The Jew of New York by Ben Katchor

Pantheon, 98 pages, $20

Graphic novelists get no respect, even in today's multimedia-happy climate -- perhaps because there are so many busty, bubble-eyed "girl superheroes" laid out for the semi-literate. But while Ben Katchor works in the same genre, he's definitely on his own turf. The illustrated absurdities that make up The Jew of New York, his first full-length work, reveal a stealthy, irresistible wit. These tales of an early-19th-century New York preserve the eccentric tone of his best-known work, the serialized strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Yet where the strip suffered from a somewhat fractured feel, The Jew of New York introduces a welcome continuity through the intertwining of characters and motifs.

Katchor's story starts from a historically accurate factoid -- that a politician named Mordecai Noah tried to establish a Jewish state on an island near Buffalo in 1825 -- and proceeds in a dozen directions. Large segments of the novel unfold in the memory of Nathan Kishon, a former kosher butcher who ends up trapping beavers in upstate New York when Noah's utopian venture breaks up. In one protracted sequence, Kishon regales his old friend Abel Marah with anecdotes about the territorial habits of beavers. He divulges that his erstwhile trapper-mentor, the self-exiled Moishe Ketzelbourd, was fixated on castoreum, "a musk-scented, oily substance secreted by an anal gland" of the beaver. After parting with Kishon, Marah visits a dry-goods vendor. The shopkeeper offers him "Castor and Pollux" lozenges, whose active ingredient turns out to be none other than beaver castoreum, a "potent male restorative." Katchor seems to drop the motif there (only later do we find out, peripherally, that Marah has bought his own box), but the theme continues in tangential ways: Marah stumbles into a parade and rally against onanism, under the banner of the Conjugal Fornicators Clan and decked out with slogans like KEEP YOUR HANDS FROM YOURSELF!

This spectacle, unfortunately, is Katchor's best material. While The Jew of New York keeps the yuks coming, it peaks early in this scene and in the accounts of Kishon and Ketzelbourd's wilderness foibles. The drama of the Hebrew-reciting American Indian -- evidence of the link between "aboriginals" and Jews! -- and the staging of an original "minor drama," also called "The Jew of New York," fail to match the hilarity of the beaver jokes. Yet the details are masterfully placed, and individual panels yield ever more on close examination. An isolated vegan commune, for instance, is run by one "Septum Dandy." Katchor's work has a kind of Zippy-esque randomness, but Katchor doesn't stoop to the easy pop-culture gags of that comic strip. Instead, he forges a rich alternative storyscape as delightful to look at as it is to read -- reason enough to justify his format.

-- Katherine Brown