Jason's Why Are You Doing This? is Good Enough for the Bin

European Comics
Jason's Why Are You Doing This? is Good Enough for the Bin
By Leroy Douresseaux
July 10, 2005 - 19:39

Fantagraphics Books
Writer(s): Jason
Artist(s): Jason
ISBN: 156097655-1
48 pp., color, $12.95

This longish review is Mr. Charlie #59:

“Why are you doing this?” You’ve never loved anyone, have you?” These are the last questions that Alex, the protagonist in Euro-cartoonist Jason’s most recent graphic novel, Why Are You Doing This? asks, making what initially seemed to be a straight-forward Hitchcockian “wrong man” murder mystery, a full-on existential thriller. Or at least I gathered that from the ad copy written by Eric Reynolds, PR man of Jason’s U.S. publisher, Fantagraphics Books.

An old Random House dictionary that I have (1980) defines “existential” as “a philosophic doctrine of beliefs that people have absolute freedom of choice and that the universe is absurd, with an emphasis on the phenomena of anxiety and alienation.” The same dictionary describes a “thrill” and thus “thriller,” as “to feel a sense of keen excitement.” So is Mr. Reynolds right about Jason’s new work being an “existential thriller?”

Alex begins the novel in a funk about the breakup of a long relationship. His girlfriend, Claire (of whom we see only once), wanted an exciting life, at least according to Alex; he admits that he just wanted to stay home. His friend, Claude, of course thinks Alex should move on. Claude indeed comes across as a doer, while Alex is the type who will throw a tantrum about something as trivial as the injustice (he thinks) Whitney Houston did to the purity of Dolly Parton’s song, “I Will Always Love You.” He also sits around moping and wondering why his get-up-and-go girlfriend moved on with her life. Alex is instantly unlikable, but in time Jason will make us feel the deepest sympathy for him.

That’s something at which this cartoonist is quite good. In his American debut, the heart-rending Hey, Wait…, Jason shows us a life unraveled by a tragedy brought about by a harmless childhood game. Jason really sold the idea that no matter how many positive choices the protagonist in Hey, Wait… made, that his life would be one of sadness. In the small graphic novella (if you will), a life of free choices is still marred by anxiety, and the living wrestle with the utter absurdity that seems to be existence. In Jason’s American follow up to Hey, Wait… (which Time magazine named as one of the ten best comics of 2001), The Iron Wagon, the ghost of his victim and a dogged, clever detective both relentlessly pursue the murderer with whom a reader may sympathize because of the enormous mental strain the killer suffers trying to hide the gruesome results of his carefully planned crime.

In Why Are You Doing This?, Alex has the misfortune of seeing a murderer just after he’s committed his awful crime, but Alex, of course, has no idea what happened. That chance “encounter” with the killer eventually costs Claude his life. While the police pursue him as the murderer of his friend, Alex must not only discover who the first murder victim was, but also learn why that victim was killed. A sympathetic single mother with a young daughter befriends Alex, but even that chance encounter and subsequent relationship eventually cost him. By then, Jason has made us root for a character who initially seemed like a whiny extra out of a Woody Allen film.

John Arne Saeteröy was born in Molde, Norway and lived in Paris while creating many of his works (he currently resides in Portland, OR). He creates comics under the name “Jason,” and for a while, his name was synonymous in alt-comics circles with pantomime or silent comics. Nary a word balloon did he need to tell his unique tales, which came across like stills from a silent motion picture, but of late, Jason’s comics have become quite talky.

The other thing for which he is known is using stylized, anthropomorphic characters – funny animals without the funny, as the players in his stories. Perhaps there is something in the way Jason uses anthropomorphic characters that makes us either ignore the fact that they are cartoon animals or that makes us pay more attention to the narrative because anthropomorphic characters give an extra edge to anxiety and absurdity. In Jason’s comix, his characters suffer all that seems ridiculous in life, and in a single panel, Jason can define and delineate alienation. All the “why’s” we ask in the face of the banal and horrific and everything in between, his characters either ask or wonder about out loud. Why did Claire leave? Why did a chance encounter that Alex barely noticed and hardly remembers lead to murder? Why did someone else’s act of revenge cost Claude his life? Why me?

Jason doesn’t exactly approach these questions in a meditative fashion. His characters don’t get to sit on a rock and wonder why? Life is too busy happening, and it’s happening so fast, especially when you’re on the run from the cops as a murder suspect, as Alex is. With the succinctness of a filmmaker that knows his small budget means every shot must advance the narrative, Jason discards the frivolity that decompression can be: every panel counts, and he gets one good page of narrative out of what would take others three.

He creates a smooth, fast flowing narrative with a rapid rhythm that turns all of his tales into thrillers. He doesn’t necessarily need the conventions of a genre, although here, there is a murder and a mystery. He designs a visual narrative with comic book panels (or frames) that carries the readers along so swiftly that we don’t have time to think. His comics, at least while reading them, are about feeling. He’s like a musician, and he moves us with his steady beat. It’s rousing and invigorating, and there really isn’t time to think about what we read until after the absolute last note of the piece. As we advance through the story, the questions are being answered; the mystery is about to be solved. The cops are making their move to get their man (Alex), and the ruthless, persistent killer makes his final play. It’s hard not to turn those pages so quickly that the proceedings seem to blur past. That’s what a thriller does; it releases the reader after the end, so that he can wonder about what he’s just experience.

So Eric was right. Why Are You Doing This? is an existential thriller. It, like much of Jason’s work, is a testament to the variety of subject matter and genres comix creators can tackle, and how few pages doing so actually takes. This equivalent of a two-hour Alfred Hitchcock film or a best-selling potboiler novel is actually only 48 pages in length.