"The Cardboard Valise," by Ben Katchor.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jeet Heer explores a new book by the excellent graphic-comics artist Ben Katchor. The first paragraph of the review sums up the lineage of Katchor’s work perfectly:

“Ben Katchor is the Joseph Mitchell of contemporary comics. Mitchell, along with his close friend A.J. Liebling, was a pivotal early New Yorker reporter who famously made a speciality of describing the peripheral rascals, layabouts, and oddballs of the Big Apple, ranging from the denizens of McSorley’s saloon to Joe Gould, the often homeless bohemian who claimed to be working on an ‘Oral History of the Contemporary World.’ With their cockeyed street-level view of New York and propensity for profiling loopy souls, Mitchell’s works were important precursors to the early Katchor who, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, meticulously chronicled the wanderings of ‘Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer’ in the pages of the New York Press (and, later, syndicated in alternative weeklies across the country). The Knipl strips were mournfully muted surveys of a New York where you could still feel the ghostly presence of the older city described by Mitchell in the 1930s and 1940s. “

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Ben Katchor’s 2002 TED Talk: