Jason's Death In Trieste

Jason's latest collection of short stories, Death In Trieste, once again finds the cartoonist doing deep-dive riffs into art history, pop culture, and pulp fiction. The result is something of a mixed bag. His work is always a pleasure to look at, as the smooth pen strokes and precise lettering, combined with his trademark, stripped-down, anthropomorphic character design, provide unwavering fun. As always, his sense of humor is deadpan mixed with slapstick, and he usually manages to mix in the essence of what he's riffing on into the jokes themselves.

For example, take the first story, "The Magritte Affair." The plot is an absurd detective farce as there's a surrealist crime wave of break-ins where men wearing bowler hats and masks install perfect duplicates of René Magritte paintings for some sinister purpose. They are opposed by the intrepid investigator duo of Mira Bell and Bob Delon, who look into a rash of mysteriously disappearing artists and more Miro-related crimes. Along the way, Jason does a deep dive into Miro's actual career as an artist, which includes a stint as a counterfeit painter. Like many Surrealists (of which Miro was a tangential member, at best), Miro's work was about the uncanny juxtaposition, designed to provoke a deeply emotional reaction. Surrealist work stems from and is aimed at the subconscious. Jason rolled with this concept as the mastermind behind the crimes used hypnosis and other techniques to brainwash his minions into obeying him by breaking them of their rational wills. It's a clever idea that sets up a conflict, like all action stories, that is settled with a fistfight (and a big fish). 

The titular story takes Jason's mash-up formula and gives it a tremendous sense of depth. It centers around the Dada movement in Berlin in the 1920s, but it also involves Rasputin (and his decapitated head, in particular), Nosferatu, David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, and a cameo from the seemingly immortal Athos, the Musketeer who has appeared in a number of Jason's books. Bowie gets mixed up with some Dada guys doing a routine with one of their members angrily "denouncing" the nonsense poetry of someone on stage, and getting into a fistfight. Bowie, in full Ziggy Stardust garb, is clearly a time-traveling secret agent of some kind, but he stays in Berlin for a bit and has a romance with Dietrich. Nosferatu's head is used in an arcane ceremony that predicts the Holocaust, and ghosts from the future haunt the man who invoked these images. There is a real sense of despair & joy, uncertainty & possibility, that is palpable on the page and emblematic of Berlin between the wars. There is enormous clarity in Jason's figure drawing here; they are still in his style, but also unmistakably capture the essence of the historical figures he evokes. It's a balance of assuming the reader knows something about these figures with just enough historical context to make it enormously satisfying. 

This is why the third story, "Sweet Dreams," doesn't work. The conceit is amusing--what if a bunch of 80s New Wave bands had super powers and were secretly government operatives?--but there's no resonance. Here, Jason had to actively identify that some of his characters were members of X-Ray Specs and the Eurhythmics, because it wasn't immediately clear. This felt more like a Grant Morrison comic than a typical Jason comic, in part because Jason doesn't go into any depth as to why any of these musicians were important or interesting. His anthropomorphic style worked against him as well; it took me awhile (and some context clues) to identify Boy George, for example. There's a fine line between a personal in-joke and a niche but inherently funny concept. Jason made this work the first two times in Death In Trieste, but returning to that well not only wasn't funny, it also made the apocalyptic ending fall flat. 

Jason's Upside Dawn

Having read Jason's entire output, I've found that his most interesting comics are those that follow his current cultural influences into ridiculous flights of fancy. The Left Bank Gang (imagining the Lost Generation writers as cartoonists) and Goodnight, Hem (imagining Ernest Hemingway as a sort of real-life action hero) are two of his best, but I've also enjoyed the way he's managed to insert the immortal Musketeer Athos into a number of his comics. The eternally deadpan way he draws his anthropomorphic characters just seems to make more sense when he's riffing on something that interests him. In particular, his delight in mixing high and low art never fails to amuse. 

