By Jason
Publisher:
Fantagraphics Books; 1st edition (June 30, 2009)
Hardcover, 216
pages
A
collection of five short stories, none have printed in any other format. Jason,
for those who don’t know, is a French- Norwegian artist known for unemotive,
nearly silent, tales of a bizarre and sardonic nature. It is often difficult to
form an emotional commentary on Jason’s work as there is often no emotion to
derive, every panel exists in an emotional vacuum. Everything is flat and plainly flopped out
for the viewer to decode with their own personal vector and biases.
That
is not to say the work is bad. It’s simply to say that the stories can be as
complicated or uncomplicated as the person reading them. In a sense, they are
an emotional mirror of the reader. Or maybe I’m going way too far here.
The
center of the author’s of humor is the use protracted silences—the hilariously
uncomfortable flashes when the protagonist are waiting for disaster to strike.
A couple of these stories are one-joke twist-ending pieces about the
intersection of lust and murder, ala Twilight Zone. But all are interesting to
read.
The
first story, “Emily Says Hello”, is about a woman who is paying a hit man with
varying increasingly intense sexual acts to kill various men, whose pictures
she then tapes on her wall. The second, the titular “Low Moon” is a Wild West
actioneer (sort of) revolving around chess and nerve. Next is “&” which
revolves around two men with different paths in life forced to commit violent
acts in order to gain or help the person that they love. The fourth, “Proto
Film Noir”, is the strangest and one I can barely describe. Let’s say it’s a
caveman film noir with a twist of Groundhog’s Day, and I’m pretty sure the
author was just making it up as he went along with an almost nonsensical
ending. Last is “You are Here” a space alien hijacks a woman and a man spends
his life building a spaceship to track her down and rescue her.
For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst. 
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