O JOSEPHINE! - JASON

One of the things I most admire about cartoonists is their ability to hone a specific style so that anything they draw looks like them. Frankly, I really wish I could do this. Jason has the obvious stylistic flourishes in that his characters tend to be BoJack style dog-men (other animals to a lesser extent) but beyond that his drawings have a cleanliness and spareness that I think of as both quietly sad and profoundly Scandinavian. I’m a huge partisan of his comic “Angst” where a character wordlessly waits for the bus.  Jason’s best stuff combines this drawing style with silly, genre-bending, sad stories. I KILLED ADOLF HITLER remains my favorite. This book, which I didn’t even know existed, was the last book I grabbed (along with a Nate West book that I’ve almost finished) before the library went into lock-down. Damn this COVID19 plague-world. No libraries. Irregardless, O Josephine is a collection of 4 short comics that are not connected. I wonder if they were published together in this manner in Norway or if this particular volume is a “collected works” so to speak. I would say I enjoyed most to least basically in the order they were presented. The title story is also the final one and my least favorite. It concerns a quasi-modern version of Napoleon and his love-life with Josephine. It was silly and funny in the way Jason can often be, but I just didn’t hit for me. The second story also takes a real person and presents a fictional autobiography, this time Leonard Cohen. I found this story much better, parts of it were almost Calvino-esq in tone. The first story involve a hike around Ireland. It’s the most realistic (I assume Jason actually went on this walk) story but I liked it much more than I thought I would, Jason is best at small moments and hiking basically only provides this sort of revelation. There’s no big reveal (except that Jason like Bruce Springsteen, a devastating blow). Finally, the second to last story is more typical Jason; it’s a genre/crime story attached to quiet, pensive characters. Jason’s style made it hard for me to tell characters apart and thus rendered the ending confusing (he’s also messing with the temporarily which doesn’t help). I had to reread the story to simply understand what had happened. It was more clear the second time but only reminded me of his better crime stuff like LEFT-BANK GANG or WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS. Not the strongest Jason but any Jason is fine right now. We’re quarantined so what can you do? 65 Blank faced animal characters.