Review by Frank Plowright

Hotel Limbo isn’t quite an anthology as Ben Harel writes every story, with each illustrated by a different artist, although Harel has a firm view of his preferred visual aesthetic, which is variations on Tim Burton’s animation for The Nightmare Before Christmas. So many of the artists work in a scratchy style with elongated figures. It provides continuity at the cost of variety as so many also only feature figures and coloured backgrounds.

All concern a bellboy at the Hotel Limbo in Purgatory where souls gather before moving onwards to their final fate. He remains just the Bellboy as the staff don’t have names, and much of the first third of a long graphic novel concerns him coming to terms with being dead, meeting the other staff and feeling his way around, The whimsy lever is set to max and Harel takes a long time to impart very little basic information or story.

Once that’s out of his system and we start meeting people arriving in Purgatory there’s a slight improvement for hearing their desires and experiences, but decompressed storytelling is a habit Harel never drops. It means that unless you really buy into his form of narrative Hotel Limbo rapidly wears out its welcome.

It would all be more tolerable if the art had some variety, or some professionalism, which is lacking in too many cases. The online aliases most artists employ suggest Harel’s sourced enthusiastic amateurs himself, and so many have a raw talent crying out for someone to offer some guidance. By virtue of contributing more pages than most, the sample art is the work of Kingsada, who’s slightly more imaginative than many, but whose pages have the look of preliminary layout sketches with added colour. To give credit where it’s due, though, of artists contributing more than a single page, Amet, Fennko and Kalanit Saidon show greater promise and creativity than the remainder.

The Bellboy isn’t content to take the rules as read, and the story gradually becomes his efforts to discover more about Purgatory and to help new residents shed their burdens. Unfortunately, due to the protracted storytelling and substance never superseding whimsy, any potential is squandered. Hotel Limbo has enthusiasm, but it’s extremely hard going for little reward.