Ben Katchor, The Cardboard Valise, Pantheon, 2011.
"In this winsomely haunting graphic novel from Katchor—whose weekly strips have been collected into The Jew of New York and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, among others—an overstuffed suitcase becomes a ripe, comic metaphor for modern life. Set in a world tilted about 45 degrees away from reality, Katchor's story follows a number of characters through their quirky obsessions, each of which highlights a uniquely curious take on modernity. A hunt in the "Saccharine Mountains" turns a BLT into a tongue-in-cheek metaphor ("the lettuce symbolizes the cost of living"), while the citizens of "Outer Canthus" each undergo a symbolic funeral at the age of 47, after which they are "allowed to shed the burden of responsibility." In this slurry of sketchy and gray-tinged surrealism, the titular valise stands out with a certain haunting magic: a cheap and disposable thing (Katchor tracks its construction and sale with a curiously socioeconomic exactitude) that can contain multitudes. Once its contents are unleashed upon the hopelessly modernized island nation of Tensint (Katchor relentlessly skewers affected bourgeois quests for "authenticity"), things go downhill fast—it's the end of the world writ small. Rarely have books that made this little sense made so much sense." - Publishers Weekly
"MacArthur and Guggenheim-winning alt-weekly cartoonist Ben Katchor uses simple two-tiered strips to conjure up whole worlds that never existed, in under 10 panels. The Cardboard Valise collects a series of those loosely related strips into a weird travelogue, taking readers on a tour through an island famous for its restroom ruins, a two-dimensional nation that exists on the borderline between other countries, and a metropolis where citizens pine for vacations in these exotic locales. Anyone who reads just a little of Katchor’s nostalgia for the never-was each night before bedtime is bound to have some remarkable dreams." - Noel Murray
"Katchor . . . does what every great artist does: clarifies things you knew but didn't know you knew, or didn't know how to articulate. Spend some time with his work, and then take a walk." - Newsweek
“Gloriously eccentric…the reader is befuddled, though in the most enjoyable manner.” –Booklist
“Artist and storyteller Katchor has achieved the goal Borges only imagined. Exiting this oneiric, shamanic, yet utterly naturalistic and sensual masterpiece, the reader steps out into a revitalized continuum richer and more exotic than the one he or she inhabited prior to the reading, a realm full of strange, alluring and bewildering lands, populated by oddball folks with odder customs. Never again will our common globe seem like a small, homogenous, boring place…The Cardboard Valise is worldbuilding on the order of Jan Morris's Hav, Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia, Brian Aldiss's Malacia, and Ursula Le Guin's Orsinia: places that are attached to our world by extradimensional roads, down which only the sharpest and most sensitive of literary guides can lead one. Get your ticket immediately!” –Barnes and Noble Review
“A surreal travelogue…a vast panorama of humane hamburger stands, exquisitely ethereal ethnic restaurants, ancient restroom ruins and wilds tracts of land that fit neatly next to high-rise hotels.” – Brooklyn Daily Eagle
“History, humor, and a generous dose of surrealness combine to make you think you’re walking down the back streets of Oz…Katchor is plainly steeped in the tropes of his craft, but ultimately he is uncategorizable, a man apart.”–Culture Books
“Anyone familiar with [Katchor’s] work will recognize his grotesque eccentrics (or maybe his eccentric grotesques), the off-kilter angles and depths of field in every panel, not to mention the banal objects granted strange value and the wonderful prose…There is an exhilaration and freedom here—a license to invent and destroy.” –Tablet Magazine
“Katchor’s work has the unusual distinction of being known…for its startling poetry, dreamily familiar urban landscapes, and revelations about the arcane systems and inner workings of city life…provocative, moving work.” –CriticalMob.com
“Katchor has made an entire world out of his narrow domain, and it’s as rich and vast (and sad and hilarious) a world as any writer or artist working today has concocted.” –Shelfari
“The appearance of a new Katchor collection is always reason to celebrate… Katchor is a true, rare, untarnished New York treasure — the kind of artist who can concoct a fantastical made-up world, but one that ensures you’ll never see the real world in quite the same way again.” –The 6th Floor blog
“His whimsical, mournful metaphysical verbal gags and scratchy visual poems are at once the most conceptual and conversational comics being made, and for my taste the best ever made…it’s only March, but surely Katchor is the automatic writer-artist of the year.” – ComicCritique Blog
“Katchor's magically whimsical vision is sui generis… a collection of richly imagined, lovingly detailed individual strips. Each is best lingered over one at a time, an invitingly exotic world unto itself.” –Philadelphia Inquirer
“Katchor is one of America’s great prose stylists, a writer possessed of an almost unequalled mastery of word choice and the rhythm and pacing of the American language…What finally elevates Katchor above not only all cartoonists, but above most prose writers, is the sheer beauty of his prose. In his finest tales, each panel, removed from its context, creates its own context, a world of its own; each is so evocative that the single panel, removed from its fellows, explodes with melancholy. The texts are gems, and when combined with Katchor’s drawings, with their washed shadows, their chiaroscuro streets, the result is a body of work of an almost unbearable sadness, of an almost unbearable beauty.” –Jewish Currents
“Part surrealistic travelogue and part satirical treatise on the very notion of culture, The Cardboard Valise is a book about imaginary places with enough heart to make its very real social commentary easily digestible.” –Straight.com’s best graphic novels of 2011.
"Ben Katchor is the best world-builder in comics today. This is true even though he does none of the things we tend to associate with world-building, be it visual or narrative in nature. He’s no epic sci-fi-fantasist, with a wiki-worthy cultural-historical framework underpinning (or overwhelming) every person, place, and thing that ends on the printed page. He hasn’t developed a personal visual vocabulary of forms and symbols from which a wholly alien world that nonetheless makes optical sense on its own terms can be constructed. He doesn’t use tricks with layout or beat-by-beat pacing to drag us through a contiguous, continuous spatial environment alongside his characters. And those characters don’t belong to a sprawling, interconnected cast whose lives and relationships grow and change and metastasize over the years, parallel to our own.
So if he doesn’t do any of those things — if he’s not a fantasist like J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, a demiurge like Jim Woodring or Jack Kirby, an architect like Mat Brinkman or Brian Chippendale, or a mass biographer like Gilbert Hernandez or Jaime Hernandez — how is it that The Cardboard Valise, his latest collection of loosely intertwined comic strips, feels like something you can open up, fall into, and stroll around in?
More than any other reason, perhaps, it’s because of the angle of entry he offers us. Katchor is the master of the diagonal. The entrepreneurs and officials, hucksters and glad-hands who inhabit The Cardboard Valise virtually never traverse the panels comprising Katchor’s strict eight-panel grids from back to front or side to side. They stride purposefully and gesticulate wildly from the left foreground to the rear background. They gaze up with wonder from the lower left to upper right. They follow sight lines that lead us not infinitely back into the panel but out of it, in whatever direction, even toward us. Katchor once told me that he draws his comics using the theatrical stage as a touchstone, rather than the flattened and cropped space of film or photography: “My approach is to construct a palpable space. Whatever happens in that space becomes believable.” Indeed, simply by staging his comics in such a way that the tile floors, shelf tops, ceiling fans, and side alleys of his cities are made visible to character and reader alike, he’s constructed a world that feels more livable than accrued detail could ever hope to convey.
Katchor’s micro-stories similarly expose forgotten, or more accurately imaginary, nooks and crannies of the urban experience. In the same fashion as his Julius Knipl collections, The Cardboard Valise is a catalog of made-up occupations, obsessions, and cultural artifacts just too picayune to be plausible, but only just: a seaside cellphone stand that offers paying callers the chance to hear the sounds of the shore for ten minutes at a time, courtesy of employees who walk to the water and hold the phones aloft; an heir to a reference-work empire who sells off the famous family name since its value outstrips that of the imprint’s accumulated, outmoded publications — The Marrowbone Backseat Bible of Contraceptive Techniques, The Marrowbone Directory of Commonly Dialed Wrong Numbers, The Marrowbone Desk Reference to Nauseating Food Combinations. In one bravura strip alone, a traveler discovers a panoply of unique customs observed by the residents of his island destination: black-market traders of partially eaten toast, discarded exercise equipment worshiped in fertility rituals, hotel employees who can deduce the personal traits of their guests from the dents they leave in wire hangers and who brag about the colds they catch from their charges, “an unwritten encyclopedia of postural gestures used to solicit tips.” Together these quotidian flights of fancy suggest a world of possibilities that are at once inspiringly limitless (cumulatively) and depressingly limited (individually) — a world, in other words, much like our own.