His newest collection of short stories, Upside Dawn, is a pretty big one, with 17 stories. Jason seems to be working shorter and snappier, not allowing his high concepts to wear out their welcome. The result is maybe my favorite Jason book since I Killed Adolph Hitler and The Left Bank Gang, which had the twin appeal of novelty and sharp conceptual gags. Absurdism is a running theme in this book, and the opening story, "Woman, Man, Bird" is a sort of tribute to absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco. It's a story of a man and woman meeting for a date at a restaurant called "Eugene's," and their small talk is solipsistic to the point of ridiculousness, as neither perceives or responds to what the other says as their visual representations also become increasingly bizarre. One of Ionesco's themes is the impossibility of communication via language, and this piece is a marvelous visual representation of this concept, particularly in the end of his play The Bald Soprano. Speaking of which, in Jason's short story "Ionesco," that play is mistakenly referred to as "The Bald Prima Donna" by a documentarian-type figure, who becomes increasingly irrelevant in the absurd story that revolves around bananas and a shifting, imaginary figure from his past named Bobbie Watson. It's fitting that Jason should be drawn to this play in particular, given that the Romanian Ionesco wrote it while learning English, and of course, English is not Jason's native language. 

The second story, "Perec, PI," imagines the OuLiPo writer and filmmaker known for his use of constraints as a private investigator getting mixed up in a byzantine murder investigation, but his hard-boiled narration is clipped of the endings of the sentences. It's a funny way of thwarting reader expectations in panel after panel. "I Remember" seems to be a bit of self-indulgent nostalgia until it builds into something more far-reaching without breaking stride or changing tone.  "Vampyros Dyslexicos" is a retelling of the old "Carmilla" vampire story that works really hard to get at the gag suggested in the title. Death being frustrated by a juvenile knight (as played by Max von Sydow) in "Seal VII" and storming off is another great gag based on a familiar bit of cinema. Jason mashes up Kafka and The Prisoner, adding a level of tedious bureaucracy to the mysterious goings-on in the Village. 

Mash-ups are a dime-a-dozen, but what sets these apart is his unrelenting commitment to his deadpan style of humor, frequent use of silent pauses, and a highly deliberate and slow pace--even in adventure strips. Some of the stories are reframed versions of classics like "Crime and Punishment," but one of my favorites was reimagining "Ulysses" as a murder mystery thriller. Seeing Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as action heroes was hilarious, while Jason elides actual action scenes with blackout panels labeled things like "fight scene" or "sex scene." Jason is often less interested in the content of particular works and is more interested in form, like in "What Rhymes With Giallo?", a spoof on the bloody Italian horror films of the 70s done with a Dr. Seuss-like rhyming scheme. 

The back part of the book is the most sentimental in many ways, as he digs deep into his oldest pop culture loves. "The City Of Lights, Forever" reimagines the old Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever," only this time it's Spock who travels to Montparnasse in 1925 to become a painter. This era has been one of Jason's running interests for much of his career, and there's kind of a sweet sentimentality in this story about Spock loving cats, painting the famous model Kiki, and a cameo by Athos. "Who Will Kill The Spider?" adds some spot primary colors in what at first seems to be a kids' story but has a punchline that is something entirely different. "One Million And One Years, B.C." is one of the more straightforward entries, notable mostly for Jason drawing dinosaurs. 

"E.C. Come..." and "...E.C. Go" are both tributes to the classic horror and science-fiction comics from EC with frequent twist endings. The former is about a stage magician whose murder of his assistant/wife has unexpected consequences, and the latter is about a crew of astronauts who arrive on a world that surprises them with its (literal) homeyness. These are entirely straightforward stories in this style, just done in Jason's distinctive hand and voice. "From Outer Space" is a classic two-track narrative story. The visual narrative consisted of scenes from the classic B-movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space," but the textual captions were apparently a personal account of a bad acid trip. The effect it created was pleasantly bizarre, given how nonsensical the film is and how an acid trip can scramble meaning and the ability to communicate. Of course, this is a running theme throughout the collection. 

