They never said whether two people showed up, or a hundred. I thought, someone must have come. I wanted to trace that story, of the person who showed up at the canceled event. But this is only one of the book's many stories. For Katchor, who grew up in Crown Heights, nothing comes more naturally than drawing and describing his home city.
History stops at the collection of facts, but fiction and poetry begin where the facts end.
Like Knipl, Katchor is an urban rover. With his hunched shoulders, flyaway hair and open, round face, the artist could easily be a character in one of his own strips. His new book delves into the beginnings of the market economy in New York. It's a world to which Katchor can relate. His father, a Polish immigrant, traded in his Orthodox upbringing for communism.