O Josephine! by Jason

I'm endlessly fascinated by the minutia of the commercial end of stories: how they are distributed and manufactured and repackaged for different markets. Think of the serial-versus-GN fight in American comics, or the way a Twitter feed can become a book. Sometimes I get fascinated about pieces of the process that are obscure or non-public, and turn to speculation.

So: I don't know that the four comics stories collected in Jason's 2019 book O Josephine! were originally published as separate albums in France. I suspect they were, at least some of them, though they're different lengths, which tends to argue against that. (An album is a tightly-formatted thing, generally -- though maybe O Josephine! takes the main stories of albums that had other small pieces to fill them out...I'm spitballing wildly here, on essentially no evidence.)

I've said before that if I were King of the World of Books, every book would be clear about the previous publication of its components. But I'm not, and it isn't. Especially here. O Josephine! says nothing about these four stories -- it has a minimal table of contents to tell us that there are four of them, and what pages they begin on, but that's it.

My assumptions: Jason (actual name: John Arne Sæterøy) is a Norwegian cartoonist long resident in France and generally first published in the French language, so I assume these stories all came out in some form in France. Possibly as standalones, maybe in collection with other works. Maybe even this exact package. This was before 2019, since time-travel is not a thing. I guess they were relatively recent -- from the past decade.

I could be wrong about several of those assumptions.

O Josephine!'s four stories are all Jasonian -- though some more than others -- but they have very little else in common. So, yes, they're all told in four-panel grids with anthropomorphic characters, generally in a deadpan tone. The two "non-fiction" stories have captions for narration; the two pieces that are purely fiction do not.

But "The Wicklow Way" is a memoir, the story of a walk on a famous path through Ireland (either a warm-up for or a follow-up to the journey Jason chronicled in On the Camino), where the interest is in spending a few days in Jason's head as he walks through the Irish countryside.

"L. Cohen: A Life" is a slightly fictionalized -- actually much less fictionalized than I first thought, since the man's life was deeply weird -- of the life and career of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

"The Diamonds" is the story of two detectives surveilling a seemingly ordinary couple -- well, it starts there, but spreads outward in that Jason fashion, as unusual things and semi-related characters keep coming up in the narrative and the world spreads outward.

And last is the title story, the epic love story of Napoleon and Josephine. Josephine Baker, in that usual Jasonian screw-historical-accuracy fashion, where everything does take place in time, but all time is the same time. It's a tragedy, or a family story, or a love story, or a revenge story. Maybe more than one of those.

I don't know if these are as good as the best Jason stories -- I still think Hey, Wait and I Killed Adolph Hitler and Why Are You Doing This? are his best stories. (Or, today I think they're his best stories; I might have a slightly different list tomorrow.) But they're good, strong mature Jason stories, showing he do well what he does, and that other cartoonists generally don't. That might not be the place to start, if you haven't started, but it's a fine place to continue.