If You Steal

By Jason
Colors: Hubert
Cover Design: Keeli McCarthy

If You Steal is the third compilation of short stories from Norwegian cartoonist John Arne Sæterøy, aka Jason, to be published for the English language market. In many ways, this is his most accessible book. Almost all of the eleven stories use some kind of hook based on popular genre conventions. His  treatment to these elements is playful, at least for a Jason comic. On display is his usual inimitable style: The anthropomorphic characters with the deadpan expressions and hunched poses. The middle distance perspective. The unvarying four panel grid. Decompressed silent panels. The sparse detail of his clear line. All the stories make for a quick read. But the variety of subject matter and execution on display hints at the inventiveness that belies his outwardly uncomplicated drawings.

Take the lead story “If You Steal”, A crime drama about a lowlife forced to commit to one more heist in order to pay off some huge gambling debts - the usual setup. The melancholic tone and sense of inevitable tragedy will be familiar to readers of his past collections. But the entire narrative is broken down into one page vignettes recounted out of sequence. Each page is an example of economic storytelling. But put together, they give the reader just enough information, not to mention a few ambiguous Magritte imagery, to piece together the broad stroke of events.

The playfulness continues with “Karma Chameleon”, a homage to those 1950s sci-fi B-movies featuring giant monsters which are actually just normal animals being obviously enlarged through the era’s cheap film effects. The story features the usual cast of characters: the hero, the local sheriff, an eccentric scientist, and his beautiful daughter. And there’s the predictable showdown between monster and military. But the eccentric scientist can’t even keep on topic, preferring to talk about masturbation to anyone he can corner.

Jason then turns his attention in "Lorena Velazquez" to another 1950s movie tradition - Mexican films starring lucha libre wrestlers like Santo battling all manner of supernatural horrors, because why not? The story is fairly straightforward, with the masked hero entering a castle to rescue a damsel in distress. He takes out a couple of hooded henchmen. But things quickly become chaotic as he confronts a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, a horde of mummies, a wolfman, all manner of aliens, even Adolph Hitler himself. It’s absolutely nuts.

Come to think about it, many of the stories riff off famous mid-20th century figures: Frida Kahlo is an assassin who works for the mob, a mashup of Brigitte Bardot and Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot, the Van Morrison album Moondance reimagined as a series of 1950s horror comic book covers, a story about jazz musician Chet Baker, or the most ludicrous theory linking the assassination of John F. Kennedy to 9/11. It’s a fairly wide sampling of pop culture, all of which may have shaped Jason’s sensibilities.

Jason’s visuals are usually so consistent that I couldn't discern if these stories were originally published together, or if they were assembled from disparate sources. Unfortunately, Fantagraphics doesn't supply any information within the book's pages. Whatever the case, this is as good an introduction as any to the artist’s peculiar blend of surface kitsch and sardonic humor. Though in the closing story “Nothing”, Jason seems to do away with any outside reference in order to tell a humane and disturbing tale of frailty.

Jason covers Daniel Clowes' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

Go to: Cats without Dogs by Jason (via Heidi McDonald)

Low Moon

Norwegian cartoonist Jason has hit upon a formula that has earned him cult status, made him a critical darling with the mainstream press, but will probably never grant him widespread popular recognition. His clear line style is characterized by sparsely detailed landscapes populated by gaunt anthropomorphic animals. Their blank facial expressions and and communication through long silences are very much informed by the "less is more" modernist aesthetic. It's what's supposed to be read between the lines, so to speak, that matters. With Jason, his uniform-sized panels are the modular units from which can be arranged in numerous ways in order to construct his narratives.

Low Moon marks a change in format. All of Jason's past translated works were self-contained graphic novels. This book is a collection of different tales organized into four panel pages. The title story was originally serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine Funny Pages section. Billed as a "chess western", it shows how Jason's stripped-down approach is used to inform old cliches with wry deadpan humor. Chess matches are treated with the same life-and-death seriousness as real gunfights. Similar clever touches can be found in the other stories of this collection. For example in Proto Film Noir, an adulterous "prehistoric" couple attempt to eliminate the woman's husband. But he keeps returning from the dead every morning completely unaware of what has transpired the previous day.


But every story inexorably ends badly for the participants, usually with some kind of a narrative twist. In Emily Says Hello, an assassin carries out a succession of hits in exchange for escalating sexual favors from his female client. But this ends tragically for the client. In the most convoluted story &, a man burglars a house to raise the money for his dying mother's operation while another man murders all of his rival suitors for a woman's hand in marriage. Both their tales end disastrously, and they end up drowning their sorrows in the same bar.

Jason is an immensely skilled artist capable of manipulating his self-restricted vocabulary to stretch space and time. Low Moon moves in a slow burn as the two antagonists move closer to their eventual showdown. In what is probably the best story in the book You Are Here, time moves more quickly as a father and son attempt to deal with the alien abduction of the father's wife. The father builds a rocket while the son grows up and has a life of his own. Eventually they pile into the rocket, and things end badly, but perhaps a bit more emotionally than with the other stories.



All the stories are informed by a similar absurdist aesthetic. But not all are equally successful in execution or have equal depth or meaning. While the father-mother-son dynamic gives You Are Here a higher degree of emotional resonance, others like & feel more like an empty formalist exercise, while Emily Says Hello comes across as a bit too sophomoric. This book is a useful introduction to Jason's oeuvre. But given their varying qualities while having a similar tone, it's probably better that the stories be read separately rather than in one sitting.