In the past, Katchor has used this technique to evoke the lost histories and specialties of the American city. In The Cardboard Valise, however, he’s tackling the theme of travel (echoed in the hardcover edition’s fold-out, suitcase-like handles), as it impacts his two protagonists—compulsive vacationer Emile Delilah, who’s so smitten with experiencing other cultures that he can hardly stand to be at home, and charismatic Elijah Salamis, a “supranationalist” who demonstrates his rejection of national and cultural boundaries by walking around in his underwear regardless of weather or disapprobation (“Today’s world market has us all in jeans and sneakers, so why not go all the way? Why not give up, once and for all, the crumbling façade of cultural diversity?”). This strips away the nostalgic veneer often found in Katchor’s comics, and reveals a sneakily satirical sheen underneath. The tourist-trap kitsch and played-up local color Delilah encounters, The Cardboard Valise argues, are merely the most obviously icky manifestation, and logical endpoint, of all nationalism — an inflation of trivial distinctions and accidents of history and geography into matters of all-encompassing aesthetic and political importance. This gives the book’s climax, in which an encounter between Salamis and Delilah leads to the public debunking of a religious charlatan who argues that it’s not our ethics or imaginations or faiths that live on after our deaths, but our acquisitiveness, real pathos and real bite. In the end, the world Katchor builds is a hall of fun-house mirrors. It’s fascinating and funny and endlessly enveloping to look at, but its delights and distortions alike are ultimately a reflection of ourselves." - Sean T. Collins
"At a dingy shop in downtown Fluxion City, you can buy, for only $29.95, the suitcase of a desperate man. It's no Samsonite: 56 inches but made of cardboard, staples and glue, guaranteed for a mere six weeks, it's a valise for people who need to get out of town in a hurry and need a case big enough, yet light enough, to carry all their belongings. Full, the enormous bag is so difficult to steer that it pulls the walker slightly sideways as it swings forward with each step.
"The Cardboard Valise," the new book by the wonderful cartoonist Ben Katchor, takes its name from this suitcase and is similarly overstuffed. Less a sturdy, self-contained graphic novel than a pleasantly flimsy repository for an inexhaustible imagination, "The Cardboard Valise" follows in the tradition of Katchor's long-running comic strip, "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer," introducing us to a whimsical city and its logorrheic inhabitants, each with an unexpected story to tell. Like the traveler lugging the cardboard valise, the reader finds herself pulled in a new direction with every page, deep into a city far more interesting than our own, full of urban decay, old-world philosophizing in invented languages, and besuited men striding with purpose in and out of absurd workplaces.
In fact, perhaps the easiest way to acclimate readers to the pleasures of the Katchorian style is to provide a brief and incomplete list of the made-up companies and organizations appearing in "The Cardboard Valise." Sinkside Steel Wool. The Kanale Clinic for Prenatal Restitution. The famous public-restroom ruins of Tensint Island. The Sans Serif League, who picket offending businesses with signs reading, "Cut 'em off!" 1-900-CONCH, where sunburnt college kids hold the phone up to the roaring surf ($10 for the first 10 minutes, 75 cents for each additional minute). The Tre Colore fresh-salad truck, stuck in traffic, its siren wailing, as restaurant-goers impatiently await the crisp salads they ordered.
They're all rendered by Katchor in his simple pen-and-watercolor style, the angular faces of Fluxion City's inhabitants blending into each other, the backgrounds teeming with detail. Open to any page and you'll be surprised anew.
The free-for-all inside "The Cardboard Valise" stands in sharp contrast to the inevitable downward spiral depicted in "Special Exits," underground-comix pioneer Joyce Farmer's memoir of her years spent managing the decline and deaths of her elderly father and stepmother. At one point, her father, Lars - explaining how his wife became so immobile and dependent on him that she hasn't left the couch for a year - says, "Things get worse in such small increments that you can get used to anything." It's a potent description of the aging process itself, one that takes away tiny pieces of our independence and dignity until we no longer recognize ourselves.
Does this make "Special Exits" seem like a downer? Good. It is a downer. It's also funny and touching, and gratifyingly cleareyed about the messy emotions involved in caring for aging parents.
Lars and Rachel live in a ramshackle, cluttered house in south-central Los Angeles, and in busy, black-and-white panels, the book observes as their daughter, Laura - a stand-in for Farmer - cares for them through the late 1980s and early '90s. At first, the couple muddles along, making it through bad falls, a car accident and even a 44-hour power outage during the L.A. riots. But as first Rachel's and then Lars's health deteriorates, Laura arranges Meals on Wheels, cleans up "Hoarders"-worthy piles of junk and helps her parents reminisce about their pasts - and make tough choices about the future.
