have no visibility
in the world of education. There are very few comics departments.
Visual Arts has one because it was originally a cartoonists' school.
Every university has a serious film department. Maybe it [Comics]
need a world of people thinking about it. Then there will be a thousand
average cartoonists, there still will be a hundred good ones. To
fill a magazine. I don't know how that works...It's very labor-intensive
because it's writing and drawing.
RB: On the face of it, films and comics seem equally accessible,
yet...
BK: I don't know...people take movies seriously. All they
are are moving-picture stories. They're a little more glamorous
because there are movie stars in them. In Mexico, photonovellas
are very popular. Maybe because they are photographs...There is
a great Fellini film about that business in Italy...he was a cartoonist
as a young man and he was in that fumetti business—I
think it was called the White Sheik—a film about the
industry of making these fumettis. It means a little bubble
of smoke. First the puff of smoke, the speech balloon.
RB: How did Maus become the one, quintessential
graphic novel?
BK: It got tons of press, it got a lot of recognition.
Pantheon is publishing other cartoonists. A Chris Ware book...and
someone else, I forget. But they've always dabbled in comics. Since
they did the Raw one shots...
RB: Have you ever been invited to a writer's workshop?
BK: I do lectures. But not really workshops. Writing comics
is a very specific kind of writing. I don't know that I would have
much to say as a writer...
RB: You don't know, or you're sure you don't have anything
to say?
BK: I think I would ask what the image would be. And they
would say, "What image, I have to make the image with words." It's
kind of like film in the fifties. People knew that there were these
great things that could be done. It wasn't recognized or taught
in any kind of serious way. That's what made the difference in film...
RB: What will happen to your students?
BK: They going to try to do exactly what I do. Newspaper
strips. Books. At this point it's like studying poetry. You don't
know what you are going to do. You are going to try to publish.
I don't think it should be a mega industry. That's the great thing
about it. It doesn't cost anything to make except rent. Do it in
your home with a bottle of ink. The lowest overhead art form next
to writing. You don't even need a typewriter.
RB: Has the Internet helped comics and your work in particular?
BK: Oh yeah, my strip is on the...
RB: How does it look, does it 'translate' well?
BK: It has to be broken into a tier at a time. Most people
don't have big enough screens. On a good monitor it looks great.
It looks like a perfectly backlit slide. The image quality is much
better than any newspaper, It looks very good. It's on Word.com.
A literary webzine. It pays people. These things don't have to be
on paper. Some hybrid is o.k. There's the whole question of why
anyone would do anything in print anymore...it's a rough business.
Visit Ben Katchor's website: Katchor.com.
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