Finally, "Etc." is a collection of one or two-page gags that are a melange of pop music, movies, Athos the Musketeer, and Death. Death hiding from the immortal Athos was an especially funny gag. It's stuff that Jason has been drawing since the beginning of his career and material that he continues to mine for comedic content. What sets this collection apart from his other work is the fact that he left a lot of it behind in favor of branching out to new inspirations while still retaining his core sense of humor. The final image of the book, an absurd image of "Sartre Night Fever," sums Jason up: high and low, absurd and refined, deadpan and silly. 

Moving Red Herrings: Lost Cat

Jason's new book Lost Cat is a metahomage to Phillip Marlowe and The Big Sleep, aware of its roots even as it refers to them and ultimately moves beyond them. There are any number of superficial similarities to Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel (subsequently immortalized by Humphrey Bogart in the film version): a missing person, a shady bookstore, a jealous boyfriend, an old man calling a detective, a nude photo, the detective getting beaten up, etc. Those are all misdirects. A closer look at the book reveals a certain structural similarity. The Big Sleep was a novel that was actually a fusion of two previously-published short stories by Marlowe. He combined two plots involving blackmail, missing persons and danger into one famously convoluted story. Similarly, Lost Cat is really two separate stories. The first involves the detective (Dan) finding a lost cat and returning it to its owner, a woman named Charlotte. Dan is drawn to her and asks her out to dinner. When she never shows, he tries to track her down, finding a series of dead ends, complications, lies and mysteries. The second story involves Dan getting hired by a supposedly dying old man to find a nude painting of his lost love. This involves more lies, double-crosses, betrayals, faked deaths, and beatings. Occasionally, the two storylines intersect in interesting ways.

However, that structural similarity is functional but still not quite what Jason seems to be really interested in regarding Marlowe. Indeed, Marlowe was less interested in plot than he was in character and mood. Famously, one character in The Big Sleep is killed but his murderer was never revealed. When the screenwriters who were adapting his book called him up to ask him who it was, he said he had no idea. He simply didn't care. While Jason's had some interesting high concepts and plots in his own works, they've always been secondary to the restrained, quiet tensions in the relationships he creates. In Lost Cat, Dan starts to have imaginary conversations with his object of affection as he is thrown for a loop by her disappearance and the set of facts that just don't seem to add up. The actual revelation of who she really is and where she went is a hilarious twist, one that's foreshadowed in ridiculous fashion a couple of times in the book but seems too ridiculous to be true. Jason gets at the idea that the actual story is less important than this lonely detective's yearning. Indeed, some of the funniest scenes involve this tough guy sitting around, waiting for the time to roll around so he can go to meet her at dinner.

As always, the humor and emotion shown in this book of Jason's typical anthropomorphic animal characters is strictly deadpan. Their dry and blank expressions nonetheless contain a wellspring of emotions reflected by the artist in the way he stretches out story beats for what seems to be a panel or two too long; that tension echoes the discomfort felt by the characters. Dan gets off quips (often while being beaten up) and manages to pick up a woman in a bar, but rejects her after he sees that she doesn't have books, unlike Charlotte's home and bookstore. There's also a strong sense of humanity running in this book, as Dan visits the comatose son of his secretary in a scene that reveals this tidbit in an offhanded manner. It's a quick, quiet subversion of the noir detective trope, done in much the same way Jason manages to both celebrate and satirize the genres he happens to be working with at any given time. It's a little dispiriting to know that this is the last book Jason worked with Kim Thompson on at Fantagraphics. His books will continue to be translated and published (they're very popular), but Thompson championed him and it was one of the great triumphs of his publishing career that Jason became such a success in the US and worldwide.Some credit must go to Thompson's particular style of translation, which favored translating vernacular rather than a strict word-for-word translation. This gave Jason's books an immediate sense of familiarity to a reader, especially since the genres he works in are familiar to any reader. There's no question that Jason is still at the top of his game, producing works that are funny but sensitive. They are comics that explore relationships, desires and loneliness above all else and the lengths we will go to in order to combat our feelings of being alone. In the case of Lost Cat, Dan would rather retreat into his fantasy world than face the harsh reality of betrayal.