It's no spoiler to reveal that "Special Exits" doesn't have a happy ending. After all, no one gets a happy ending. But thanks to the hard work and loving care of Laura - and some heaven-sent hospice workers - her parents die more gracefully than many. And thanks to the thoughtful writing and art of Joyce Farmer, their lives and deaths will be a comfort to readers beginning to consider the end of their parents' lives - or their own." - Dan Kois
"I am feeling a little overfed, a bit unsettled, woozy even, as after a large meal of many dishes, all different but equally rich, none of which I could refuse. I have read through the new collection of what must be named comic strips, no other term available, by Ben Katchor, called The Cardboard Valise. I toss down the napkin, push away from the table cross-eyed, and swallow effortfully, trying to formulate a useful thought.
Of course it’s wrong to have read it all in a gulp, or even five or ten. Katchor has himself warned against this. The pages of the book are intended, or at least made, to be read one a week, with time between one and the next for digestion, reflection, eructation. They appeared thus in different papers from Miami to Baltimore to Philadelphia and on to the West, but living as I do in a hinterland, I saw none of them. Amuse-gueules could be found on Katchor’s Web site, alongside glimpses of four other of his continuing narratives, each as chock-full as the one here between covers. The man could have not one but two MacArthur grants, given all the value he produces.
The Cardboard Valise has handles inside the covers, which if folded out turn the book into a metaphorical valise, opening to allow its contents to be metaphorically unpacked, as so many different kinds of things are unpacked within it. It commences as young Emile Delilah, inveterate tourist and one of the book’s three protagonists, takes a brief airplane flight out of Fluxion City to see if his newly acquired valise is up to the rigors of airport luggage handling. For this test, he tells the cab driver, he has filled it with “a hundred pounds of old medical textbooks, back from when they were printed on that heavy, coated paper. I found them in a dumpster on Pitgam Avenue.” And indeed in a full-page frontispiece we have seen lucky Emile coming upon that dumpster outside the Cough Conservatory and leafing through a volume on “The Amatory Cough and its Cure” (“removing the patient to an open-air terrace where the object of his excitation is removed and his mind can turn to other less stimulating thoughts”).
On the next page we learn how Emile earlier purchased the valise, a $29.99 Fitzall “Ahasuerus” model; then we learn how the valise was made, “assembled amidst the glue fumes and staple-gun salvos of a loft in Cachexia, New Jersey.” Emile and his enormous suitcase head for Tentsint Island, with its pervasive dry cleaning industry and far-famed public-restroom ruins (“a lost world of glass soap-dispensers and electric hand-driers”). An enraged bellhop at the Two-Ply International Hotel, where Emile is checked in, rants against island visitors and their pointless impedimenta—“winter coats, pocket dictionaries, bottles of dried typewriter correction fluid, cut-rate multiple vitamins, monogrammed belts, zippered bibles and loose change”—and urges his fellow bellhops to revolt:
A young tourist has transported the entire contents of his home to our fair island. . . . our children are already addicted to ketchup and chewing gum . . . . Do you want your wives and daughters, in their capacity as cleaning women, to be exposed to the sight of this fellow’s accumulated bedtime reading matter going back to 1970?
While Emile tours, the bellhops relieve him of all his belongings except the valise and a change of underwear. And within a few pages, the soil of the island, “permeated by the accumulated runoff of twenty years of dry cleaning fluids,” suddenly turns to vapor, and the island “like a stubborn stain upon the face of the earth, is removed without leaving a trace.”
Only when you reread it do you see how this beginning establishes an opposition, a wrestle, between a delight in stuff—more possibilities, more complications, more things, more names—and a revulsion against the idea of more in itself, or indeed any: at bottom, against the idea of anything at all existing. This tension will at length create something more than a series of funny ideas vaguely connected in sequences long or short.
The origins of Katchor’s art, as he has said himself, lie in the city—not only the city of his upbringing, Brooklyn and the rest of New York, but in the past of that city. Most of the faraway places in The Cardboard Valise—from Tensint Island to Outer Canthus to Fluxion City—seem also located in a recent past, recent anyway to someone my age. To Katchor, ten years younger than I, such places were at least lying all around in his youth, the years when the visual and imaginative worlds of many writers and artists are built and where the lives that they imagine take place. And while the Katchor world is a visual world, it is as much a verbal world. Katchor’s city streets and shops would be flat without the thousand signs, appeals, ads, warnings, and dreams overwritten on them: Discards International, Mal-Grand Drugs, Mortal Coil Mattress, Puncto League, Play-Tink Toys.
