3:AM Magazine

Jason, The Living and the Dead (Fantagraphics, 2007)

Following successful forays into four colours with The Left Bank Gang (on the Paris of the Twenties, starring Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ezra Pound in a bundled bank job) and Why Are You Doing This? (described as Alfred Hitchcock shot by Jim Jarmusch)—Jason goes back to two tones in The Living and the Dead, part two of his planned horror trilogy, and his amusing reworking of the old boy-meets-girl story as a rom-zom-com (a term cribbed from Shaun of the Dead).

A deadbeat dishwasher passes a hooker each night on his return from work. He scrimps enough money together for a date, but a meteor falls on a graveyard and the city, now plagued with the undead, proves a more hostile background than usual as the both flee the flesh-eating hordes.

In the past, much has been made of Jason’s (real name, John Arne Sæterøy) deadpan Buster Keaton style and here, an homage to the visual gags of the silent movies results in a wonderful panel where the two lovers escape by clambering through a car; the zombies queue up to plod in after them and file out the other side.

It’s not entirely whimsical, though: the panels where a mother leaves her child in a pram on the street outside a shop, to return to a skeleton, knocks any notions of gentility on the head, as does a scene were a dog ravishes a bird. That said, for a zombie turn, it is not all blood and gore. In Jason’s hands, most of it is a whiff of the genre. Like a German Expressionist horror film, it is the unseen that is the most chilling, and his simple renderings of the characters and backgrounds only reinforce the harrowing austerity.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Tomaselli lives in Ireland where she edits the inimitable Dogmatika and is Comics Co-Editor of 3:AM.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, May 14th, 2007.