3 out of 5

A promising, if typical, setup is hoisted way above genre standards by the (no pun intended) excess spirit of its entire creative staff.

The world of Smuggling Spirits shares its template with gangster / ghost mashups like The Damned, and any given variation on the grizzled-adult-with-haunted-past-and-pestering-kid-in-tow trope: Adult Al and kid Nathan are rum runners for the various outfits in town.  When tasked on their latest fetch and discovering the keepers of the liquor still slaughtered, writer Ben Fischer’s tweak on the setup is fully laid out: At some point the “darklings” – demons – crossed over into our realm and now own the night.  And unfortunately, Al seems to be “blind” to any visual or aural reference to said darklings, requiring Nathan to negotiate around his handicap and try to keep him safe.  To be clear: Fischer does us a favor by making Nathan not the pestering type.  He’s our narrator; he speaks to his situation intelligently and poetically and doesn’t talk down to Al, despite his dangerous blindspot.  It’s a solid relationship, and one that Fischer builds really, really well for the majority of the book… until its final ten pages or so.

This is a case of a limited series that really needed some more room.  Some light, but fascinating darkling mythology is wended in, but the relatively short length of the story makes it a MacGuffin.  It also requires Ben to slather on the Conclusions and Realizations and Explanations in the ending sequence, which, as Smuggling Spirits shifts into a survivors-surrounded-in-a-bar setup, should really be much more tense than it ends up being, but the rushed nature of everything makes it one more forced detail of the escalations.  It’s truly unfortunate how quickly tension deflates thereafter, but it should be noted that Ben keeps the writing itself on par, it’s just too compressed.

The rest of the book – besides some digital blurry printing cheapness from publisher Studio 407 – really strikes an imprressive note.  Artist Mike Henderson’s scratchy black and white avoids the issue most duotone artists commit of, like, not understanding that you can’t just drop shadows in and have your two flat colors work like a regular comic page; he adapts his style effectively to tell the story in B&W, and, even better, makes it feel like this is how it should be told.  Yes, when there are many short-haired, suited men on the page, sometimes who’s who takes some tracking, but he does his diligence of putting everyone in particular hats or ties so at least we can track it.

Letterer / designer Adam Markiewicz is an important piece of this as well, impressing with his chosen fonts for various darklings (I’m normally not a fan of scratchy bubbles / lettering, but it’s perfect here) and having a good sense of when it’s okay to space your bubbles far from the speaker and still have it be clear who’s speaking.  With this skill, Henderson’s art can be uninterrupted, and thus, for that solid opening 4/5ths or so of the book, the mood is immersive.

While the flaws of the series are evident, Snuggling Spirits is also exactly the kind of indie project that makes you pay attention to those involved.  Definitely worth a read, though perhaps with some leveled expectations.