By Matt Dube
Jason’s “Low Moon,” recently published
serially in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine,
embodies that approaches to narrative and form that make
the Norwegian writer-artist such a pleasure to read. “Low
Moon” is a mock-Western, and in it, Jason deploys his
strange anthropomorphic characters to jape at and celebrate
the tropes of the western: the saloon, the showdown, the
sheriff whose place in the town is fit to be challenged,
and the competition between the good girl and the one with
round heels. The strip also engages Jason’s peculiar
ability to work with form and formal constraints: published
a page a week, the strip never deviates from a three-by
four twelve panel grid, and often manages within those
straitjacket confines to deliver traditional seeming comic
strip punch lines and serial cliff hangers, both at the end
of a single tier and at the end of the page.
A reader might expect a comic strip called “Low Moon” to
tweak western clichés, and such a reader would not be
disappointed. The first chapter of the strip shows the
arrival of the train to a small Western town, and the
disembarking of a single passenger who sets an observer
running to the sheriff’s office to announce, “He’s back,”
elevating our sense of danger and then undercutting it, in
comic fashion when we see the traveler standing at the rail
of the saloon with one finger raised to catch the barkeep’s
attention and ordering a decaf cappuccino. There is
something ludicrous in ordering what I’ve learned to call
“a coffee drink” instead of rye whiskey, an absurdity
underlined and attributed to the traveler himself by asking
the drink be decaf. The reversals continue, at once
benefiting from our sense of heightened anxiety (why has
the traveler returned? What will the sheriff do about it?),
and then deflating them when we realize, for example, that
the rematch sought between the traveler, Bill McGill, and
the sheriff is not be conducted with pistols, rifles, or
fists, but with rocks, knights, and pawns over a
chessboard. The story proceeds in this fashion, repeatedly
setting us up and knocking us down, exploiting our
expectations and then redirecting them, through the final
chapter, when the two men play their rematch. In the final
chapter, a man even dies clutching his chest, as if to say,
“you got me.” But he is only a bystander, and seems to have
suffered a heart attack from the tension Jason has
developed, and he tumbles off a roof where he was
inexplicably standing and falls to the ground. The final
panel of the strip sees another version of the classic
Western ending, with the Sheriff on bended knee asking his
sweetheart the school teacher to marry him, reinstating the
classic Western theme of women’s civilizing influence, a
thematic turn hoary enough to be presented skeptically in
Stephen Crane’s 1898 short story “Bride Comes to Yellow
Sky.”
The abbreviated nature of the narrative, sixteen pages
published at the rate of a page a week, means that Jason is
able to incorporate the elements of the Western without
exhausting the genres store of stock situations. So the
story opens with the arrival of a train to the dusty town,
and finds its way through all the well-trod highlights of
the form: we see the conversation in the saloon where two
peripheral characters fret about the coming confrontation;
the good girl and the bad make their appearances, as does
some oblique investigation of the down-on-his luck
sheriff’s flaw (in this case, narcolepsy!). For Jason, the
story elements of genre are the steps in a dance routine
that must remain recognizable and which will allow him to
shine for the way he gets from one step to another; here,
Jason crosscuts the elements of the Western with a
slapstick, vaudeville sensibility, so that a panel of the
sheriff being awakened by having a bucket of water thrown
in his face recurs (first seen on page 2, it reappears on
page 5 on and page 7). Likewise, the set-up is somewhat
ridiculous: the danger of the gunfight is drained out when
the confrontation is replaced by the chess match. Jason
recognizes that the tension is built into the macro shape
of the genre, and the actual narrative element can be
changed without undercutting the drama. Throughout, Jason’s
control of the elements of his story remains absolute:
nearly all the panels are medium-long shots, where we can
see the whole body of the characters, better to exploit
their comedy potential. The choice, then, to alter the
panel composition, as Jason does in on page 13 with an
abstract view and a series of panels with increasingly
tight focus, signals the approach of the narrative’s
climax. By limiting visual changes to those that signal
narrative progress, Jason betrays a confidence in his
storytelling skills.
Jason’s confidence is justified, because “Low Moon” meets
all its marks, delivering consistent entertainment. I think
“Low Moon” is a minor work by Jason, one that doesn’t raise
the narrative stakes the way some of his other works do
(I’m thinking here specifically of the narrative fugue
created by the multiplied time travelers in
I Killed Adolph
Hitler, though
the same kinds of elements could be found in other longer
works). But in spite of that qualification, I like it
better than almost anything else the Times has published as part of their “Funny
Pages” feature. The creators that have been published by
the Times up till now share a suspicion of the
elements of comics’ production with writers of the
mainstream comic companies’ summer mega-epics, that comics
need to import something outside the form to elevate and
redeem them. In the case of Civil War or Final Crisis, there’s a fear that the steps available
to superhero comics are interesting only when they can be
used to reflect on something else, whether it is current
events or some abstract laws of myth-making. Chris Ware and
those who followed him in the “Funny Pages” practice
analysis through evisceration, taking apart the elements of
comic storytelling to show they are above such cheap
thrills. Jason, at least, seems to believe that these old
props can still be used to put on a hell of a show.
