Safari Honeymoon is a not-safe-for-kids graphic novel by Jesse Jacobs, the author of Even the Giants and By This You Shall Know Him and also a repeat contributor to the popular cartoon Adventure Time. Much like these other media he has worked on, the novel is a strange mix of the melancholy and the bizarre. Be warned- this is not a book to pick up if you’re looking for something that makes complete sense.
Still with me? Okay, cool. The primary plot of Safari Honeymoon is all in the title; an arrogant man and a naive woman go on a honeymoon to a wildly overgrown jungle with a hyper competent tour guide. All seems to be going well, but they soon discover that the jungle they have taken a vacation to is a lot more dangerous than it looks. It’s crawling with parasites and predators, and nearly everything in it is poisonous. The events that take place are told through a combination of faux-nature show narration and a more conventional comic style.
This synopsis really doesn’t do the novel justice, however. The real draw to it is that the jungle the newlywed couple has traveled to is as surreal as it is horrifying. A small beast eats and replaces the tour guide’s tongue and a centipede crawls into the man’s brain at one point, and this is only what happens at the very beginning. A certain taste will be required to stomach this as a reader, but those in the right mindset are in for a real treat as things get progressively weirder and the coherency of the novel itself begins to unravel.
Helping this along is a unique art style that builds atmosphere. The humans are drawn to be simplistic and familiar most of the time, but their environment is detailed and alien. The book favors greenish blue hues, but several colors are used to represent hallucinations and other psychological oddities. As the jungle reveals itself as more and more dangerous, some legitimately clever moments crop up that experiment with the established style for varying effects, and the whole experience is wonderfully disorienting for readers, who will no doubt find themselves perplexed, but pleasantly so. The mind-boggling nature of the novel does not feel contrived, but purposeful.
From start to finish, the entire novel is a trippy treat. Even the physical book itself does away with conventional pleasantries on either of its inside covers, lending further credit to the idea that what the reader holds in their hands is truly absurd and incomprehensible.
