Ben Katchor and Alternative Newsweekly Comics

Old comic books and short newspaper strip comics are generally preserved and easy for contemporary readers to understand and place in their original settings, but the comics that appeared in free alternative newsweeklies are not. How does one understand “Too Much Coffee Man” or “Red Meat” or “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” today? You can read them as collections, but they seem strange and out of place in many ways taken from their original and now long gone settings.

Anyhow, you should read Ben Katchor comics and you should imagine you’re reading them in a slightly punk rock city paper full of ads for music and shows.