Meet Julius Knipl, real estate photographer, distinguished by his fedora, fine-line mustache and healthy length of nose. Living in a time warp on a rich diet of nostalgia, he is the brainchild of Ben Katchor, a cartoonist who has peopled an imaginary world with characters from a mid-20th-century Yiddish past that he manages to make vividly present.
In Knipl's universe, wholesale-calendar salesmen, importers of folding rain bonnets, stagers of going-out-of-business sales, manure futures brokers and other small-business men are caught up in the sights, scents and sounds of low-end urban life.
They spend hours riding escalators for the thrill of it, attend canned-food tastings at neighborhood groceries, catch their faces reflected in the sheen of egg-washed Danish pastries and give home musicales based on the sounds emitted by faulty radiators. One man, Emmanuel Chirrup, a skidproof-slipper tycoon, has replicated the squalid apartment of his parents at the time of his birth, down to the aroma of reheated pot roast.
Knipl (the name means a small treasure or nest egg in Yiddish) and other Katchor characters strut their stuff in ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' a display at the Jewish Museum of the cartoon strips and drawings created by Mr. Katchor since 1988 for The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Forward and the design magazine Metropolis.
There are also excerpts from his comic-strip novel ''The Jew of New York'' and color drawings for his opera, ''The Carbon Copy Building,'' which won an Obie award when it was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999.
What's artful about these drawings -- mostly in black and white, with gray ink wash -- is their evocation of New York's demoniacal energy, the look of its down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and storefront facades, and the ethnic faces that Mr. Katchor has evolved from perusal of books like ''Lexicon of the Jewish Theater,'' published in 1931, with its illustrated biographies of actors and actresses.
Then, too, there is the zaniness of his characters' ruminations, like Knipl's poetic inventory of the remains of dinner with friends at the Hylozoic Restaurant: ''a piece of brisket lost in the shadow of a dessert plate; a wedge of sour tomato reflected in a pool of cole slaw dressing.'' And his subway reminiscences: of chocolate-vending machines, subterranean luncheonettes and track workers reading soft-bound leather books.
Born in 1951 in Brooklyn, Mr. Katchor grew up on comic strips, and in his teens began publishing his own on a mimeograph machine. In the 1980's, he contributed to the underground comics magazine Raw, and in 1988 he began the Knipl strip for The New York Press. Obsessed with urban life, he says in a filmed interview shown at the exhibition that for him ''every inch of pavement is a whole new world of activity.''
One of his meatier creations is ''The Jew of New York'' (1992-93), a ''historical romance'' originally done as a serial for The Forward. It takes off from the real-life effort of a 19th-century visionary, Mordechai Noah, to create a Jewish state on an island in the Niagara River in western New York State.
But the real story here is the peripatetic adventures of the hero -- Nathan Kishon, a slaughterhouse worker dismissed for mixing kosher with nonkosher animal tongues -- among hustlers of beaver pelts, importers of mother-of-pearl buttons, peddlers of soil from the Holy Land, would-be carbonators of Lake Erie water and Indians passing as Jews.
Like the rest of Mr. Katchor's work, the tale is told through vivacious, verbose cartoon strips and wanders off in many directions. It ends with a gray but graphic fire, ignited by an apparatus rigged to generate the smell of pickled herring at a theater presenting ''The Jew of New York,'' a play about the life of Mordechai Noah.
But Mr. Katchor's sagas never actually end, even when they come to a halt. You know they will regenerate in other strips, like ''Hotel and Farm'' (named for Katchor's Hotel and Farm in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., operated by his father in the 1930's), which currently appears in The Forward. Its action switches back and forth between rural and urban life, with farms that now cater to the canned- and frozen-food markets, and seedy hotels peopled by characters of varied virtue.
Given the visual challenge of a show devoted largely to black-and-white comic strips that demand a good deal of close-up reading, the museum has done a creditable presentation. The display has been enlivened with artfully fabricated artifacts, like the desiccated remains of turtle soup (circa 1831) from one Ormon's Restaurant in Manhattan and early samples from the Lake Erie Soda-Water Company.
And there are audio excerpts from ''The Knipl Radio Show,'' a 1995 production by David Isay, starring Jerry Stiller, that was broadcast on National Public Radio. ''Pleasures of Urban Decay,'' the film in which Mr. Katchor is interviewed, is also shown as a continuous loop.
Although the show seems to include miles of cartoons, you don't have to eyeball every episode to agree that he is an outsize talent, one that has found itself in a brilliant archaeological exploration of a very special world (with maybe some help from fellow diggers like Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel and E. L. Doctorow).
''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories'' remains at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 423-3200, through Feb. 10.
Photo: A detail of the cover of ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories,'' part of ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' at the Jewish Museum. (Ben Katchor/the Jewish Museum)