Katchor contributed occasional illustrations while on staff for The Kingsman, the student newspaper of Brooklyn College, and he was an early contributor to RAW. He edited and published two issues of Picture Story, which featured his own work, with articles and stories by Peter Blegvad, Jerry Moriarty, Mark Beyer and Martin Millard. In 1993, Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by Lawrence Weschler in The New Yorker and an extended essay by John Crowley in The Yale Review. His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese. Katchor wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" for Slate in 1997, and he contributed articles to the now-defunct Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress. Katchor was the guest editor of the
Strips
Julius Knipl – Paints a fictional version of New York City with a decidedly Jewish/urban sensibility. Julius Knipl has been published in several book collections including Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, with a foreword by Michael Chabon, and The Beauty Supply District.
The Cardboard Valise – A weekly strip chronicling the travels of Emile Delilah to a variety of imaginary nations. It was expanded, collected and published by Pantheon Books in 2011.
Hotel & Farm – A weekly strip dealing, over alternating weeks, with hotel culture and agriculture. It appeared in weekly newspapers in the U.S.
Shoehorn Technique – A weekly strip exploring the possibilities of human mobility across socio-economic strata in an imaginary city. Temporarily suspended after 52-weeks.
Metropolis series – Since 1998, Katchor has produced a monthly strip for the back-page of magazine dealing with the topics of architecture and urban design. Katchor's operas The Carbon Copy Building and The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island were adapted from strips in this series. The strips were collected in the 2013 book Hand-Drying in America and other stories. This series ended in December 2016.
– An online comic-strip series started 2017.
Theater
Katchor has written several works of musical theater, including ; , an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island; , about the culture and architecture of coat-checkrooms, and , about a page working the stacks of the New York Public Library in 1975. All feature music by Mark Mulcahy.
Teaching
Katchor has been an associate professor at Parsons The New Schoolsince 2007. He gives "illustrated lectures" at colleges and museums accompanied by slide projections of his work. Since 2012 he has run the at Parsons, a weekly symposium for the study of text-image work.
Awards
Katchor won an Obie Award for his collaboration with Bang on a Can on The Carbon Copy Building, a "comic book opera" based on his writings and drawings that premiered in 1999. The same year, he was the subject of Pleasures of Urban Decay, a documentary by the San Francisco filmmaker Samuel Ball. The first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Katchor has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
