Review: The Living and the Dead, by Jason

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
As Tim, a fellow reviewer on Goodreads, put it: "This is just one of those stories where a dish boy falls in love with a prostitute and they try to survive the zombie revolution." For once, those lying anon. thugs from the Intertubes are right: the aforementioned dish boy --dog-man, really-- is busy collecting the necessary hundred bucks for that one unforgettable night when a meteor (much like the one on the cover) strikes, leading to an apocalyp...ZomBies!!*Braaaains%$*!!! His plans of love and sex seem shattered, but perhaps even Love can find a place in Zombieland?

The Living and the Dead is probably the first book I have read cover-to-cover in a public library since the hallowed days of Frog and Toad. It is without words, excepting the occasional onomatopoeia and a mere seven lines of dialogue, presented in their own panels, silent movie style. It can be "read" in under ten minutes by all but the extremely vegetative. (I did not time myself.)

The author, a so-called Jason, from so-called Norway, is now on my list -- my good list, not my shit list. His is an art style that is simple and clean, heavily influenced by the so-called ligne claire style invented by Hergé, famed creator of The Adventures of Tintin. (He probably got the idea for his single-name pen name from Hergé, too -- I kinda like it, it's got a Greek/Roman feel to it: Diogenes of Sinope, Jason of Norway.)

The anthropomorphic animal motif seems to permeate just about all of his works. The comedy, too, seems to make a regular appearance. No, there are no pianos falling from the sky (at least in this work), but the humor is there: as the back cover says, "It puts the 'dead' [back] in deadpan." (*nyuk*nyuk*nyuk*) I managed to track down another, wordier Jasonian work -- The Left Bank Gang: Hem, Ezra, and Scott as the dog-(men) we always knew they were -- before toddling out of the library in earnest search for father.

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