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.