Hotelitor: An Interview with Author and Illustrator Josh Hicks
Welcome aboard Hotelitor: Luxury-Class Defense and Hospitality Unit. This is the finest hospitality craft in its colony, equipped with jet feet, a hyperspace engine, and single, double, and adjoining rooms. When an alien attack strands the craft in deep space, 18-year-old intern Anna Greene must save its guests from chaos!
Today comics extraordinaire Josh Hicks joins us to share his inspiration for this wacky premise, his artistic process, and some work-in-progress sketches. Read on to watch the official book trailer!
How did Hotelitor come about? What inspired the book?
A lot of my work has to do with taking quite a stupid idea and really committing to seeing it through to its logical endpoint. I’d drawn this big cutaway illustration of a giant robot hotel for some reason. One of the prints just sat in the corner of my office for ages, and after seeing it every day for a while I started dreaming up the kind of stories that the image suggested. I couldn’t really stop thinking of stuff, so Hotelitor was born.
When I’m making something I tend to try to take my stupider instincts and ground them in, like, a legitimate concern I have. For all sorts of reasons I was thinking a lot about work when I was writing Hotelitor, and was especially thinking back to the kind of anxiety and stress I felt as a young person who was about to leave school and start working for the first time. I had a few bad jobs and unpaid work experience things straight out of school (being the worst employee in game store history; getting up at 5am to file exam papers in a big warehouse; basically being an unpaid janitor for a really bad reality TV show) and I wanted to try and channel all that stuff into the medium of cathartic giant robot punching action.
Where there any specific reference points when it came to building the world of the comic?
The world of Hotelitor is kind of steeped in the stuff I love. Japanese superhero shows like Ultraman and Ultraseven, mecha anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam, old Godzilla movies, Super Nintendo games, Thunderbirds… There’s a ton of stuff I wanted to try to evoke while still making the book feel like it fit in with the rest of my work.
Most of my other comics feature a lot of people standing around talking, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could pull off my version of a proper action-packed sci-fi adventure. In terms of comics, things like Shotaro Ishinomori’s Mazinger and Umezz’s The Drifting Classroom were big influences, as were some of the American comic books I really gravitated towards when I was a teenager. Hopefully the book feels like a mix of some or all of those things, but with more jokes.
What is the most surprising thing you discovered while writing the book?
I wrote Hotelitor during the pandemic, and I think looking back on it now the most surprising thing is how much that situation subconsciously filtered into the story. I was writing it at a time when we couldn’t really leave the house, and that in itself sort of felt like being stuck in a spacecraft. Maybe the whole thing is a fantasy about what it’d be like if my house had limbs. There’s also a bizarre thing about actually kind of feeling like you’re weirdly flourishing in crisis when other people are having a really bad time of it, and there being an element of guilt involved in that. I think a bit of that bled into the book too – but hopefully in a way that is light and funny and relatable and not, like, super depressing.
How do you approach comics compared to animation?
When I’m doing stuff for animation, whether it’s a short film or a music video or whatever, I’m always trying to think cinematically, and in terms of rhythm and pacing and sound and image. There’s an element of all that in comics too, but my goal is always to do things in comics that you can’t really pull off anywhere else. That’s why I love making comics about groups of characters in one main location – you can do all sorts of things with maps and diagrams and charts and stuff that you can’t do in any other medium. I love trying to figure out ways to use design to make holding a book feel like you’ve got an entire little miniature world in your hands.
Also in animation there’s the constant issue of budget, whereas in comics you’re only limited by what you’re willing to attempt to draw. I’m not like a virtuoso action artist, so I really tried hard to get the mech fighting stuff in this book to look and feel good on the page. I didn’t necessarily want the action to feel slick – I kind of wanted the fights to feel like someone was taking big action figures and bashing them into each other. Hopefully it worked!!
What do you hope readers will learn or discover from reading your book?
If there are young adult readers that are currently as freaked out by entering the adult world as I was at that age, then I’d hope the book could give them a tiny bit of comfort or at least the sense that they’re not alone in feeling that way. That would be the highest compliment. Ultimately though my main concern was just showing readers a good time – if a someone has fun for an hour or two and gets a few laughs out of the book then I’ll feel like I did my job. It’d also be nice if at least one person successfully completed the crossword I spent ages making for the back.
Watch the Official Book Trailer!
Praise for Hotelitor
“A searing satire that cleverly lampoons the excesses and contradictions of late-stage capitalism…With wit as sharp as a laser beam, Hicks takes aim at the absurdities of our capitalist society, inviting readers to laugh along while also reflecting on the deeper issues at play.” — Geek Vibe Nation
“A fun, satirical sci-fi saga that’s big on laughs and big on ideas, all delivered with a kind of wide-eyed innocence that does well to hide its fiendishly delightful satire.” — COMICON.COM
“It’s a fun story about giant robots and aliens, but also has deeper themes around the struggle between classes, how we think of the service industry and late-stage capitalism.” — SMASH PAGES
“A journey into the absurd and hilarious… Hicks, a Welsh cartoonist celebrated for his wit and storytelling prowess, invites readers on a sci-fi adventure like no other.” — TOONS MAG
Connect with Josh
Josh Hicks is a cartoonist from Wales, UK. He has been creating comics since 2015, working with anthologies and independent publishers in the UK and self-publishing his own minicomics.
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