The Cardboard Valise

 
The Cardboard Valise

by Ben Katchor

Pantheon

2011

 

 

I learned of the existence of Ben Katchor from seeing examples of his comics in the annual America's Best Comics series I've been reading. The Cardboard Valise collects both reprints of pages Katchor published in newspapers and magazines as well as material original to this book. 

 
Valise kind of tells the narrative story of an individual traveler, and kind of meanders through an off-kilter alt-historical America. Each page functions as a vignette, so it's easy for Katchor to take a minor character from one page and give them the next page for their own little story. As a result, the narrative is never continuous or uninterrupted. The first quarter or third or so of the book tells the traveler's story, mostly, and then he doesn't really reappear until the end. In between, another character recurs but has no particular narrative, just wanderings and musings.

 
It's hard to describe The Cardboard Valise as being about anything in particular, but I would say that Katchor is interested in travel, mass consumption, and I guess at the intersection of those two, globalization. Most of the people we meet are tourists or immigrants, and Katchor turns a faux-anthropological eye on the rituals individuals and communities invent to imbue mass-produced junk with meaning. Katchor describes a world that seems to have no original art or music as we understand it, only the repurposing of found materials.

 
In one city, the locals eat only canned food, in another they're wild for shoe shines. A charismatic preacher explains unwanted knick-nacks in general stores as a sign of the eternal appetites of the dead. Audiences gather to watch sculptors create ephemeral shapes as they eat their soft-serve ice cream cones. 'Puncto' is invented as a universal language inteded to be incomprehensible even to fluent speakers. My favorite is the 'diurnarama,' an indoor street scene that perfectly recreates natural light passing through the day-night cycle at half the normal speed, where people come to while away the afternoon enjoying the illusion of a slower passage of time.

 
What narrative we get concerns Emile Delilah, who buys a giant cheap suitcase, packs up his entire apartment, and goes on vacation to Tensint Island to see the ruins of public restrooms. The island later evaporates due to too much dry-cleaning solution soaking into the soil. We see Emile again much later. 

 

After that, we take our own leisurely tour through the two-dimensional country of Outer Canthus and the unmapped town of Fluxion City, NJ. We repeatedly see Elijah Salamis, whose personal project is to reject all traditional and national culture in favor of new customs arising from human needs interacting with globally-available mass-produced goods.

 
Katchor has another collection that I think is loosely about city life that I want to check out soon.