Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay

The classic graphic novel by the landmark cartoonist is back in print for its twenty-fifth anniversary
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"Cheap Novelties" is an early testament to Ben Katchor's extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city--an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor's signature pen and ink wash style, "Cheap Novelties" is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago.

In 1991, the original "Cheap Novelties" appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius. Drawn & Quarterly's twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover reformatted to Katchor's original vision and features a new cover and comics from Katchor's tabloid newspaper "The Daily Pigeon."