Veteran Norwegian cartoonist Jason returns with an all-new collection of three short graphic stories rendered in his impeccably clear line style. There’s nothing quite like a Jason story: you may not understand where it’s going, but it’s always a fun trip. Here he’s unleashed with tales encompassing Dadism, surrealist riffs related to the artworks of Magritte, and ‘80s musicians reimagined as superheroes.
Buy Death in Trieste“The Magritte Affair” follows a pair of detectives tasked with solving a case involving art forgeries of the Belgian painter Magritte. The pair of dapper crooks don’t ape the master for financial gain, instead they kidnap other painters to make the forgeries, then leave their counterfeits on the walls of unsuspecting homeowners, leading to numerous mental breakdowns. True to the form of the painter, the sleuths are soon enmeshed in increasingly surreal scenarios that test their sanity as they race to stop the bad guys.
The titular story is set in 1920s Berlin, the Weimar home of Marlene Dietrich, Nosferatu, Rasputin, and a time-travelling David Bowie. They’re all linked to a group of Dadaists who chase the ideal of rationality through madness, much like Jason’s plot. It’s worth it just for the imagining of the gender-bending icons Dietrich and Bowie meeting for the first time, with the tophat-and-tux-clad Dietrich drily admiring his platform boots, arch foreplay for a later bedroom tryst. This seemingly random meetup led me to wonder if Jason was inspired by Bowie and Dietrich’s real-life collaboration in Dietrich’s final film, Just a Gigolo.
The final entry, “Sweet Dreams”, is packed with perhaps the most celebrity appearances in any Jason story, including the Eurythmics, David Bowie again, Ultravox, Boy George, and Bono. The story doesn’t make a lick of sense, but appears to revolve around an apocalyptic event that might only be avoided by the combined superhuman powers of the rock stars. Unfortunately, they’re not all that inclined to leave their cozy clubhouse, so we don’t really see them using their powers, but it’s amusing to think of them hanging out together while the world burns.
Aside from the celebrity appearances, Jason presents his standard smorgasbord of anthropomorphic characters coexisting in harmony. His artwork is reliably superb, with the droll, nonchalant expressions of the characters ramping up the absurdity of their highly unusual situations. It’s a bit like watching normal people trying to conduct business in a bizarre Twin Peaks-type environment, getting by while all sorts of craziness pops off around them. Jason sets up the unhinged scenarios, shows readers around, but doesn’t always develop an off ramp, with “Sweet Dreams” in particular just petering out without any meaningful resolution. And yet, the meandering stories aren’t a bad thing, only adding to the Jason mystique as we try to parse meaning out of delightfully abstract tales that rarely wrap up with a tidy bow.
Death in Trieste arrives on September 16.
