Even though I'm sure there are thousands (though how many thousand I wonder) of people who look forward to new work by Jason, I've yet to find a good discussion about him online. For those who don't know his work, Jason's work is very Herge inspired and a textbook example of minimalism. Some of his stories have no dialogue, others have occasional short exchanges and there's only a few that have characters talking to each other. He's an exceptionally gifted storyteller who, to me, has mastered the economy of comics storytelling (both visual/non-verbal and visual/verbal). He always uses anthropomorphic animals (with upright posture who are really just human beings with animal heads or perhaps masks) to some effect. One of the few who can do comedy in comics as well as lingering tragedy.
For those of you who are not familiar, his "Why are you doing this?" is a good place to start. There's very little I can add that you can't find on amazon about a non-spoiler premise but that's his best work and should give you a good idea about his "serious", "talky" stories. His "Left Gang Bank" was a lot of fun and might impress others more than it did me (Jean-Paul Sartre as a uber-masculine dog-faced womanizer, James Joyce as a impoverished cartoonist as well as Hemingway, Fitzgerald working as cartoonist in Paris is clever enough).
So who has read his comics? I've read all his english comics and am wondering if there are others published in French or Norwegian that haven't been translated. The only real problem is that they're paced so wonderfully and can be read too quickly, leaving you to wait months for new work. |