Sequart Reprints: Living and the Dead, Grave Robber's Daughter, House, HWY 115

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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Fantagraphics isn't exactly known as the go-to publisher for horror or suspense comics. Yet they've released a number of comics over the years that fall into these categories, albeit usually in a skewed or off-beat manner. Thomas Ott's scratchboard comics can't be considered anything but horror comics. Richard Sala works entirely within the mystery/horror realm, albeit with an eccentric sense of humor. Even Charles Burns' Black Hole explicitly uses monster-movie trappings to get at its deeper meanings. The fact is, Fantagraphics has never been afraid to publish genre comics, just so long as the works are intelligent and the result of an author's personal vision.

In recent months, Fantagraphics has published several comics that all lie in the horror-suspense continuum. However, each volume is completely different in terms of tone, style and intent. They range from zombie romance comedies to killer clown mysteries to the exploration of a spooky old house to detectives trying to track down a serial killer in a very strange world. Notably, all of them are in black-and-white; this is no surprise because there's no better way to get across the starkness of terror than by depicting it in the starkest of terms. Where each artist excels is in how they compose the page to guide the story, and the sort of linework they employ.

Let's begin with the most lighthearted of the four comics I'll be discussing, Jason's The Living And The Dead. This is a clever little tale by the fantastic Norwegian cartoonist, for whom genre boundaries don't seem to exist. No matter what kind of story he tells, he always uses his stripped-down, clear-line, funny-animal style in his comics. Amazingly, it works every time, acting as a very quick shorthand for the reader to instantly understand any situation. For his funny comics, his standard characters often wind up interacting with more outlandish caricatures (like Darth Vader, Indiana Jones or the Terminator). In his serious comics, their deadpan nature keeps the audience on edge. For a tale of zombies, it's perfect.

Like most good zombie stories, this book is really about something else. In a brilliant opening page when we're trying to find out who the protagonist is, we see a couple dining at a restaurant. We then see a waiter and the next panel focuses on him, so we learn the couple is not important. The waiter walks into a kitchen, past some cooks—it's not their story, either. Finally, we settle upon the dishwasher, who is clearly not happy to be there, and we learn that the story focuses on him. Walking home, he encounters a sweet-seeming prostitute whom he immediately falls for. Working up the courage to talk to her another night, he realizes that he won't have the money to pay for her services for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, a meterorite falls to earth in a graveyard and the dead walk again—just as our hero was ready to see his woman.

From there, he saves her from a zombie in the nick of time, and they run around town trying to get away from the undead. There are small moments of grim humor to go with whacking zombies in the head with axes or setting them on fire. The climax of the story is too good to give away, but suffice it to say that romance lives on even beyond the grave. The story overall is a nice confection: it doesn't linger in one's imagination as long as some of Jason's best work (especially his recent The Left Bank Gang), but it's still fun. While there are plenty of zombie-munching scenes, Jason's open layout and wit allows the reader to laugh at the scenes easily. He only uses 6 panels a page (with one notable exception towards the end), an approach that allows the reader to easily approach the work and almost race across each page.

Richard Sala's The Grave Robber's Daughter is a nasty comic with periodic moments of comic relief thanks to its heroine, Judy Drood. This young detective with a foul mouth accidentally stumbles upon a small town that seems eerily empty. It's empty with the exception of the town carnival, where she stumbles upon some extra-creepy clowns and smartassed teenagers. Nothing seems to make much sense until she runs into Nellie, a young girl on the run who's trying to dodge the clowns. Seems as though one night they rode into town, hypnotized every adult into coming to the fairgrounds...and then made them disappear. Nellie gets kidnapped when Judy nods off, and Judy is left to deal with one of the grotesque clowns. Judy clubs the thing in the head with a shovel and the remains of a corpse are revealed.

