Live video chat with Ben Katchor, David L. Ulin at 10 a.m. Tuesday

Join David L. Ulin and author and artist Ben Katchor at 10 a.m. Tuesday for a live video chat about the art of storytelling and cities, real and imagined.

Katchor is a visionary comic artist, a MacArthur “Genius” fellow who has made urban landscapes part of his subject. “Born in 1951, he makes comics that bristle with an off-kilter melancholy reminiscent of New York in the 1970s, a city in decline but also oddly full of life,” Ulin wrote in a review of his latest collection.

That collection is “Hand-Drying in America,” published in March by Pantheon. “Think of ‘Hand-Drying in America,’” Ulin wrote, “as an atlas of Katchor’s imaginary city, a series of maps intended to chart its life.”

“‘Our knowledge of the domestic interiors of a city is limited to the homes of a small circle of friends, acquaintances, and relations,” Katchor writes in “Open House Season,” a strip on the pleasures of the real estate open house. “We are born, visit a narrow range of apartments, and then die in relative ignorance of how life was lived in our own time.”

Ulin will talk to Katchor about this book and an earlier project, the newspaper strip “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.” You can ask a question too when you join our Spreecast at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

Katchor comes to Los Angeles’ Skirball Center on April 10. Tickets are free; reservations are recommended.

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