reviewed by Matt Reingold
Benjamin
Fraser’s recent biography of American cartoonist Ben Katchor is the first book
to explore Katchor’s lengthy career and vast catalogue. Much like his
previously published monograph Visible Cities, Global Comics (University
Press of Mississippi, 2019), Fraser draws upon his own training as an urban
geographer to consider the ways that cities take on a life of their own.
Readers
expecting a traditional biography that tells a chronological narrative of
Katchor’s career will quickly realize that this is not the approach that Fraser
employs in Ben Katchor. Instead, each chapter (aside from the
introduction and the conclusion) is built around one or two of our senses –
sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste – and how they are featured in Katchor’s
illustrations of urban life. The cumulative effect created is a work built
around showing the ways that Katchor creates an immersive and sensory
experience.
Fraser’s
approach focused on the small details in panels like sight lines, noises, the
ways that panels abut each other, the beautiful onomatopoeia created with the
sounds of eating, and the ways that words can convey multiple meanings. He
conducts beautiful close readings of the choices that Katchor makes to draw readers
in to the richness of urban life. I left the Fraser’s biography with a deeper
appreciation for Katchor’s techniques and world-building approach. At the same
time, I would be remiss in not acknowledging that I also feel like I left the
work with a limited understanding of the stories that Katchor tells in his
comics or the larger thematic considerations that cut across his works (if any
such exist). This is a consideration that Fraser, too, recognizes in his
conclusion when he suggests that more books about Katchor still need to be
written. Nevertheless, I found myself impressed with how Fraser engages with
urban spaces and physical geography to analyze comics in a way that differs
from other such scholarship. It is an emphasis on methodology, technique, and
intention and left me thinking deeply about both Katchor’s cartoons and the
urban spaces where I live.
Posts
