Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
Author(s)	Ben Katchor
Current status / schedule	Running
Launch date	1988
Syndicate(s)	Self-syndicated
Genre(s)	Humor

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer is a weekly comic strip written and drawn by Ben Katchor since 1988. It is published in The Jewish Daily Forward and various alternative weekly newspapers.

Katchor embodies his love of the fading small-business community of New York City in the title character, a small businessman who wanders the streets taking pictures and being sidetracked into surreal escapades. Strips often depict Knipl's chance encounters with obscure, marginal businesses (e.g. a company that distributes newspaper weights to newsstands), eccentric hobbyists, and enigmatic details of the urban landscape. There is rarely continuity between the strips, and Knipl is the only recurring character.

A collection of Julius Knipl strips was published in 1991 by Penguin Books (as a RAW One-Shot) as Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay. Another collection was published in 1996 by Little, Brown and Company under the title Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories. Pantheon Books published a third volume of strips, The Beauty Supply District, in 2000. Each book includes one long story in addition to the self-contained weekly strips. Translated collections of the strip in French and Japanese have also been released.

NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday ran audio versions of several Julius Knipl stories in 1995 and 1996, narrated Katchor and starring Jerry Stiller in the title role.

The word knipl means roughly "nest egg" in Yiddish.

In 1988 publisher Russ Smith approached Raw co-editor Art Spiegelman about comic strips for the weekly alternative newspaper New York Press. Spiegelman recommended Katchor, whom he had published in Raw. Katchor has since produced the strip weekly, and it has been carried by other alternative weeklies as well, such as The Forward and The Village Voice.

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