I don’t get down to the Drawn & Quarterly store here in Montreal often enough, but when I do, there’s always something gorgeous that catches my eye. Published by Koyama Press, “Safari Honeymoon” is one of my more unusual finds – an off-kilter fable about coupledom and corruption.
Written and illustrated by Jesse Jacobs
Join a pair of young newlyweds as they descend deep into a mysterious forest, encountering unknown creatures and unimaginable landscapes. Amongst the unusual flora and fauna, they discover within themselves something more strange and terrible than any sight their safari has to offer. Safari Honeymoon is a tale of jungle love and jungle madness.
At first glance, “Safari Honeymoon” looks like the adult coloring book of your nightmares – the kind that, instead of combating stress, might suss out new worries. Bold, wiggly lines set out surreal landscapes populated by improbable monsters. In the middle of it all, a leggy couple embarks on their honeymoon, putting their trust in a guide that never sleeps.
We don’t know much about the couple, but as the story progresses, we get glimpses of their personalities. They do share a tendency toward stilted phrasing – like they grew up in a Winsor McCay comic – but the resemblances end there. The husband, balding and trigger-happy, wants nothing more than to shoot and stab his way through the jungle. The wife, meanwhile, tries to befriend almost every pop-surrealist creature they meet. Both wind up in trouble, and are saved by the guide – but the prevailing mood is one of paranoia. With parasites and poisons at every turn, you’re never really sure who’s already corrupted.
Long story short, many-legged things make frequent use of orifices in this book, and if you’re the squeamish type, some of the lowbrow body-horror elements will probably get you down. That said, the artwork is flattened by the overabundance of detail, making even the most horrifying scenes a joy to look over. There’s a decorative quality to Jacobs’ compositions – like any panel could be turned into the world’s most unsettling wallpaper.
Jacobs is particularly fond of 6×4 grids. He fills two sets of them with poisonous-looking plants, and another one with gourmet dishes. Peppered throughout the narrative, these pages slow the storytelling down but add atmosphere in spades, emphasizing the overgrowth of the jungle on the one hand and the epicureanism of the couple on the other.
The eye candy doesn’t end there. Making frequent use of grid layouts with evenly-sized panels, the moment-to-moment storytelling sometimes puts you in mind of animation. This is especially apparent when the wiggly figures show up, wandering by like herds of Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tubemen.
The most fascinating visual moment is when time starts to warp and bend around the couple. Copies of the couple (in fact visions of their future and past selves) sprawl across the page, making centipedes out of our protagonists. It’s a great splash page, both confounding and absorbing – like an existential Where’s Waldo.
I said before that “Safari Honeymoon” looked like a colouring book, but in reality somebody’s done all the work for you – the pages are mostly green, ranging from the minty variety to a grassier shade. The paper-white figures look sharp against these backgrounds, so sharp that your eyes smart. Sometimes it feels like the story is being told through night-vision goggles, like somebody’s been keeping an eye on this couple all along. The limited palette also underscores the sense of paranoia. The implication is that we aren’t getting the whole picture; that our vision of this world is suspect already.
The structure of the story as a whole could probably be tighter; it sometimes feels like, along with the reader, Jacobs gets lost in the creeping, crawling, efflorescing details of the jungle. The half-sensical utterances of a mystical being at intervals throughout the book were also lost on me. The line between psychedelic-beautiful and weird for weird’s sake is a thin one, and I’m not sure Jacobs toes it successfully.
The climax of the story involves the wife developing a streak of badassery and adapting to the ways of the jungle in surprising ways. Where it all leads I’ll leave you to discover, but the conclusion is both satisfying and oddly touching. There’s a moral here that would be easy to overstate, but it’s something about adult life, and adapting to adverse circumstances, without becoming poisonous to the people around you. It’s a timely thought as well as a hopeful one, and it makes me wish I knew some funky newlyweds, so I could wish them well with this weird book.
Overall, “Safari Honeymoon” is a quick, enjoyable jaunt. And while the nuts and bolts of the narrative might not stay with you, the imagery will – crawling around inside your eyelids like something that feeds on darkness. The good books are always parasites.
