HOTEL AND FARM
by Ben Katchor ; illustrated by Ben Katchor
A collection of elegiac, dystopian comic strips from a much-lauded artist.
A woman with a rooftop garden slowly poisons her wealthy customers so that their worsening health convinces them to buy more vegetables. A man finds a room key on the street and tries to return it to the Hotel Sandshoe, where the clerk explains that they now use disposable plastic cards because keys carry the emotional detritus of a room’s previous inhabitants. Katchor is an archivist of urban spaces and the people who inhabit them, and these scenarios capture the spirit of this comic. The strip is set in a crowded metropolis that looks a lot like New York in the 20th century but seems to be a vision of the not-too-distant future. It’s a world in which status symbols include manure trenches in living rooms and carefully engineered apples, a world in which the very rich live as nomads to avoid property taxes and the poor pay each other in salad greens and pepperoni. Like Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and Bill Griffith, Katchor started his career just as alternative weeklies were taking off in cities around the country and artists like Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware were reinventing indie comics. In fact, Katchor is still best known for Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, a comic that ran from 1988 to 1998. These days, he’s more a scholar than a creator of comics. He teaches at the Parsons School of Design and leads the long-running New York Comics & Picture-stories Symposium. He started writing and drawing the strip collected here in 2000, just as the internet was decimating the free weekly environment. Despite the age of these panels, Katchor’s critique of late capitalism is still relevant, even if his brand of absurdism no longer feels countercultural. As is generally the case with comic strips, this one is best enjoyed in its native format and original cadence. The panels don’t cohere into a single compelling narrative and consuming them all at once flattens their effect.
Best suited for Katchor’s fans, of which there are many.