Upside Dawn by Jason

I always focus on the wrong things, I know. Years in the book-mines left me fascinated with the minutia of behind-the-scenes, when that doesn't actually matter.

Upside Dawn is a new collection of comics stories by Jason, a Norwegian cartoonist resident in France and, I think, working originally in French for that vast, complex comics market. This English translation was published in late November of 2022, and, if I'm reading the copyright page correctly, the author did the translation himself. (Or else he's just claiming the copyright and denying credit to the person who actually did the work; I'd prefer not to believe that.)

There are sixteen longish stories here - a dozen or twenty pages each - plus an "Etc." section at the end, with another dozen-ish mostly single-page stories, all dated 2020 or 2021. They're all also very much Jason stories - colliding high and low culture, philosophy and werewolves, with a cast of blank-faced anthropomorphic people who have much deeper emotions than they show. Also very Jason: the relentless four-panel grid he's simplified to in this era of his career, after denser grids for his earlier work.

See O Josephine! for the last time I wrote about Jason's shorter works - that was a collection of four roughly album-sized stories two years ago. Or Low Moon, a similarly large collection of stories from a decade ago. Jason's concerns and style have been stable for quite a while: this is how he works, and these are the stories he tells. Some books shift a bit in one direction or another, maybe a little more philosophy or a little more pulp-fiction, but the stew stays roughly consistent. So most of what I can say about Upside Dawn is: Jason is back, and (maybe) here are some tidbits from my favorite pieces in the book.

I've been poking around, trying to figure out if this was a book in France first, with no luck. (Fantagraphics regularly either builds new books for the US audience or ignores previous publications - I don't know which, or if they do both.) My assumption is that it was: that's where he lives and works, so a local publication would usually be first. But I can't find any evidence of it.

Maybe I'm focused on the wrong things because miscellaneous collections are tough to write about. There are sixteen stories here - more if you count the single-pagers - and most of them have clever, complex premises that the reader discovers by reading them. Explicating all of that would take a lot of time and page-space - and spoil the enjoyment of a lot of the book for anyone reading this post.

Let me give one example, without, I hope, spoiling anything. The second story here, "Perec, PI," is particularly inventive - it is a detective story, in which the narration cuts off in every single caption for every single panel. The reader can still figure out the general outline, but the precise secrets of this mystery stay mysterious. It goes further than that by the end, too - Jason's stories often start with one idea and then keep going farther, which is thrilling.

These are strange stories: stories about strange people and things (vampires, Death, famous writers and their characters, monsters of all kinds), stories told strangely, stories that get stranger as they go. I think it is all serious, though a lot of the elements could be hard to take seriously for some readers - there are two EC-style stories, near the end, which are super-obvious on purpose, as if to make it even harder to accept their surfaces.

It's a Jason book. I've been circling that, since it's a cliché, and not terribly useful to new readers. But he is deeply distinctive, and short work shows off his strengths and idiosyncrasies even more so than his book-length stories. Laconic, allusive, mysterious, playful, uneasy. Those are some of the touchstones of Jason stories; those are some the things to look for here. I recommend you do - even or should I say especially if you've never read Jason before.