Josh Hicks has worked many odd jobs in his life, which is relevant to the topic of this interview, but right now he is a Welsh animator, cartoonist and director. His work spans comics, animation and music videos. As a filmmaker, he directed Spectre of the Bear, and he helped create animated music videos for the Foo Fighters and Tyler Childers.
On the comics side, Hicks created Glorious Wrestling Alliance, a comic about the surreal world of professional wrestlers, and he’s followed that with a new graphic novel, Hotelitor: Luxury-Class Defense and Hospitality Unit, which comes out next Wednesday from Graphic Universe. It’s the story of a mobile hotel, shaped like a giant Shogun Warrior or other manga-inspired robot, and the denizens that work and stay in it. When a giant alien monster attacks the hotel, the surviving guests and staff find themselves stranded in deep space, leading to all sorts of chaos, and it’s up to 18-year-old intern Anna Greene and her fellow workers to find a way home.
It’s a fun story about giant robots and aliens, but also has deeper themes around the struggle between classes, how we think of thr service industry and late-stage capitalism. I spoke with Hicks about the project and the themes it touches on, as well as the UK wrestling scene and what he’s working on next. My thanks for his time.
How did you come to comics, both as a creator and a fan?
I always read comics as a kid. I loved everything, but I specifically remember being big into Spider-Man, Tintin and these weird British Sonic The Hedgehog comics. When Dragon Ball hit the UK, I started drifting toward manga, and then got into more alternative American and European stuff in my late teens and early 20s, which opened the door to thinking maybe I could make comics myself. I’d always drawn privately, but I then started putting out comics and never really looked back. Fast-forward 10 years and I’m drawing a sci-fi book about a giant robot that is also a hotel. I’m not sure if that’s a natural culmination of all these influences or just a symptom of mental collapse.
We’ll get into Hotelitor in a moment, but after perusing your Twitter feed, I realized you were the creator of Glorious Wrestling Alliance and I was digging some of your posts about UK wrestling. I haven’t followed it much since NXT UK shut down, but what’s the current state of UK wrestling? Who are some of your favs right now?
Thanks for perusing! One of my greatest joys in life is going to Attack! Pro Wrestling shows here in Cardiff. That’s my local. I’m friends with Mark Andrews, who runs Attack! and is also a great, great wrestler in his own right. He, Flash Morgan Webster and Dani Luna are doing amazing things here in the UK and around the world. I think Wales, specifically, has an insane amount of talent given how small a country we are. Wrestlers like Jay Joshua, Nico Angelo, Mike Hitchman, Brendan White, Danny Jones – these are great Welsh talents who would be at home at basically any big roster in the world. Everybody in the UK should feel very fortunate that we get the chance to see them ply their trade in our bars and bingo halls.
Getting us back on topic, how did your work on Glorious Wrestling Alliance (or even just being a wrestling fan in general) prepare you for a story about a giant robot hotel that fights aliens?
The whole premise for Glorious Wrestling Alliance was that it was a wrestling comic where you’d barely see any actual wrestling: it was all about the backstage dynamics and the characters’ weird idiosyncrasies and neuroses. Hotelitor is more plot-driven, but it still has that ensemble character focus – it’s about what happens to the staff and guests in this mechanized hotel when it gets trapped in space – and I really wanted to expand on the tiny amount of action I did in GWA by leaning into the giant robot fight sequences and whatnot. There’s still plenty of bickering, but it’s hopefully now drawn a little bit more dynamically. Dynamic bickering.
I think a lot of people will identify with the intern Anna and how she has to hold things together without much support from her superiors. Did you draw from your own experiences here — as a worker in general, not specifically as an intern at a robot hotel? Is she based on anyone you know?
A lot of the writing for Anna draws on my late teens and early 20s, when I was working odd jobs and unpaid work experience things to try to figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I’ve been lucky to have had a few really good jobs, but I’ve also had some stinkers. That feeling of being young, out of your depth and beholden to the whims of a middle manager on a power trip is a visceral memory for me, and that was a big jumping-off point for the book. One of my friends did work at a fancy hotel for years. He was a personal trainer, so anyone who reads the book or glances at the cover for five seconds will know which character is vaguely based on him.
Getting serious here, you do offer up some poignant points in the graphic novel about late-stage capitalism, resource hoarding and the struggles of the service industry. Was it difficult to balance that with the more light-hearted fun parts of the book?
We all contain multitudes, and as much as I love drawing jokes and fight sequences, I do also have things I want to say or work through when I’m writing. The balance for me was trying to thread those elements through the book without sacrificing any of the fun. I didn’t want it to be a didactic comic — it’s a space romp, essentially – but I also wanted it to have some depth. I do like the idea of some legitimate ideas sitting right next to some of the stupidest drawings I could come up with. Hopefully it’s a good mix!
As a bonafide fan of the cutaway drawing, I was excited to jump into Hotelier when I saw you were using them. They always remind me of the Official Marvel Handbook and those drawings Eliot R. Brown did of Wolverine’s skeleton or Avengers Mansion. Can you talk about some of your artistic influences, both for the cutaways as well as the graphic novel overall?
Yes! I am all about the cutaway. As a kid I had this book about medieval castles that was essentially one giant cutaway, and I think it left some sort of permanent imprint on my brain. I love Chris Ware comics, I love old action figure playsets. There are also tons of beautiful cutaways of Astro Boy and Ultraman and Mazinger Z out there, and those are super inspiring to look at. A lot of those classic anime and manga influences show up in the action sequences, too. Part of finding the balance we spoke about earlier was about juxtaposing the real and the potentially overwhelming with the joyful – I kind of wanted the comic to visually represent a big smorgasbord of things I love.
With Hotelitor finished and hitting stores, what are you planning on working on next?
I’m in the middle of making some projects for a younger audience – there’s a comics thing I’m working on and a book project that has an interactive element, and both of those should be announced soon. There are some parts of my brain that haven’t really changed since I was 11 years old, so writing for that age range feels like a good fit. In the shorter term, I’m just excited to get to go to comic shows and festivals with Hotelitor. I’ll be at TCAF in Toronto in May and Thought Bubble in the UK in November, and it will be fantastic to be out of the house.
Finally, if you had the opportunity, would you book a trip into space on a Hotelitor?
Sure. I’ve stayed in weirder hotels.