Books like Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

I had thought Knipl was a kind of adolescent joke name from Katchor, and a good silly one, and I wouldn't have put it past him, but nope, "knipl" is more meaningful, Michael Chabon tells us in his lovely introduction, it means "nest egg" and as he points out, that fits for comics, and maybe especially for MacArthur-award winning comics genius Katchor, whose book is a large collection of strips focused on real estate and economics and urban working class Jewish men living in a nostalgic fantasy version of New York City. Katchor is all about the past, with an ever-present blend of humor, melancholy and surrealism. It takes a bit of work to read him because he can also be dense, complex, quirky, and deeply ironic, but at his best he hopes you see anew the urban world you thought you knew. Are you thinking maybe Kafka? Sure, but there is more humor here than in Kafka, maybe (though I have heard Kafka laughed harder than anyone else when he read his own stories to his friends, so maybe Kafka is right for thinking go Katchor's tone), and a very specific insight into material culture, consumerism, the struggle to survive, and, I don't know, pop culture. Kind of amazing stuff. The book is large, so there's a lot of strips to read, but wth, you don't have to read all of them!