Jason
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Fear Itself #3
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on a “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.
Chris Arrant
If I had $15, I’d first do a two-fisted grab of this summer’s big event series Flashpoint #2 (DC, $3.99) and Fear Itself #3 (Marvel,$3.99). It’s required reading if you’re writing about comics like I am, and as a reader I’m intrigued by both. Two questions come out of this: 1. I wonder which one jiggered their release dates to come out the same week as the other event book, and 2. I guess DC will have to take off its “Holding The Line at $2.99” logo, or at least add some fine print. Next up would be Uncanny X-Force #11 (Marvel, $3.99); Rick Remender and the artists here have made this the best x-book on stands, hitting me right between the eyes by revisiting older storylines and characters and giving them a modern spin. Lastly, I would get Turf #5 (Image, $2.99), because I’m one of the biggest Tommy Lee Edwards fans out there.
- May 31, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by JK Parkin
Comics College | Jason
I Killed Adolf Hitler
Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
With a few notable exceptions, most European cartoonists have a tough time getting noticed by U.S. audiences. That’s definitely not the case, however, with this month’s Comics College entry, the Norwegian artist John Arne Sæterøy, better known to most American readers by his pen name, Jason.
- May 27, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Talking Comics with Tim | Jason
Werewolves of Montpellier
Hopefully, if you’ve been reading Robot 6 for any substantial amount of time, you’re familiar with the work of Jason. In this email interview, we discuss his latest work released from Fantagraphics, Werewolves of Montpellier (a book aptly summed up by the publisher as “a lycanthropic thriller, a romantic comedy, and an existential drama — basically, your typical Jason book”), as well as some ideas shared in his blog, cats without dogs. My thanks to Jason for the interview (and for reminding me why I love Hal Hartley films) and to Robot 6′s Sean T. Collins as well as Fantagraphics Jacq Cohen for helping to make this interview feasible.
Tim O’Shea: Cinema clearly informs your work, does your appreciation of film date back to your childhood-or when and how did it begin?
Jason: I read comics as a kid, and books like the Hardy Boys, but I think what made the biggest impression on me were movies. In the 70s there was just one Norwegian channel and every Monday night they showed a feature film. I would watch every one of those. And I still remember a lot of them, sometimes better than some movie I saw last year.
O’Shea: In the comments section of your blog, you wrote: ” I like movies, non-musicals, where the characters do a dance or sing a song. Like Rio Bravo, Buffalo 66, Bande à part or Simple Men. It’s something that doesn’t work in comics.” If you don’t think it works in comics, I’m curious why did you have Audrey sing Moon River (a scene that I thought worked, by the way)?
Jason: It’s just four panels of her singing, and I guess it sort of works. But take the dance sequence in Simple Men (Hal Hartley’s 1992 film) as an example. I don’t think that could be recreated in a comic. You don’t get into the music and start tapping your feet like you would in a movie.
- September 13, 2010 @ 03:30 PM by Tim O'Shea
What Are You Reading?
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne
Welcome once again to What Are You Reading? Today’s special guest is writer and artist Dean Trippe, creator of Butterfly and co-founder of the Project: Rooftop blog, among other credits. He posts regularly on his Tumblr site Bearsharktopus-Man, where he is currently selling this nifty Doctor Who/Batman crossover print. He also has some art in the Webcomics Auction for the Gulf.
To see what Dean and the rest of the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below …
- July 11, 2010 @ 02:04 PM by JK Parkin
Your YouTube link of the day: Shhhh!
Oh my gollygosh. Someone’s actually adapting one of Jason’s short works to animated film.
Click on that first link to see Part one. (found via Mike Lynch)
- September 1, 2009 @ 11:30 AM by Chris Mautner
Robot reviews: Low Moon
Low Moon
Low Moon
By Jason
Fantagraphics Books, 216 pages, $24.99.
For his latest and 13th (by my admittedly sloppy count) book, Jason has decided to try something a bit different. In addition to the snappy hardcover packaging, Low Moon collects not just the title tale, but four other stories as well, all presented in the same four panels to a page format, a quite different layout compared to previous works.
And yet this is still Jason. Anyone who’s read his work before will know the drill here, right down to the pupil-less animal-faced characters who seethe with inner pain while maintaining a stone-faced expression. In attempting to stretch himself, though, he offers some of his weakest work to date, but some of his strongest and emotionally wrenching as well.
- June 30, 2009 @ 12:11 PM by Chris Mautner