Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer #[nn]

This collection brings together the early strips of Ben Katchor's acclaimed comic series featuring Julius Knipl, a real estate photographer navigating the overlooked corners of a decaying urban landscape. Originally serialized in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the book compiles Knipl's melancholic, detail-rich observations of forgotten storefronts, obsolete businesses, and the quiet poetry of city life. Published by Penguin in 1991, it stands as a foundational work of alternative comics, blending architectural nostalgia with a distinctly surreal, humanist sensibility.