The story takes several twists and turns after that as we learn what the clowns really are, who brought them to life and why, and the ultimate fate of the town and Nellie. Witchcraft, curses, soul reanimation and teen angst gone amok are all involved, but the creepiest page of all is the final one, as we see Nellie changing into something very disturbing—and clearly influenced in part by Judy's own bad habits. Sala's panel design is an important part of the storytelling. The use of just a couple of panels a page in the early going, often catty-corner to each other, is a nice reflection of the town's isolation and Judy's disorientation. Like Jason, Sala also uses a stripped-down style, but this book resembles the art in a child's adventure book: the faces range from simple and iconic (often with dots for i's) to grotesque and cartoonish. This makes for some jarring moments when we are presented with grisly acts of violence. What I like most about this comic is that while mysteries are revealed and the case is "solved", there's no real resolution. The eccentricities in Sala's style and the Judy Drood character in particular are a perfect match for the horrors he reveals. The reader is never quite sure whether to laugh, cringe or both.

Josh Simmons' House is in many ways the most straightforward of the works reviewed in this article. There's no overt element of the supernatural at work here, and Simmons further restricts himself by making the story entirely wordless. I've been reading Simmons' minicomics and associated series for some years now. The best way to describe them is earthy: they're bawdy and often dedicated to exploring the lives of those on society's fringes. In House, he plugs in a teenage love triangle into an increasingly claustrophobic scenario that's a masterpiece of page design. More than any of the other books reviewed here, House could only work as a comic.

The opening sequence is quite memorable: a teenage boy comes across a ramshackle house in a forest clearing. After looking at it for a moment, he walks away from it to meet his friends at the real "house" in the story: a huge, magnificent relic of a building. Simmons takes a couple of pages to let the reader see just how impressive a structure it is. Meeting two female friends of his, the trio seems quite prepared for an adventure: they have headlamps and backpacks with supplies. Going through the ruins of the house, they discover that part of it is completely underwater. It's a spectacular scene, and loves blossoms between the boy and one of the girls—much to the chagrin of the other girl.

This long exposition sets up the action in the second part of the story. One of the girls almost falls down a flight of stairs in the dark, but the boy saves her in the nick of time. That save is yet another false take, as the stairs collapse under the weight of another girl. It's not long before the trio is separated—partly by circumstance, partly by jealousy, and partly by hallucination (or is it something else?). Simmons draws the reader into the ultimate nightmarishness of the scenario through his composition and use of black. The story starts off brightly, often with single-page splash panels. As the adventure begins, it goes into 3 panels per page—until we reach the secret passage that precedes the collapse of the stairs, when it becomes a 6-panel grid. When the characters are separated, it changes into a 9-panel grid. Towards the very end, as the characters are alone and in the dark, it becomes a 12-panel grid. By that time, every panel is engulfed in darkness, reflecting the desperation and hopelessness of the situation. This is a comic that's tautly and cleverly constructed. Its goals are modest in terms of narrative and themes, but it's a pleasure to see how Simmons takes a familiar set of elements and wrings real desperation out of them.

Finally, there's Matthias Lehmann's disturbing HWY 115. We are thrust right into the plot on the story's first page: there's a serial killer on the loose named Robert Illot who has escaped from his psychiatric hospital. His MO for killing his victims is to stuff unusual objects down their throats. He's already struck again, having forced a roast chicken down some unfortunate person's gullet. We then meet our hero, a detective who's trying to find Illot on Hwy 115, his choice of locale for his killings. The detective picks up a woman who's also looking for Illot, and she has a notebook filled with contacts. The whole book has a feverish sort of dream logic from the very beginning, as its never explained how the woman got this notebook or why she was on the side of the road. From there, they travel from place to place in order to talk to people who knew Illot at the institution. Two things happen in every case: we are told of a story that Illot told them where he's a young boy alone in a house, and someone is killed by means of some device that the detective had just heard about in that segment of the story. In particular, these items provided comfort to the young boy in the story, odd as they were. And without exception, they were stuffed down throats of their victims: a stapler, a bunch of lightbulbs, a huge beetle, a sock, etc.