The made world has for a long time been a world of words, of messages; Hazel Hahn in her book Scenes of Parisian Modernity notes that as advertising in the press and in public spaces became universal at the turn of the twentieth century, parodies of advertising began appearing, too, in comic papers, often indistinguishable in their absurdity from the absurdities of the real thing. Katchor’s eye and ear are attracted to the basement levels of this universal messaging, where the appeals are hopeless, the warnings outmoded, the ads for things no one could want, the names at once fatuous and poignant. I do not desire to eat in the Exegete Bar-Grill or in the Inamorata Coffee Shop, I am not glad to find the Lucky Stiff pancake house, I hope I never need a gray room at the Gravamen Hotel.
I used to believe that Katchor’s visual style, or, to be frank, his level of artistic skill, lagged behind his proficient and elegantly explosive language-spinning. He had limited success drawing bodies in action; his line seemed hesitant, scratchy, infirm; interesting and necessary details were constantly suggested rather than actually rendered. But I have come, over time, to see a closer fit between the words and images. His drawing has gotten better—the faces more varied, even verging on the expressive, and the panels more composed. Like many comic artists, Katchor draws on the vocabulary of German expressionist films as filtered through Hollywood noir, a mode particularly appropriate for his dark city blocks and industrial sites and gloomy hotel rooms, the spaces seen from low or high angles, reaching inward toward far corners and streets as though in deep-focus cinematography.
Substantively, though, his pictorial work is unchanged; the islands and towns of purported tourist destinations in The Cardboard Valise are like those false getaway places in crime films, black-and-white palms and verandas full of un-escaped threat. They continuously creep or migrate away from the beach to the same old shabby streets we have known since Katchor’s first collection, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: streets lined with the dim low-rise buildings and failing but persistent enterprises that Julius Knipl spies on and eavesdrops in. But unlike the American night city of the crime film or crime comic, the streets of The Cardboard Valise are safe, the populations harmless as moths. Though hilariously boring, depressed often, frantic occasionally, or full of mad but ineffectual excitement, Katchor’s visual world is somehow never sinister: maybe because every panel is so crowded with thinking and speaking, with so much this and that.
The inventiveness is in itself exhilarating. Katchor’s list-making and thing-producing is unceasing, rational in syntax and prim in grammar but only tangentially or abstractly connected to what we know as reality. Your gullet strangles in irrepressible laughter before you are halfway through one of his riffs, and you can barely make it to the end, only to find there is another on the next page, or the next panel. Emile, seized with intestinal trouble, occupies a stall in one of Tentsint Island’s restrooms and there “considers the dinner he just ate: A salad wreath, cemetery soup, grilled sardines in-the-net, and for dessert, a Health Dept. pudding, with horse-whipped cream.” In Fluxion City an observer stands baffled at the hopeless stuff on offer at Discounts International: “Sweat-suits in small sizes, ‘God Bless This Home’ acrylic doormats piled waist-high, . . . Cadillac-style video rewinders, doorknob cozies, tuxedos for infants, cans of ‘Danish’ butter cookies . . . . The list is endless.”
There are comic strips that are replete, whereas others are plain. Peanuts and Dilbert are among the plain, and so, long ago, were Nancy and Henry. Katchor’s are among the replete: those strips whose panels are crammed with amusements, odd people coming and going, wacky knickknacks on shelves and tables, pets or vermin underfoot, whimsical signage. In Walt Kelly’s Pogo, if a character is holding a book we are sure to be allowed to read the title (“Girl of the Limberwurst”); the walls in Smokey Stover were hung with pictures that changed from panel to panel, as well as punning or nonsensical remarks (“Notary Sojac”) from the artist.
Strips stuffed with stuff are often also stuffed with words (but not always; see early Little Nemo episodes). Katchor’s words—like those in Gene Ahern’s Our Boarding House, which Katchor has named an early influence—often use up more of the panel than the drawn things. In Katchor’s work, even when the speech balloons are sparse, the narrative bands at the top of the panels proffer elaborate descriptions and explanations in his refined and queerly learned language. Fans of the word, over on this side, roll around in it like delighted puppies, while the purist picture fans on that side shake their heads. It might be better if Katchor practiced his lettering a bit more assiduously, but the subtle match between picture and word, which is the highest goal of a comic strip, is perhaps aided by the slightly slovenly look of it above or within the seemingly slovenly drawings. No one, after all, is going to letter and draw the way Walt Kelly did in his prime, word and picture melded in exquisite complementary effects; that world, and those draftsman’s skills, are not so much lost as long-surrendered.
