When Lawrence Weschler asked Ben Katchor about the surname of Julius Knipl, the title character of Katchor's weekly comic strip, Katchor replied: "It's Yiddish.

And it's one of those Yiddish words you can't really translate."

Katchor's interest in what can and cannot be translated comes to the fore in his graphic novel, The Jew of New York.

At a climactic moment in the novel, rehearsal for the eponymous play The Jew of New York is disrupted by the crazed Moishe Ketzelbourd, who fatally attacks the lead actor before being shot dead himself.

On being shot, Ketzelbourd cries out, but because he has been living like a beaver for some years, the Gentile cast and crew do not recognize that the mysterious attacker was a man and that the sound he uttered was a word. As "news of the freak attack spreads through the city," a patron at the Chaldean Gardens tea shop reads a newspaper account: "In its death throes, the creature emitted a strange, drawn out cry, most accurately represented phonetically by the letters: F-A-R-V-O-U-S."

Another patron, the kabbalist Yosl Feinbroyt, overhears this account and speaks the letters as a word: "Farvous?"

The Yiddish-speaking Yosl has recognized the strange cry as the Yiddish for "Why?", but Katchor has obscured this information by spelling the word in unusual English transcription rather than using Hebrew characters.

(Elsewhere, Katchor freely uses the Hebrew alphabet to render both biblical quotations and transcriptions of English documents.) Had Katchor spelled Ketzelbourd's death-cry in Hebrew letters, it would have been intelligible as a foreign word even to readers unable to read the Hebrew alphabet, but the transcription into English orthography momentarily turns the meaningful word into meaningless noise.

Throughout the novel, Katchor frequently uses Hebrew characters to spell English words and Roman characters to spell Yiddish and Hebrew words. This practice both exploits the visual aspect of written text and reflects different levels of intelligibility.

As the example of Moishe Ketzelbourd shows, Katchor's decisions about when and how to use which alphabet can have profound effects on his characters' lives and on his readers' interpretations of the text.

Katchor carefully exploits one of the signal resources of comics, the visual representation of sound and language, as part of a fascinating investigation of language and meaning, of sounds, sense, and nonsense.

Katchor examines the difficulties of translation from language to language, of transcription from alphabet to alphabet, and of transformation from meaningless noise to meaningful utterance (thus the kabbalist Feinbroyt transcribes the incidental sounds of eating and digestion--"zhaloup," "grepts"--as mystical words that lead him to angelic visions).

Concentrating on Katchor's deft manipulation of auditory effects in comics, I will discuss his unusually effective use of visual resources to give meaning to meaningless noises or, conversely, to disguise intelligible language by cloaking it in strange garb.

I will explore how Katchor achieves these effects and why they would be difficult, if not impossible, to produce in other media.