BIO
Keren Katz (seen here in a photo by Neta Alonim), is a cartoonist, illustrator and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’s MFA Illustration Program. Her work has been published in anthologies by Smoke Signal, Locust Moon, Rough House, Ink Brick, Retrofit Comics, The Brooklyn Rail, Carrier Pigeon, Seven Stories Press and more. Katz is the recipient of the SVA Alumni Society 2013 Micro-Grant, Sequential Artists Workshop’s 2014 Micro Grant, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art’s 2015 Silver Medal and Award of Excellence. The Academic Hour is her first graphic novel.
IN THE EMPORIUM
Keren’s comics can be found in the Secret Acres Emporium here.
Keren Katz’s comics transcend the medium, the text is poetry, the drawings are dance, the stories are not like anyone else, she is a true original.
– Richard McGuire, author of Here
Katz’s work, like that of Matthew Barney or Mika Rottenberg, has its own logic. Her storytelling voice seems to link the divine nonsense of authors like Daniel Pinkwater, William Steig, or Edward Gorey with surrealist writers like Leonora Carrington. Her comics are Truly Weird, the highest compliment I can give. With drawings executed in confident colored pencil, her figures stretch, bend, and topple in a manner reminiscent of contemporary choreography.
– Matthew Thurber, Artsy
The book is so rich in strange images that attempting to square them all with specific symbolic meaning seems fraught and silly, and perhaps would lead to misguided conclusions: The talk of a growing pencil, for instance, which comes up a few times, could refer to an erection as an instrument of will and agency, but suggests an argument that true agency for a woman comes not through her sexuality but through acts of writing or drawing. How can a young woman argue with the swelling cock of an older man positioned in power, if not through telling her story?
– The Comics Journal
The Academic Hour is a slew of contradictions wrapped up together; it is as delicate as it is intense, as heartbroken as it is joyous. The Academic Hour is one of the most complex, beautiful, and puzzling comics I’ve read in years. It’s a must read, and likely one of the strongest comics published so far in 2017.
– Alex Hoffman, Sequential State
– Calm Undertones Now Transmitting
This book reminded me, above all else, of the feeling people sometimes gets that everything and nothing are both just a little bit off to the side, out of reach but not impossibly so. It’s all right there, if you tilt your head just right, angle your arms just so that they can slip through that veil and grab a bit of what’s on the other side. If you angle too far you’ll slide right through and never return, and if you don’t angle them enough you’ll never see a thing. Get yourself and your mind into exactly the right position, take a deep breath and dive right in.
– Optical Sloth
Keren Katz seems to bowl everyone over with her vibrant, zealous elaborate stagings and illustrations. Characters break the constraints of their places and stages, color overwhelms, stories go everywhere.
– The Sequential Artists Workshop (2014 Micro-Grant Award Winner)
Keren’s colorful and detailed drawings certainly make a visually striking—and beautiful—impact and they are all inspired by dance and/or movement.
– Examiner
An artist whose ethereal style of stylized, elongated and graceful figures touched with watercolor have gained quite a following, as well as her ambassadorial approach to spreading the word about Israeli comics.
– Bleeding Cool
It’s safe to say that children in grade school can’t illustrate images this impressive, but still, these Keren Katz renderings have a certain unrefined quality to them that’s evocative of kids’ drawings. This is, of course, a conscious design choice as Katz’s style stands out immensely amidst a sea of computer-generated artistry. Her penchant for leaving things not perfectly colored, her exaggerated human proportions and the overall whimsy of the scenes she depicts are things that make her work endlessly interesting to examine.
– Trendhunter
Children’s book author and illustrator Karen Katz does a lyrical adaptation of Tolstoy’s little-known tales for young readers.
– Brain Pickings, on The Graphic Canon of Children’s Literature
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