The Cardboard Valise also places Katchor’s work on one side of another distinction in comic-strip artists, the one between the jokesters and the storytellers: in the first, each day’s strip is a self-contained, punch-lined entity, a variation on a standing circumstance (Blondie, Beetle Bailey); in the other, a part of an ongoing adventure with at least a tentative conclusion, followed by another (Li’l Abner, Pogo). An intermediate form sets afoot a problem or dilemma that lasts a few days before evaporating, as in Peanuts or Krazy Kat. Katchor’s breakout strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer was organized, if that’s the word, only by the wanderings and curiosity of Mr. Knipl, and even he and his investigations vanished for pages at a time. Each weekly unit unfolded a little moment, told an anecdote, and though bits and scenes recurred, nothing really developed. The Cardboard Valise at first seems to be the same sort of thing, and indeed it is prone to idling and wandering, but as the pages turn it evolves, or coagulates, into true storytelling.
Maybe it was the experience of creating The Jew of New York—which was a graphic novel rather than a continuing strip, and a novel indeed, as chock-full of characters interwoven and bound together by shifting destinies as a Dickens doorstopper—that trained Katchor in the arts of integration, reflection, opposition, and entwinement that deepen The Cardboard Valise as it goes on. As in a Dickens novel, three or four characters generate around them, often by their occult connections to one another, a quasi-endless but actually endpoint-driven story.
First to be put in place is Emile, who, despite his desire to run off to far places and escape the circumstances of his life, is always dragging those circumstances with him where he goes or imagines going, accumulating experiences like new possessions. Weekly readers may well have forgotten that Emile was believed to have been lost in the Tensint Island disappearance when, much further on, his grieving parents turn his apartment (actually a more fitting and slightly better-furnished substitute) into a museum of their son’s life and wanderings (“All of his trips were planned in this very armchair—the macaroni and cheese encrustations attest to his monastic life-style.”) Emile’s not been dead, of course, but rather has been drawing on the lifetime paid account at Hoopus Travel his parents gave him as a boy. Emile-believed-dead is going to pay off in the accounting that makes a well-made tale.
Practical philosopher Elijah Salamis, on the other hand, never leaves home and is progressively shedding every permanence in life. His single room is painted “U.V. Blue No. 75—a color devoid of all historical connotations.” He has recently changed his name to Pylon Zoon: “Why associate oneself with hundreds of generations of Salamises—it’s time for a fresh start.” Rather than obey the meteorological dictates of Fluxion City, where he resides, Salamis dresses year-round in thin T-shirt and shorts—“Who looks anymore at an open fly? The missing buttons of the world belong in archaeological museums”—and believes in the dissolution of all qualities, distinctions, names, nations.
Just as nuts as Elijah but not so blithe, Calvin Heaves gathers “world-weary” crowds at the Quiver Tabernacle for his weekly “Sermon from the Mouth.” Calvin believes that the mountains of unsold and unsellable goods piled up at Discounts International reflect the unappeased and unappeasable commercial longings of the dead; he preaches man’s continued existence beyond death, but not the usual supernatural kind:
Upon death, the human appetitive urge departs from the body in the form of a twelve-inch-long section of colorless sausage casing. . . . This immaterial gullet, or soul, finds its eternal home in the shadow of the street curb where it continues forever in its peristaltic contractions.
For “demonstration purposes,” Heaves employs a realistic battery-operated toy esophagus, “The Voracious Maw,” manufactured in faraway Buccal Mucosa for the Sowtoy Company of Liebestraum, Ohio, and once shipped by the hundred-gross to Tensint Island for the spring Diarrhea Festival. With Tensint obliterated, they are snapped up by the Heaves cultists as their aegis.
The triangulation of these three, the opposition of their stances toward appetite, need, and the ceaseless proliferation of things, comprises the structural members of the work, though this isn’t apparent at first (how did Dickens’s first readers, getting his monthly installments, keep his plots straight? Did they take notes, or just not concern themselves with it?). But “structural members” is really too spatial a metaphor, because the essence of all fictional creations beyond the one-joke-a-day comic strip is movement through time.
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer maintains to the end the dreamlike slippage between topics, the cabalistic or fractal branching-by-repetition, that can proceed nowhere. The Cardboard Valise, however, trends ever more visibly toward a solidly novelistic conclusion, in which (1) opposed persons, acting out the compulsions of their characters within the constraints of their social world, reach (2) resolutions of abasement or transcendence in (3) a carnivalesque climax, followed by (4) the promised though not completed instauration of a new-old world—in this case by means of a cardboard valise identical to the one we began with, the Fitzall “Ahasuerus” of New Jersey, Emile’s self-chosen burden and trust. The last image in the book is of it, as was the first.
