Him And Her's Smuggling Vacation
Posted on July 21, 2008
A facetious mosaic of lives entangled in the environment of drugs smuggling, Jason Wilson's Him And Her's Smuggling Vacation chronicles the seemingly ill-fated attempts of a bickering couple of opportunistic Brits to transport a tonne of found-cannabis from Spain to England and dodge both gangsters and customs in the process. With a title that combines an Americanism with the idiosyncratic grammar of a British colloquialism, and with a storyline that echoes English sit-com double-length specials (when, more often than not, characters are sent abroad for exotic intrigue) but told in the European style of humour cartooning, this attractive volume inevitably struggles to find a fitting tone, though is possessed of a gleeful energy.
The writing, at times, lacks guile – clunkily omniscient captions prove particularly off-putting – but the story is structurally sound-enough to withstand frequent interruptions to suspense by inane dialogue, and relief from a script that struggles to be funny is offered by pockets of sober insights and facts on the smuggling business – fuelled by crime consultant to the book, Tony Spencer. Ironically, this absence of laughs is accentuated by quality humour cartooning that outperforms the script and raises expectations. Smuggling Vacation, then, offers a decent story impressively illustrated but encumbered with a gag-deficient humour. Best light-up for this one. (Demotivational Syndrome, anyway, otherwise requires years of dispiriting toil to develop!)
A facetious mosaic of lives entangled in the environment of drugs smuggling, Jason Wilson's Him And Her's Smuggling Vacation chronicles the seemingly ill-fated attempts of a bickering couple of opportunistic Brits to transport a tonne of found-cannabis from Spain to England and dodge both gangsters and customs in the process. With a title that combines an Americanism with the idiosyncratic grammar of a British colloquialism, and with a storyline that echoes English sit-com double-length specials (when, more often than not, characters are sent abroad for exotic intrigue) but told in the European style of humour cartooning, this attractive volume inevitably struggles to find a fitting tone, though is possessed of a gleeful energy.
The writing, at times, lacks guile – clunkily omniscient captions prove particularly off-putting – but the story is structurally sound-enough to withstand frequent interruptions to suspense by inane dialogue, and relief from a script that struggles to be funny is offered by pockets of sober insights and facts on the smuggling business – fuelled by crime consultant to the book, Tony Spencer. Ironically, this absence of laughs is accentuated by quality humour cartooning that outperforms the script and raises expectations. Smuggling Vacation, then, offers a decent story impressively illustrated but encumbered with a gag-deficient humour. Best light-up for this one. (Demotivational Syndrome, anyway, otherwise requires years of dispiriting toil to develop!)