The story has a curiously static feel to it. The detective is constantly in the dark even as he does all the legwork. He starts to wonder where talking to all of these people is leading to but feels compelled to keep doing it. The people he meets grow progressively more disturbing, until he finally meets the last person on the list. He tells the detective the last part of the little boy's story that Illot told him, and at that moment the two narratives converge suddenly, unexpectedly and violently. This leads to a final twist that is never explained but rather strongly hinted at throughout the story, making us question the sanity of more than one character and reality as it is presented in the narrative.

The tension in the story is ratcheted up through the use of Lehmann's manic scratchboard style. This gives each panel a sort of frenzied & neurotic energy, heightened even further by the unsettling events that Lehmann depicts. This story is about loops and feedback, and the new realities that result from such feedback. Lehmann is fascinated by the grotesque, and it's no coincidence that we never see Illot actually do anything bad until the end of the story. Instead, we relive the gruesome killings of those who knew him, each of them driven to kill by the circumstance of their own insanity (or so it seems). Lehmann is able to get some humor out of some of the situations (like a driver who picks up the detective and the woman), but the story is really just one long nightmare—and it's not clear that anyone gets to wake up from it.

That nightmare reality, the transformation of everyday reality into something horrible, is what these books are about. In The Living and the Dead, the protagonist embraces the nightmare. In The Grave Robber's Daughter, one character escapes from the nightmare and another character becomes it. In House, all three characters struggle but have to limply succumb to darkness. In HWY 115, the trick is not knowing where the nightmare starts and reality stops, because the ground shifts constantly for our hero. All of the artists involved are quite adept in manipulating fear for their audience.

Sequart #150: Pocket Full Of Rain

This post was originally published at sequart.com in 2008.


Jason is one of my favorite cartoonists, a master of pitch, tone and composition. His comics are simultaneously hilarious and tinged with sadness, a balance achieved in part through his use of a "funny animal" motif. That anthropomorphic use of animals accomplishes three things: it creates a certain reader expectation of silliness, it allows him to subvert that expectation with the use of horror, drama or slice-of-life situations, and it allows him a free hand to inject weirdness into the proceedings without breaking the flow of the story. In Pocket Full Of Rain, we see his earliest strips, many of which were done using a more realistic style. This book is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, especially in seeing Jason as a younger cartoonist cycling through his influences, trying his hand at various genres and riffing on his personal obsessions.



What's interesting in reading this is that an observer of the artist can see that Hey...Wait, his first work in English published by Fantagraphics, is really a transition point between his earliest work and what he's doing now. Jason has since moved away from that kind of story, but it's clear that his career was leading him up to that point. The title story in this collection is his longest earliest work and bears many hallmarks of his later, more mature style. There's a doomed relationship, an air of danger settling in on it, a heavy dose of weirdness, slipping between reality and fantasy (sometimes from panel to panel) and a liberal sprinkling in of pop culture references. In many ways, it's a brilliant story, with the central love story having an aching resonance. There's an exuberance to the imagery that Jason uses, but there's also a certain stiffness to the art at times. That doesn't just come across just in terms of action, but it also brings a certain unwanted emotional slickness to the proceedings as well. The central villain is much more fearsome when he suddenly has the head of a wolf, for example, but when you compare this to future Jason stories, the decorative aspects of his art almost interfere with his emotional narrative.



It's interesting to read the many autobiographical or semiautobiographical strips in this collection. We see stories about potential romantic opportunities missed, insane landlords, growing old, losing hair, not getting into art school, etc. There's a funny early strip where Jason is talking to an anthropomorphic friend coming up with lists of annoying people who should die, which ends with Jason getting shot by a character who showed up in many of the book's other strips, shooting random people. There's an insane action story called "Invasion of the Giant Snails" which reminds me a bit of Gilbert Hernandez in its zany tone and what Jason Lutes' art would look like years later in Berlin. Jason himself notes that he was going for a David Mazzucchelli vibe. This comes in a section dedicated to influences, as we see an X-Files take-off, a Basil Wolverton pastiche, a Hugo Pratt parody and a strip about Ernest Hemingway. None of this is what I'd call top-drawer work, but it is interesting to see him work through these influences and put his own stamp on their styles.