So, in E.M. Forster’s well-known terms, while the earlier book’s a story, provisional and potentially endless, the other’s got a plot. I even wonder if it would be proper to reveal its ending—to perpetrate the spoiler that readers are now ubiquitously alerted to in reviews and blogs. It includes some rather non-Katchoresque elements, such as sudden death (“six deadly capsules of potassium chloride . . . he washes them down with a Cherry Swallow”) and violent overthrow (of false prophet Calvin Heaves: “The assembled crowd is awakened as though from a delusionary stupor”).
I am moved by the thought of Katchor brooding so long over the matters he has broached that the sense of an ending arose in him, and by his courage in carrying it forward. Simultaneously, I feel a reader’s common dissatisfaction in the closing up of a fictional world. As Forster perceived, the last third of a novel tends to disappoint even as it compels, because it must make its way toward the wrap-up, shedding possibilities as it goes: thus it becomes less lifelike, because actual life always opens up further, never shuts down, never aims toward a final paragraph.
It’s strange to think of Katchor’s work as lifelike, but there it is. Its lifelikeness is partly a function of the felt possibility of ongoing randomness inherent in the comic-strip mode. The Cardboard Valise finally refuses that mode, and that is perhaps why—delightfully full though it is of notions, places, and people—it’s not likely to displace the first Julius Knipl collection in my affections. That collection ends with what I still consider Katchor’s most sublime invention, the Evening Combinator, a city newspaper that chronicles not the daily events of life but the nightly dream-life of the citizens (“Mosquito Gives Birth to Sentient Safety Pin”). A band of Katchor’s obsessive crusaders, led by muscle-bound Ormond Bell at his Stay-Awake-A-Torium (“hot coffee, hard chairs”), opposes the creeping surrender to the pointless inventions of dreaming. But rather than pressing the story even to a provisional conclusion through this conflict, the volume just takes a deadpan turn around one more strange corner and draws to a close, like night." - John Crowley
In his new book The Cardboard Valise, Katchor pays direct tribute to Mitchell’s “The Mohawks in High Steel,” published in the September 17, 1949 issue of the New Yorker. In that article, Mitchell regaled readers with lore about the Caughnawaga Mohawks, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” many of whom worked as riveters building skyscrapers all across the continent. The Mohawk affinity for highrise construction can be traced back to the building of a cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River near their Canadian reservation in 1886. Mitchell quotes a letter from an official from the Dominion Bridge Company who noted that
as the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched, they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters … These Indians were as agile as goats.
Katchor’s version focuses instead on “ceiling workers.” It opens with a paean to the music of shopping malls and elevators. “Today, no business can be conducted without a decent sound system,” the narrator informs us, and the group whose labor makes this Muzak possible, “the men who scale these high ladders to install our modern speaker systems all come from the village of Tufarwan in North Western Slippur.” An off-panel voice offers dubious anthropological explanations as to why Tufarwanians dominate this trade: “In addition to being fearless ceiling workers, they are completely deaf to the charms of western music.” Like their Mohawk counterparts, the Tufarwanians are nomadic craftsmen: “Most leave their families behind and live in the company of their fellow tribesmen in short-term studio apartment sublets.”
Spoofing a six-decade-old magazine article, even one as memorable as “The Mohawks in High Steel,” is not something that a typical cartoonist would do, but then Katchor has never liked dawdling down familiar pathways. He’s a brilliant artist but also a baffling one, supreme in his idiosyncratic creation of a baroquely dense fictional universe that has its own internal coherence while fitfully mirroring, in a fudged and misshapen way, the consensual reality we inhabit. As you read a Katchor strip, it is hard to ignore the tone of droll burlesque while being unsure about what, exactly, is being made fun of. This makes reading his work a heady experience, at times even surreal or psychedelic, since his strips induce a pleasant mental buzz even as they unmoor us from reality.
