The official description for Hotel & Farm describes the book as the chronicles of what happens when “a group of story-addicts lingers after dinner to share 140 tales that examine the mysteries and idiosyncrasies of hotel culture and agriculture.” This is technically correct, as are subsequent descriptions of these stories being about the dangers of glossy magazines and the arrangement of fruit as an art form. Having read the book, however, I should warn you that whatever you think this implies, you are probably wrong.
Hotel & Farm tricks its readers by having the first several pages appear to frame the graphic novel as being the story of Yalos Finger — an early adopter in the personal manure pit business. The uniformity of artistic style, with characters difficult to distinguish muttering non sequiturs to themselves or whoever happens to be nearby, can make it hard to parse how one panel relates to the next. The title page claims that this volume is a faithful reconstruction of the lost work of Jug Oar (2000-2004). Presumably these are the years that Jug Oar worked on this volume of early 21st century cultural lore, but Hotel & Farm as a narrative is light on clearly described details as opposed to nonsensical logical progressions.
Hotel & Farm
Story and art by Ben Katchor
Pantheon Books; 181 pages
Yalos Finger and Jug Oar are ultimately just means to that end, since once Finger arrives at the hotel, Hotel & Farm rapidly transitions to encyclopedia style anecdotes that have almost nothing to do with each other save for the fact that they appear to be set in an alternate nonsense reality. There’s really no better way to describe just how incoherent this book is. On page 129 (odd pages are farm, even pages are hotel), we learn how breaking eggs is illegal, requiring a license from the Department of Agriculture. Technical information is then provided about egg factories alongside illustrations.
The fruit critic Gilbert Silo runs around biting
The fruit critic Gilbert Silo runs around biting malice plums, getting sick from his job, blaming insects, and then comparing plum trees to cocker spaniels. At least half the joke here, I think, is that malice plum is a strange name for a fruit. Of course, fruit names in the real world are silly too (“malus” pronounced “malice” is the scientific name for apples). Gilbert Silo’s strange ramblings are no more peculiar than, say, a podcast about red delicious apples, and Katchor presents his stories with that same sort of uninflected factual tone that only comes off as surreal if you’re making an effort to closely pay attention to what he’s actually saying rather than taking his strange progressions at face value.
Take another anecdote which goes over how leftover food was sold to pig farms. Seems simple enough. But within a few panels, the leftover food is now being sold to the poor. Then the leftovers from that are shortly taken to specialty pig farms where the pigs have human circulatory systems and are monitored for reaction to the leftovers they consume. Health reports based on those pigs are distributed back to the restaurants for consumer approval.
This agricultural detail all sounds plausible, in part because the typical reader of Hotel & Farm — like most urban residents — is unlikely to have much knowledge of how farms actually work. You might think that, given how the typical reader of this book is more likely to be familiar with hotels, that would make those sections more obviously farcical. But as it happens, bickering over the health benefits of certain fruit doesn’t feel any less like specialist knowledge than, say, a man being blinded by overly glossy magazines in a hotel gift shop, provided the documentary logic of Katchor’s serious, unamused, cartoony characters.
Katchor’s commitment to the bit even extends
Katchor’s commitment to the bit even extends to the construction of the book itself, which only offers a single, short, begrudging sentence on the back explaining who he is, and allowing the interior pages to be simply crammed full of more art. It somewhat helps to parse the nature of this comic if you know that Katchor produces it as a weekly strip appearing in certain newspapers. But only in the sense that this explains how it is produced on page by page basis, since nothing reads sequentially.
This edition doesn’t even add titles to the individual strips, despite all of them being about a single, weird subject, which can make it difficult to locate any one Katchor concept that sounds like a deranged fever dream if you want to prove to a friend that it’s actually been published.
Further impeding the use of Hotel & Farm as a casual coffee table book is the text heavy layout. The sheer verbosity of its characters is in deliberately stark contrast to how they’re all drawn to look like they’re in a hurry. Yet they never seem to actually get anywhere or do anything.
Consequently, despite being a comic book, Hotel & Farmis thick reading. It’s not the kind of story you can rush, mainly because there’s just too much going on to decode. Half the time you might be left wondering whether there even is a code. Seemor Hotel literally forces its hotel guests to appreciate the city by pumping salt water, bakery smells, and ambient city noise into its rooms. Is this a metaphor for the absurdity of hotels being treated as proxies for their own cities? Or just silliness for the sake of silliness leading to a punchline about whether people have a right to privacy when speaking to a pretzel vendor? Whatever the case may be, try to unravel Katchor’s logic at your own risk.