The section that reprints some newspaper strips he wrote is fascinating because his Charles Schulz influence is in such strong evidence here. The pacing, the punchlines, the surreal subversion of expectations and more are in evidence as we meet a cast consisting of a ball-and-chain convict, a sentient cactus, and sheet-wearing ghosts. The best gag involves the convict pulling aside a curtain at a polling both, and the cactus pulling aside the curtain on the other side--wearing a wig and brandishing a knife ala Psycho. These strips are hilarious and were an obvious starting point for his simultaneously silly and deadpan style that mixed in timeless gags with pop culture obsessions. The final strips are a clear lead-in to Hey...Wait in that they mix oblique symbology, an obsession with mortality and a certain lurking dread. The main difference is that he uses a sort of warped realistic style, with oversized heads and distorted facial figures. Once again, the art slightly deflects what he is trying to convey emotionally. Switching over to simpler, more iconic figures allowed him a sort of visual versatility that allows him the freedom to instantly modulate the tone of his stories and switch gears very quickly without it jarring the reader. It's also allowed him to refine his line to an achingly beautiful extent. This book is certainly a must for any fan of Jason or someone who has an interest in artistic development and its fits and starts.

New Review @TCJ.com: Isle of 100,000 Graves

Over at tcj.com, I've reviewed the new comic by Jason & Fabien Vehlmann, Isle of 100,000 Graves.

Crimes & Punishments: Low Moon

Rob reviews the new collection of short stories by Jason, LOW MOON (Fantagraphics).



LOW MOON feels like a sharp right turn from Jason's other recent work, both in terms of content and presentation. The previous Jason books from Fantagraphics have been softcovers, all done with a design sense that made each volume look similar. Debuting with a hardback seemed to be a bit of an unusual departure. Either artist and publisher wanted to start a different look for these volumes, or else perhaps Fantagraphics wanted to capitalize on the story "Low Moon"'s appearance in the Sunday New Times Magazine. It's certainly a move that makes some sense if that's the case, especially for the bookstore market.



The book itself is a strange read, with a number of tonal & emotional shifts that are sometimes jarring. There's always a touch of melancholy in everything that Jason writes, but there's a bleakness in some of these stories that I haven't seen since HEY...WAIT. For example, "Emily Says Hello" has a grim noir feel to it in a tale about a woman delivering a series of escalating sexual favors to a man in exchange for him murdering several men. Part of the deal involves the killer telling the victims, "Emily says hello". The story's structure is unusual for Jason in that he witholds more information than usual from the reader, and obviously quite intentionally so. We never learn how and why the couple made the deal, why the woman wants revenge, or even whom Emily is. We're introduced to a situation, are quickly made to understand the nature of the deal, have tension escalated through variations on the situation, and then are given an ambiguous but downbeat ending. There's no comic relief, no jokes, no turning ideas on their head like in all of his recent books--just a bleak and brutal set of power relationships. This is underscored by Jason's use of color in the story. Set solely in the woman's apartment, we see that all of her walls are painted black. This underscores that for all intents and purposes, she's already dead.



"Low Moon" is an extended bit of silliness, riffing off wild west tropes turned on their heads. This story was much more in the vein of books like THE LAST MUSKETEER, THE LEFT BANK GANG, and I KILLED ADOLF HITLER in that it mashed together several genre conventions and then flipped around a couple of key elements for comedic effect. In this instance, the haunted sherriff and the black hat riding back into town had a memorable showdown over a chessboard. A fight breaks out in the saloon over a bad cup of espresso. Horses are replaced by unicycles. Jason downplays all of the ridiculousness with a deadpan emotional narrative; every character approaches every (laughably cliched) situation with deadly seriousness. The pacing of the story in book form is a bit different than in its original format, which breaks up the jokes a bit more. It doesn't ruin the story, but it is a bit jarring for someone who read the strips in the Times. That said, the ending of the story actually scans better in the book than in the Times, where it fell a bit flat as a big final episode. Without that sort of external temporal pressure, the ending in the book feels natural.