While respectfully evoking forebears like Mitchell and Liebling, Katchor abandons their romantic modernism for a more skeptical post-millennial perspective. Throughout The Cardboard Valise, Katchor questions the idea of authenticity, be it ethnic, geographic, or historical. In many of the strips, tourists head to far-off fictive lands like the Tensint Islands (home of “the famous restroom ruins”) in the hopes of making a tangible connection to the vanishing remnants of the historical and natural past. Katchor clearly sympathizes with their yen for the good old days, but raises doubts about whether, in our globalized world, it’s still possible to make sharp distinctions between the past and the present, local and the international, the natural and the technological, or the primitive and the modern. In one strip Elijah Salamis — a typically eloquent Katchorian obsessive — rants against a concert devoted to the folk music of Pelagia. “But it’s all a sham,” Salamis laments. “These out-of-work restaurant musicians may have had the poor fortune of being born on Pelagia Island, but grew up listening to rock-and-roll, eating imported goods and watching satellite TV. They’ve heard some old 78s, looked over a few 19th-century travel books, and cooked up a saleable semblance of Pelagian culture.” The strip ends with the sly Salamis, camera in hand, ready to expose the pretend-Pelagians as they enjoy an after-show snack at a local club.
The younger Katchor of the Julius Knipl strips was even more of a nostalgist, albeit more wistful and wry than schmaltzy. The nostalgic instinct, of course, runs strong in alternative cartoonists; it can be observed in everything from Robert Crumb’s collection of old blues records to Art Spiegelman’s loving tributes to precursors such as George Herriman and Harold Gray to Chris Ware’s celebrations of the architecture of Louis Sullivan. In his introduction to Katchor’s 1996 volume Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, the novelist Michael Chabon astutely noted that the nostalgic impulse was being subverted by a plethora of knock-offs: “The mass synthesis, marketing, and distribution of versions and simulacra of an artificial past, perfected over the last thirty years or so, has ruined the reputation and driven a fatal stake through the heart of nostalgia,” Chabon argued.
Chabon’s observation helps explain the shift in the late Katchor’s work from the sensual indulgence of nostalgia in the early Knipl stories to the strenuous interrogation of false authenticity that permeates The Cardboard Valise. Hitherto, Katchor had not been an especially political artist. As the cartoonist once noted, his father, “a Communist Yiddishist from Warsaw, was so political that he used up all the space for politics in the family.” While The Cardboard Valise is hardly a polemical work, it is informed by a powerful anxiety about the relationship between the local and global, and Katchor, although still not straightforwardly a political artist, is a very civic-minded creator, and in quite literal sense: he’s obsessed with the fates of public spaces, be they restrooms, restaurants or trains.
In the end, all these abstractions — nostalgia, authenticity, politics, civic-mindedness — only have meaning and force because Katchor embodies them in pleasing cartoon forms. He remains the master of the ineffable, an artist who can bring to life ideas and experiences that exist at the sub-atomic level of consciousness. The sensibility of a Katchor strip is as hard to pin down as a quark or one of the hypothetical constructs of string theory. Who else but he could give us a convincing tirade against fortune cookies? (“You can get away with anything if you print it on a little slip of paper and then stuff it inside of a cookie! No one has the guts to say they’re all lies – barefaced lies! Nice way to end a meal!”) Elsewhere, Katchor plausibly theorizes that shower curtains are evidence of “the embryonic formation of a true world culture.”
Along with Krazy Kat’s George Herriman, Katchor is the only cartoonist whose language achieves the pitch of high artifice that deserves the name of poetry. As with Herriman, you have to read Katchor’s strips slowly, savoring every word and also that constant layered interplay between the art and text. And like Herriman, Katchor is emphatically not a graphic novelist: his strips shouldn’t be read from beginning to end as a continuous narrative, but rather in small doses of about four or five pages a time. You can overdose on Katchor’s richness if you don’t pace your reading.
Charmingly ungainly and obeying their own laws of perspective and lighting, Katchor’s drawings are a perfect counterpart to his words: both the language and the art are stupefyingly off-kilter. Gravity seems denser in Katchor’s world than in ours. How else to explain how low to the ground his people are, as if tugged ever downward? Katchor eschews the bluntness of conventional cartooning line drawings, achieving instead a murky, smudging effect by drowning his figures in a delicate gray wash. To appreciate his drawings you have to linger over them and suss out how they are linked to the words.
The Cardboard Valise is a worthy addition to Katchor’s already distinguished oeuvre, but it’s also a sign of an accomplished artist deepening and developing his core themes. Katchor-watchers should enjoy the book not just for its unique pleasures but also for evidence of the unexpected new direction in which a familiar artist appears to be heading. Like a Mohawk on a girder or a Tufarwanian on a ladder, his sense of balance never fails; he was born for this." - Jeet Heer
Interview by Malcolm Jones
Interview by Sam Adams
Interview by Alexander Theroux Ben Katchor's web page
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