The book’s opening story, “Emily Says Hello,” is a bizarre tale about a young woman who trades sexual favors to a hitman in exchange for his services. The story, which is confined to a single room, à la Hitchcock’s Rear Window, is frustrating in that it never divulges any details about the murders themselves, who the victims are, why they are being killed, or even what the point of it all is. On top of that, the notion of a woman trading sex for such horrible acts, particularly in such a premeditated and decidedly high-schoolish fashion, is both shocking and disgusting. Yet, this story is also undeniably powerful. Jason, who frequently writes absurdist, deadpan humor, said that he intended the story as a comedy, albeit a particularly grim one. “Any story where a guy kills someone just so he can sniff a pair of panties is funny to me.” But many readers failed to find humor in this somewhat repulsive story. Rob Clough, in his review of the book at his blog (http://highlowcomics.blogspot.com), wrote “there’s no comic relief, no jokes, no turning ideas on their head like in all of (Jason’s) recent books—just a bleak and brutal set of power relationships.” Regardless of whether or not you find the story humorous, “Emily” is another example of Jason’s always impressive command of pacing, both in terms of the overall storytelling structure, which has five distinct movements, each building towards its climax, as well as within the pages themselves, which use only four panel grids, allowing Jason to plot each page as if it were an individual comic strip.
“&,” the third story, is a clever experiment in storytelling structure as two seemingly unrelated narratives unfold in parallel on alternating pages. Even the cryptic title is an allusion to the connection between the two individual tales. In the first story, a man breaks into a house hoping to steal something valuable in order to help pay for an operation for his dying mother. Much of this half of the story is little more than a silent, screwball comedy, as the man encounters one bizarre obstacle after another. The other plotline follows a different young man in love with a woman who regards him as merely a friend. Like the first storyline, this man finds a series of unique and often humorous ways to overcome many obstacles. Eventually the two stories converge on the final page, like the punch line of a long joke, but, as is the case with all the stories in this collection, despite Jason’s admitted love of old films, he resists the Hollywood tendency toward happy endings. In these five stories, the main characters wind up either dead or depressed, lamenting their sorry fates at the hands of a fickle world. “There is something false in saying that everything will be alright in the end,” Jason said in the Comics Journal interview. “That’s not how life is. And a sad ending is just more memorable — it sticks with you for longer.”
“Proto Film Noir,” which the artist described as “The Postman Always Rings Twice, but with cave people” is a dark, surrealist take on the film, to be sure. The story opens with eight pages of silent action as we see a caveman wandering alone in a desert, only to discover a paved highway which he follows to a modern suburban house. Here again, temporal disconnects are used for comedic effect. From there the deadpan humor of the strip follows an escalating pattern of violence as the caveman repeatedly tries to kill the cavewoman’s husband, but is always unsuccessful as the husband keeps returning home as if nothing had happened. The story is little more than a farce, but the punch line in the final panel was a little bit of a head-scratcher.
In the book’s final story, “You Are Here,” a troubled marriage is suddenly broken apart not by a divorce, as one might assume from the opening pages, but rather by an alien kidnapping. Here again, it is “the meeting between the everyday and the fantastic” that Jason finds “interesting, or at least fun.” For the rest of the story, the father becomes obsessed with building a rocket to go in search of his missing wife, while his son grows up practically unnoticed. In his Comics Journal interview, Jason discussed the motivation behind using an alien in an otherwise quiet story about the hidden struggles of domestic life. “The rest of the story is about this incident, how it affects both the man who is left behind and their son. It’s a story about divorce, I guess. But it’s such a dreary thing. A ’50s space monster is more fun than a divorce procedure, no? But the ending is the same as if it had been a divorce, the way it haunts them.” Jason’s use of silence in this story, including solid black word balloons to imply arguments between the characters, is particularly impressive. “I think using no text makes the stories more universal. They become fables. You don’t hit the reader on the head with all the answers. It’s more up to each reader to interpret the story — he has to fill in some of the answers himself.”
Although the five stories in Low Moon appear to have very little in common, the glue that holds them together is Jason’s sublime artwork, a clear line approach inspired by Hergé (and dozens of other influences), and the artist’s consistent application of certain stylistic techniques and visual tropes. The most obvious, of course, is Jason’s signature anthropomorphic characters, which make all of his stories distinctive and instantly recognizable. Jason’s lack of facial expressions has also become a common technique throughout his body of work. The artist provides very little guidance as to the emotional content of his stories, and in moments of extreme sentiment, his characters are frequently silent and expressionless, challenging his readers to fill in the emotional blanks. As the author stated: “…if the characters show no emotion, the readers are encouraged to invest their own emotions in them. Also, somehow it makes sad scenes sadder and funny scenes funnier.” The warm coloring also provides a consistent look and tone to the five stories. The muted color palette, which rejects the dynamic and often over-colored Photoshop, matches its artwork’s simplicity by remaining minimalist. Strangely, no colorist is credited, so it is not clear if Hubert, the artist who provided the superb colors for Jason’s four other color albums, was responsible for these five stories as well, or if Jason himself provided the colors.
In his Comics Journal interview, Jason lamented the fact that his more recent books still get compared to Hey, Wait…, yet the fact that his first graphic novel still resonates nearly 10 years after its initial release as one of the most emotionally devastating portraits of childhood friendship and loss ever written, in comics or otherwise, is a testament to just what a classic that book is. For most American comic readers, Hey, Wait… was their first introduction to Jason’s work, and, perhaps unfairly, it set the expectations for stories of similar emotional intensity that the artist has never quite achieved, or even aspired to. Whether or not Low Moon will be the mainstream success that its upscale book design implies is uncertain. Like its five stories, the book itself is something of an anachronism. Sitting on the stands, it looks and feels important, but the actual contents are mostly light-hearted genre mash-ups, albeit expertly rendered ones. Readers waiting for the artist to revisit the complex characterization and emotional landscape of Hey, Wait… will once again find disappointment here, as Jason has clearly moved in a totally different direction. Still, Low Moon is a very entertaining and enjoyable book, and the quality of Jason’s cartooning is undeniable. He is an artist who understands the mechanics and timing of visual storytelling, and his highly simplified style has a grace and elegance that makes it aesthetically appealing. These are the rarified traits that have given Jason a legion of fans, warranted his inclusion in the New York Times Funny Pages, and, at least in his publisher’s eyes, justify the high-end treatment for this latest collection.
Images [©2009 Jason]
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