Ben Katchor, creator of comic strips such as "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer," "The Jew of New York," and "Cardboard Valise," has, according to a contributor for the New Yorker, "been doing for comics what Marcel Proust once did for the novel." Andrew D. Arnold, in a Time.com review of a 2001-02 exhibition of Katchor's work at New York's Jewish Museum, noted that "[Katchor's] characters inhabit a kind of twilight-zoned New York City. . . . Katchor essentially writes illustrated, free-verse poems that celebrate the absurd possibilities that America's cities present." Reviewing that same exhibition, Jason Rosenfeld noted in Art in America that each of Katchor's citizen characters "has some particular esoteric knowledge to share, conveying the value and dizzying heterogeneity of human interaction in urban centers."

In Katchor's cartoon world, "everyone is on a mysterious errand and every dingy storefront holds a story," according to Jon Pareles...