"&" feels like a story whose genesis came from its ending: two strangers, sitting in a bar next to each other. With that image, one might ask: how did they wind up sitting next to each other, with such weary expressions on their faces? The story as such involves the two men taking desperate measures to achieve their goals. For one man, it's getting enough money to pay for an operation for his mother. For the other man (with a Chaplin-like moustache), it's getting a particular woman to marry him. The story, much like "Emily Says Hello", stacks gag on top of gag as the first man bumbles his way through a robbery and the other man resorts to increasingly byzantine schemes to kill off the woman's various suitors. When they finally attain their goals (and the woman exasperatingly saying "Sure, why not?" after a story's worth of flowery denails and appeals to friendship was a nice touch), they find things didn't quite work out as they expected. Both men were in a shaggy dog story and didn't realize the joke was on them until the end. This story was amusing but emotionally flat. Jason seemed more interested in the gag than in making the reader care about these characters, which felt a bit out of place for one of his longer stories. In something like SHHHH!, that thinner characterization didn't seem to matter much, but it made this story neither fish nor fowl.



"Proto Film Noir" is another story that works much like "Low Moon" in that it very deliberately deconstructs a cliched genre and puts it back together with several weird twists. Here, we are introduced to a caveman who happens upon a house with a lonely wife, and they inevitably (rather quickly, actually) have sex. In classic noir style, the interloper decides that it's time to kill the husband...only it turns out to be much harder than expected. Jason then pulls off another example of escalating repetition of a joke until we're rewarded with a punchline that's not only the best in the book, but it's also a last bit of metacommentary on the subject of film noir. Note the bright, cheery colors in this tale of repeated homicide, underlining the humorous nature of this story--as opposed to the grimness of "Emily Says Hello".



The final story in the book, "You Are Here", doesn't have much in common with the rest of the entries. Sure, there are genre elements (an alien kidnapping a man's wife and his subsequent, life-long effort to build a rocket and find her), but they're more background fodder than something Jason's commenting on. The centerpiece of the story is the son of the couple in question, and the way's in which his father's obsessiveness first alienated him and then later drew him in when he faced the same sort of relationship woes. The father's obsession clearly derived from guilt (he and his wife had quarreled before her abduction) an emotion he felt to the exclusion of anything else. I liked Jason's use of word balloons here: the arguments we're shown have just black blogs in the balloons, signifying that what they were arguing about wasn't relevant; indeed, such screaming matches frequently find two people arguing past each other anyway. The ending, unsurprisingly, was heartbreaking, even if there was a shaggy-dog character to the way the story was paced. What made this story so much more affecting than the others in this volume was that each detail the reader was shown added to the emotional weight of the narrative. When we see the boy avoiding taking girls back to his house, or quickly suggesting that he move in with a girlfriend, then avoid his father altogether with a variety of excuses, we can feel the character's alienation that was never acknowledged or healed by either party. It was those moments that packed more of a wallop for me than the actual conclusion of the story, the sort of moments that enriched books like I KILLED ADOLF HITLER.

"Low Moon" and "You Are Here" were both top-notch Jason, while the other three stories faltered at times in terms of execution, purpose, emotional depth and/or tone. I liked everything about the way Jason set up "Emily Says Hello", but it lacked the emotional resonance of his darker stories. "Proto Film Noir" was a goof of a story that was redeemed by its punchline. "&" didn't always seem consistent in the kind of story it wanted to tell. The stories are somewhat tenuously linked in that they depict crimes and punishments in various forms. The first and second stories are directly about both topics; the third story punishes the crimes obliquely, while the fourth story punishes the crime ironically. In the last story, both crime and punishment were a bit more abstract: the crime was alienation, the punishment was loneliness. All told, this is still a book every Jason fan should read, but it's one that I perhaps wouldn't recommend to a reader new to the Norwegian's work.