Review by New York Times Review
The Norwegian artist who goes by the single name Jason is the most deadpan comedian in comics. His stories are almost always rooted in loud genres that he reduces to quiet gestures, and he writes and draws them with draconian formal constraints, the most obvious of which is that all of his characters have nearly expressionless animal heads. This new book is a set of short pieces, constructed in the scorched rubble where B-movie matinees used to dwell; they're populated by assassins and vampires, but in Jason's comics, we're less likely to see a military showdown against a huge, murderous chameleon than a couple of animal-headed civilians placidly watching the fight from a distance. His favorite trick is swapping out the rules of a story midway through it, as in the title piece, a meditation on a burglar's life that somehow becomes a homage to René Magritte. "New Face" piles up every "criminal gets plastic surgery to disguise himself" cliché ever stamped onto pulp, then peels the meaning of the text away from the meaning of the images like bandages; "Ask Not" presents itself as a "Da Vinci Code"-style conspiracy yarn about the Kennedy assassination, and ends up somewhere much stranger. DOUGLAS WOLK is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 18, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Norwegian artist Jason offers up 11 short stories sporting, as always, his anthropomorphic, animal-headed characters and distinctively stripped-down, ligne claire-derived cartooning style. The pop-culture connection, always strong in Jason's work, comes to the fore here: the masked Mexican wrestler Santo grapples with a succession of horror-movie monsters; a giant chameleon straight out of a '50s B movie terrorizes a desert community; an escaped murderer undergoes plastic surgery to disguise his (canine) face; song titles from Van Morrison's Moondance become horror-comic covers; Chet Baker's final years are condensed and recounted; and Nostradamus foresees the Kennedy assassination, but gets the details wrong. High culture gets nods as well: Frida Kahlo is cast as a grim-faced hired killer, and images out of Magritte keep popping up in a nonlinear account of a heist gone wrong. Jason's longer works often pack a surprising emotional punch at the end, but the brevity of these short pieces precludes that. What remains, in abundance, are his signature black humor and deadpan minimalism.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection of shorts by Ignatz Award-winning Norwegian cartoonist Jason (The Left Bank Gang) explores the existential ennui of theft and betrayal; alternate histories and conspiracies of the JFK assassination; and the ultimate masked Mexican wrestler adventure story. The art is bright and poppy, a pleasantly sweet-and-sour contrast to the inherently bleak world of the anthropomorphic animals who populate Jason's fables. Symbols, dreams, and fantasy flow in and out of one another, and if it seems clear where the story is going, simply turn the page to be pleasantly surprised by a zig where other cartoonists would zag. One glaring issue is that, with the exception of one Frida Kahlo-as-assassin story, the female characters in this collection are merely background characters to their fathers or lovers, or, in a misogynist take on Waiting for Godot that's so blatant it must be ironic, spoken of with vile disdain. Laden with skewed takes on pop culture, art history, and (often wry) moral lessons, these shorts are symbol-laden and fast moving, more like sequential poetry than sequential narrative.(Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
