Comics Grinder

Hotel & Farm. New York: Pantheon, 2026. 181pp,  $32.00

Review by Paul Buhle

In a world of ecological collapse ongoing and constantly intensifying, the familiar division of city from countryside has long since collapsed. Or has it? Complaints in the Roman Empire of city life (in Rome itself, that is) as dirty and dangerous, but at least not as boring as the countryside, have the ring of endless truisms. And can never be out of date, for obvious reasons. Would the current speculative boom in real estate survive without Second Homes of the gentry?

The subtleties of selling manure.

Katchor, as  usual, offers readers a satire that is far beyond satire. Dwellers of his imagined metropolis yearn for “the natural world,” even when or especially when it carries the unmistakeably odor of horse manure. This particular creation of nature has a thousand uses but none more precious than its use for the merchants responsible for hauling it in, keenly aware of primary and secondary clients in a wide variety of venues. He especially pinpoints garish hotels, with equally garish staffs and customers. One gets the feeling that his own hotel experiences have perhaps not been altogether pleasing.

Katchor’s artistic trajectory can help us out here. He emerged in the 1980s-90s as a unique and helpfully enigmatic figure in the fast-changing world of comic art. One could say that comics, with a few dramatic exceptions  in its history (“Krazy Kat” would always top the list), has nearly always been a straight-forward narrative art, with stock poses and phrases in popular newspaper comics, for well over a century. Even superheroes, changing with the times—latterly identifying as nonwhite, Jewish, lesbian, etc—never went too far in the mysterious line.  When RAW magazine first appeared in 1980 and embraced the enigmatic, our then-young Katchor was a helping hand in the historic enterprise. Coeditor Art Spiegelman also proclaimed him the “most Yiddish” of comic artists, superficially one more mystery (perhaps with buried enigma) because Ben’s stories were in English, at least English of his own invented sort.

Readers of the New Yorker, during appearances as illustrator there during the 1990s, likely had their interests in his work whetted. By the time he achieved the MacArthur Award—the first of several comic artists to win that coveted prize— his status had solidified. His subsequent series of books have been snapped up, pored over. and discussed as his work continues to appear and as he became a lecturer/advisor/mentor on comics to aspiring artists at Parsons. Carrying on an extended series of interviews with artists, seen widely on YouTube, Katchor looks over the evolving, global field as he continues his own projects.

Has his work changed since Cheap Novelties (2000) and how has it changed? Let us pause and ponder. His take on the urban scene usually found him in a hall of architectural memories, seemingly an earlier twentieth century Manhattan that had survived in unattended corners, glimpsed in the windows of the small shops that used to be so common, and in the oddball people on the street or off.

Katchor, from the beginnings of his work serialized in the alternative newspapers of the 1990s, gave readers a special sense of the Yiddishkayt, Yiddishness on its way out but not quite vanished. That he should unravel stories and reveal cultural secrets of every kind, culinary or marital to choices of clothes,with details quietly hilarious, might be described as his specialty. Popular use of the Yiddish language, condemned by Jewish intellectuals in the late 19th century, nearly destroyed in the Holocaust and cursed by Hebraists after the founding of Israel, has always had a half-life. That it survives today, largely thanks to the ultra-orthodox, offers just one more enigma.

Some of Katchor’s later books after Cheap Novelties—more likely to be created by way of reprints, earlier serialization in a slightly offbeat architecture magazine—reveal a shifting locus to foreign parts, the kinds of places that the Jewish middle classes of middle age might travel for respite. These also, deeply seen with absurd names of cities, streets, restaurants and hotels, redolent of a life passing away. The traveling Jewish merchant centuries ago as much as fostered the rise of restaurants and low-priced hotels across sections of Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia.

It was, if not natural, at least logical for Katchor to have taken up formal scholarship in a unique volume more prose than pictures—a detailed, highly illustrated history of the dairy restaurant in the old world and new. Once globally known for fresh milk (the most important health claim in other times) but also for an endless series of Jewish dietary variations and also architectural variations, these remained vividly alive in his New York childhood. Now, almost  gone, they obviously live on in Katchor’s memories, marinated in layers of irony, like gefillte fish.

A never-ending process.

Hotel & Farm takes us on another geographic adventure, if perhaps no further than the exurbs of Somewhere USA….and then back to The City. A “Boys and Girls Beetroot Club” may be founded in the countryside, for instance, so that, processed and mixed with vast quantities of sour cream, borscht can be made by the tons. Or beans of some kind raised as specialty item, when cooked tasting “like the driver’s seat of an expensive automobile on a damp autumn day”  (p.67)

The never-ending search.

In this world, vegetables will always suggest meat that, served back in the city, will be rendered into obscure and repulsive dishes likely to remind vegetarian readers of their virtuous habits. And so on. Tourists will stay far enough from metropolitan city life to experience traffic, budget-priced and budget-tasting meals in a mediocre hotel that has grown progressively more dreary with the inevitable decline of architecture and services.

Katchor’s dense pages, the subject of two scholarly volumes of formal criticism or interviews and many essays, return us forcefully—if artistically, that is to say, by careful indirection—to the central issues of comic art. Is it art? Or what kind? As a comic arts teacher, he encounters students who seek to make a living with art meaningful to themselves: comics are a gambit, one more option, approached with any and all means available to them. All of which brings us back to familiar questions, reposed In useful ways by Katchor’s work.

A recent New York Times commentator on a current, prestige showing of Roy Lichtenstein’s prints remarks that in 1962, the reproduction of comic strip images as “art” seemed somehow to equate or at least to reconcile avant-garde and kitsch. Was this a belated recognition that nothing else remained for art to accomplish after Abstract Expressionism had broken up the historical narrative? Or did it say something about comics?

Thirty years later after the Lichtenstein show, at a MOMA panel, an enraged Art Spiegelman—actually on the verge of global fame that would come from Maus—denounced Pop Art for offering banal comics as banal art works. He had a point, if not one much appreciated by gallerists ever eager for revivals.

Another thirty-some years have passed, and the contested issues remain contested. Readers of Hotel & Farm will enjoy the absurd humor and the searing social critique just beneath the surface. If they are serious about comics, they might think about what questions Katchor’s art raises for the world of art at large, and our role within it.

Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.