Low Moon back

The Things We Do For Love.

Coming in at over 200 full-colour pages, it's Jason's thickest work to date: 200 pages of thwarted passion and murderous intent divided into five stories of varying degrees of absurdity. Jason is a master of suspense, building expectation with repetition and unanswered questions as his anthropomorphic black and white bears and beaked ones solemnly go about their business, their expressions seldom giving anything away. Wide-eyed and often clueless (yet determined), half of them are dapper but a surprising number are dowdy. It's comedic enough in itself.

'Emily Says Hello' sees an awkward suitor murder a series of men for a skinny woman in exchange for an escalation of sexual favours only to experience the ultimate in anticlimax.

'Low Moon' takes place in a West that is so very far from Wild, its inhabitants are more likely to die of ennui than anything else. Their equivalent of duelling is a game of Extreme Chess as Bob McGill returns to town for a rematch, bringing with him some killer moves. The incongruities will make you smile.

'&' follows two separate stories on opposite sides of the page as one man takes to crime in order to pay his mother's operation, whilst another persists in trying to obtain his loved one's hand in marriage whatever the barriers. The comedy is ratcheted up each time the same process is repeated in accelerating fashion, Jason employing the shorthand of eliminating increasingly unneccessary panels just as he does in 'Proto Film Noir'. There the adulterous lovers' persistence in successfully offing the woman's husband each day is matched only by the husband's insistence on returning home each morning for breakfast, delighted at the prospect of another sunny day in the garden. So predictable does this become to them that when a policeman calls in search of the victim after another grisly deed, they confidently tell him to come back in the morning.

Lastly I can assure you that 'You Are Here' only sounds familiar because it's the title of a Kyle Baker graphic novel, and not to be confused with another Jason book, YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE, whose name alone still causes me much mirth.