Review: Grand Abyss Hotel

GRAND ABYSS HOTEL, a Boom Studios graphic novel releasing this week, is an instant classic. Written by Marcos Prior, illustrated by David Rubin, translated by Andrea Rosenberg and lettered by Deron Bennett, GRAND ABYSS HOTEL (GAH), dissects the political malaise of our current moment and offers up an intellectual portrait of the 21st Century“s global zeitgeist. It is not often that graphic novels ”“ or comics ”“ will delve deeply and formally into the intellectual world of Critical Theory, but somehow GAH does. And it takes this deep dive with the intentionality of an Olympic athlete and the articulative aplomb of an emeritus professor.

GRAND ABYSS will expand readers“ vocabularies ”“ intellectual, theoretical, visual and otherwise. It“s not without fault ”“ nothing is, but there is nothing else like this book on anyone“s comic book shelf at the moment. It will remind more experienced readers of V FOR VENDETTA and at times, (sometimes deliberately so), it will look a bit like WATCHMEN, but GRAND ABYSS is a classic graphic novel of our making. It represents an extension of the discourses of Critical Theory visually applied to the politics of populism in a dystopic future version of our world that is reflected in nightmarish, utterly credible ways.

The prologue to the graphic novel, “Room 307”“ finds a mysterious figure lifting weights in a workout that appears to be both routine and of an intense purpose. As he grunts his way through his workout, a series of talking head screen-shot panels and text boxes inform readers of this world“s current state of affairs. “Health care cuts,”“ tax cuts for the rich, slashing school budgets, increasing public utility costs, the dismantling of organized labor, and the rise of “bittercoin”“ give readers a foreboding sense of familiarity with GAH“s world. It“s a quick world-build done in the talking head style that has become familiar with these kinds of groundbreaking political works in the graphic novel form.

And yet somehow GAH distinguishes itself from its classic predecessors. The mysterious figure becomes the “animator”“ and the masked face of the revolution. He almost singlehandedly transforms a protest into what the government considers a violent (and fiery) act of terrorism. As bad as GAH“s government is, they are not wrong here. And that“s one of the elusive points of the graphic novel ”“ the remarkably subtle dissolution of our accepted political binaries ”“ right-left, conservative-liberal, democracy-dictatorship. These models cannot hold in a world where neo-liberal market ideologies displace politics and governance itself.

This review is already in the weeds. The title, “Grand Abyss Hotel”“ is a crafty play on a phrase ”“ “Grand Hotel Abyss”“ used by Georg Lukacs in 1962 to express his disappointment and disillusionment with the renown Frankfurt School of critical theorists. The Frankfurt School (https://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur/) originally consisted of a group of German Jewish intellectuals who established the early tenets of Critical Theory (CT). CT focused on philosophical critiques of capitalism and a deliberate embrace of social liberation.

But the school“s critics ”“ like Georg Lukacs ”“ believed that its members were more talk (or thought) than action. The “Grand Hotel Abyss”“ became an architectural figure for the privileged space that Frankfurt School thought leaders occupied as they thought about revolution and watched the erosion of liberty in the face of capitalism, populism, and fascism.

This is heady stuff for a comic book, even a graphic novel produced in Europe and translated into English. But do not mistake this review“s enthusiasm for the intellectual force of this work for an absence of aesthetic (visual) excellence in the work. David Rubin“s artwork is absolutely stunning and rendered in such exquisite detail that at times the book churns along with images sans any text. These are some of the most captivating reading experiences to be had in any genre. Sometimes these series of wordless panels will compel readers to engage in such a way that they might lose their place on the page and in the book.

Some of you may not have heard of Deron Bennett, one of the most gifted letterers in the comic book industry. Here his gifts are on full display as the variation and font/articulation in lettering becomes yet another extraordinary tool of storytelling in this vividly crafted bleak version of our future. GRAND ABYSS HOTEL isn“t for everybody. Its allusions are thick and its lexicon will force you to use your mind and the dictionary. Do you know (”˜off top“) what a plebiscitary democracy is? It’s not for everybody. But it is about everyone ”“ all of us in this world and in this time. And it asks the question that ”“ if we are lucky ”“ we might have to answer for our grandchildren someday. What did you do . . . when the world was burning down? 5/5

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

(W) Marcos Prior (A/CA) David Rubin