Tom Speelman | December 3, 2024
The title of Smoking Kills is somewhat misleading. From it, you expect some sort of long-winded PSA against cigarettes and/or vaping or perhaps some sort of ironic endorsement ala the Reefer Madness musical. The actual story Dutch cartoonist/animator Thjis Desmet presents is neither of these. Instead, it’s a story far smaller in scope and focus yet far more existential in its probing, resulting in a funny, captivating read.
The book chiefly follows Skeleton, a humanoid figure in a hoodie and skull mask/jumpsuit (not unlike the title character of Les McClane’s currently paused adventure webcomic Jonny Crossbones, albeit one with a more Munchian influence), who suddenly wakes up on an abandoned train platform all alone save for Ghost.
Ghost, like Casey Affleck’s character in David Lowery’s 2017 film A Ghost Story, is rendered in the classical “guy under a sheet” style. Decidedly surly and almost constantly drunk, Ghost also loves to smoke (despite not having a visible mouth) and gets frequently admonished by Skeleton with the phrase that gives us our title. Despite quickly finding him irritating for both that and his refusal to believe that they’re dead and in the afterlife, Ghost begrudgingly lets Skeleton follow him around as they do things like steal from a liquor store, try to move a beached whale in the middle of a dead forest (easily the funniest sequence in the book, particularly through how it ends), deal with more heroic doppelgangers of themselves and other misadventures. While initially feeling a little meandering, the reader quickly gets used to both Ghost’s cranky charm and Skeleton’s quiet optimism as much as they do to the other. It’s like watching the formation of a Millennial Bert and Ernie. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s like if J.G. Quintel had been allowed to take the harder-edged comedic sensibilities evident in the late, great Close Enough and his student films and could apply them to the outlandish world of Regular Show. But y’know, in the afterlife.
When read all in one setting, this reads not so much as a conventional Eurocomic (with any pretensions or allusions to high art assumed) so much as some sort of strange comics answer to Waiting for Godot. By that, I mean our perspective is (save for one brief setpiece involving heroic versions of themselves ala early Adventure Time) entirely isolated to either Ghost or Skeleton or just the two of them.
Despite existing in a very different mode of storytelling from Smoking Kills, I surprisingly found myself thinking of Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, of all things. For all that Enid and Rebecca clung to each other until they didn’t, there was always a sense by Clowes that the community of their particular suburban wasteland had thoughts about them (usually negative) and their interactions with Enid and Rebecca provided some outside perspective to bring the book into a wider focus and make the reader question what the main characters were telling them.
Desmet doesn’t do that and the book is ultimately better for it in the sense that such isolation develops our duo better. Ghost turns out to both be a misanthropic alcoholic and someone both desperately lonely and afraid of getting close to people. Skeleton is both a sweet optimist and an adventurous sort.
Furthermore, it’s noticeable that Desmet weaves his story with a remarkable lack of stuffiness, using deliberately unconventional tools (mainly coloring pencils and markers, though one striking portion is rendered entirely via crayon) to great effect.
Far too often in their history, independent/alternative comics (American or European but mostly American) tend to be defined by an opposition to the mainstream. Traditionally, that has meant outlandish action or costumed characters of any sort, although these days "mainstream" creators like Tynion IV, North, Hickman, Kirkman, etc. tend to pull from a broader palette of genres, at least in books for publishers like Image and Boom, while still keeping a foot in the superhero game.
But as someone raised on newspaper comics and a diet of 90s-2000s superhero stuff before (wisely and thankfully) expanding my palette as I got older who loves going back to historical examples of all kinds of comics, it’s not hard to read, say, Pekar or Crumb and come away thinking they felt a certain (well-deserved!) resentment at cape comics’ sales and cultural dominance.
All that said, Desmet could’ve easily gone down that route and dredged up the same hoary arguments we’ve all been having since us comics cognoscenti first formed but noticeably doesn’t. Instead, he plucks his work out of that conversation and just lets his characters be themselves, with Skeleton’s fundamental niceness and optimism balancing against Ghost’s alcohol-curdled cynicism.
Even when the story does briefly dip into more conventional action ala the above-mentioned sequence involving heroic versions of Ghost and Skeleton versus a demon, Desmet still sticks to his established tone. That is to say, the action sequence is like the rest of the book: rendered noticeably absurd, albeit with the same heightened focus on character. Even when things get decidedly metaphysical for Skeleton (In a stunning, mostly wordless sequence), we never lose sight of who he is or Ghost’s slowly melting opposition to him.
While not breaking entirely new ground here (if the artwork had been a bit more conventional and the pacing a bit quicker, one could easily imagine Image or Dark Horse publishing it) Desmet still has made something that is pretty special.
English (US) · 