Ben Katchor. By Benjamin Fraser. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2023. 130pp, $20.00
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
It is useful to note that this volume is the second of presumably more to come in a new series of comic art scholarship published by the University of Mississippi Press, and that the same press published, a few years ago, a very notable book of interviews with Katchor about his life and work. (Ben Katchor: Conversations, edited by Ian Gordon, 2018).
Ben Katchor (the book!) is an unusual study, neither a biography nor a treatment of the artist’s work in the context of other comics. Nor is it an analysis of Katchor within art history, let alone modern art history (a subject he pursued in the interview book, amusingly describing how little effect his art school teachers exerted on him with their urgings of Abstract Expressionism). Fraser is an academic from the world of “spatial theory” and is drawn mainly to Katchor’s famed exploration of urban, metropolitan space and its inhabitants, both human and built architecture. With some background in Orthodox Judaism, Fraser is interested in the major language of the Pale (until the Holocaust), i.e., Yiddish.
Thus, he follows page design (often discussed by comic artists themselves, too rarely by historians or critics), linguistic syntax and narrative point-of-view, with his own points of perspective that come up all too briefly and then recede into a wider text. As he notes, Katchor’s intense interest in Yiddish connects with the generations of Jewish labor struggles in the US, very often against Jewish employers. That interest also returns repeatedly, one might say overwhelmingly, to “disappearances” (p.33), physical settings that have literally been wiped away, along with the generations of people, the signage around them, the very sense of urban life in its fabled prime, at least in the US, across the twentieth century.
Pretty soon, the author gets to a recurring theme in Katchor’s work, never treated with heavy-handed (or any other) didacticism by the artist but returned to, faithfully, over the decades. The material details of urban life serve to become profit-generators, the more so with the obsession with images prosperity and luxury, elaborated with vast satirical energy in a wide range of the artist’s drawings. Likewise, the auditory qualities of city life, ranging from inadvertantly pleasant to annoying and unbearable. Close to “noise” is language, offering Katchor opportunities to revisit the grand humor of “ethnic” comic strips of long ago and the arch silliness of Harry Hershfield among others in their versions of fractured English. With Jewish assimilation (in the early decades of strips, also complaints of Jewish institutional critics), the language jokes faded in the comics mainstream and have rarely been resurrected,even for newer immigrant groups. Katchor knows his way to get beyond the easy malapropism to something more complicated, creative and interesting.
Benjamin Fraser does not want to be taken as a “political” commentator. He has no leaning whatsoever, or does not wish to disclose it. For these reasons, in my view, he does not know quite what to do with the quiet but vivid lamenting undertone in Katchor’s work, arguably Katchor’s own political signature.
Consider the ongoing demise of the printed word, a theme in Katchor properly noted by Fraser. Or the disappearance of certain kinds of foods or eating experiences, so obvious in the most researched of any of Katchor’s works, his historical study of the Dairy Restaurant.
Robert Crumb and several other artists of the Underground Comix generation had been intrigued by a “style” in a deep vernacular sense originating from their childhoods in middle America, years before they drew for publication, that had been sinking catastrophically since their childhoods. The modernization of the street signs, advertising signs, soup labels, furniture, automobiles and a thousand others obviously met consumer approval (inasmuch as consumers snapped up the latest version) but seemed to a certain kind of youngster as monstrous. A fairly vague memory of the visual world of the 1940s found itself in old movies, animated cartoons, and so much more for the growing child to access and in a sense memorize for future use.
Katchor uses this lever as social criticism, without ever really saying so. His very grasp of Yiddish, long considered by upper class Jews to be an embarrassing remnant of an earlier time—likewise, almost banned in Israel for a time, even after being pushed aside for the daily use of Hebrew, something almost entirely recent—is a commentary. More than a meta-commentary, that is. He wants to be understood subtly, but to be understood.
Ben Katchor, the comics study, deserves to be read and pondered. For myself, an old hand at Katchor commentary, a Yiddishist and socialist to boot, we need to say a lot more.
Paul Buhle is an editor of more than twenty non-fiction, historical comics.
