Jason’s idiosyncratic approach to cartooning

The Lambiek Comiclopedia calls John Arne Stery, better known as Jason, “one of Scandinavia’s most prominent artists of alternative comics.” Considering his role as an underground cartoonist in a foreign country, you might expect that Jason is unheard of in the United States, but he’s actually quite critically admired in certain circles. His work in America has been published by the long-running alternative publisher Fantagraphics Books. Jason has been nominated for two Ignatz Awards and has won a Harvey Award for Best New Talent and two Eisner Awards for Best U.S. Edition of International Material.If you’ve seen even one work by Jason, all of his other works are almost instantly recognizable. The artist draws in a clean, spare style that has drawn comparisons to the works of Adventures of Tintin creator Herg’s ligne claire (“clear line”) drawing style. Most of the time, the majority of the story is told visually, with little to no dialogue. The other main feature of Jason’s work is his use of anthropomorphic animals and B-movie monsters, sometimes standing in for historical personalities.While his style is fairly consistent, the subject matter of Jason’s work can vary widely from book to book. Hey, Wait is a “touching ode to childhood buta very disturbing one as well,” according to Arnold Blumberg of Cinescape Comics, while The Iron Wagon is based on a 1908 Scandinavian mystery novel about a man haunted by the ghost of his murdered romantic rival. In You Can’t Get There From Here, the Frankenstein story is turned on its head as a mad scientist falls in love with the woman he’s created for his original monster, and in The Left Bank Gang, alternate versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and other famous authors decide to rob a bank.Jason’s latest graphic novel, Isle of 100,000 Graves, is a dark comedy about a young girl who meets up with some pirates and stumbles across a mysterious island. This island just happens to house “a secret school for executioners and torturers, where apple-cheeked youngsters are taught the finer points of extracting information from prisonersand then putting an end to their lives in a wide variety of gruesome ways.” As you might guess, there’s no telling what Jason will come up with next.