Meow, Baby!
Jason's short stories and gag strips demonstrate the comic side of a creator whose fascinating full-length graphic novels (e.g.,Why Are You Doing This?2005) are grim noir crime stories. The protagonists of Jason's funny stuff, like those of his graphic novels, are tall and thin with animal heads. They include a reanimated mummy, zombies, a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, an angel, a devil, a werewolf, and other monster and sf movie icons, whose eldritch auras suggest a noirishly oppressive atmosphere. Meanwhile, the comedy they play out, usually wordlessly, is the whimsical, fanciful, incongruous stuff of physical comedians from Chaplin to Gleason. Jason presents them in the deadpan, no-frills manner of Ernie Bushmiller's bedrock comic-strip classic,Nancy. Their antics should seem lame and warmed over, but the ludicrousness of them behaving as if monstrousness was just a job and they are otherwise ordinary guys and gals, subject to ordinary appetites and urges (head turned by a pretty girl, the mummy reacts all-too-masculinely), saves the day. Invariably.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved