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.