Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures Of Urban Decay

"Ben Katchor’s comic strips, published in various alt-weeklies as Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, serve as both a serialized love letter to, and a deadpan satire of, a kind of urban experience that has faded from the world. Katchor produces a series of vignettes about tiny, out-of-the-way and vaguely impossible corners of a vanished New York City, and makes sure we feel a subtle magic simmering behind every grimy storefront and tenement fire escape. Originally published in 1991, this deluxe 25th anniversary edition has been reformatted by Katchor, and the result retains the artist’s characteristically elliptical, allusive charm."