...and the equivalent of death is demolition.

www.katchor.com

"I don't see my work as being satirical," he says. "I see it as being tragicomedy. It's not like a political cartoon that wants to expose someone's silly behaviour. I don't talk about particularly despicable people. They're all people in various predicaments. I sympathize with most of my characters."

"The size of comics is smaller. When people did comics as broadsheets in the 1800s, they were as full of information as any painting. Now comics have been reduced to this sign language, and all these little concrete details get thrown out--one building is as good as another. The particulars of the visible world get reduced to signs and symbols."

"Neighbourhoods and buildings go through these cycles of life, and the equivalent of death is demolition. You just hope something better springs up in its place. I don't advocate turning cities into museums of architecture. Sometimes, in the act of preserving a building, you ruin it, turning it into a museum-quality falsification. It's literally the building, but the culture it came out of is gone. The best moment in the life of a building is when it's in a state of neglect, but that happens when there's no reason to do anything. It's past its heyday, and yet it's not in the way of new schemes."
Ben Katchor