Jason Lives

That's the description on the inside flap of one of Jason's comic books. It's as plain and curious as the work itself, or, for that matter, the cartoonist. Jason -- the pen name is an implosion of John Arne Sæterøy -- is a little older than many of the cartoonists storming the alternative scene, a fact that could explain his calculated economy, and the streak of grey in his halcyon storytelling.

I met him at a rare Toronto appearance, sitting at a corner table at the Word on the Street literary festival and batting the sun out of his eyes as he casually watched the masses mill about. It could have been shyness, or jetlag, or simple indifference, but he eyed the crowds from behind his tortoiseshell glasses with a detachment that is his work's calling card, the inscrutable calm of his cartoon animals, whose pallid faces betray not a wince when circumstances hoof them in the specials.

"They're more expressive," he says of his gaunt, elastic crows and heavy-browed mammals, "more universal." Visitors would pause at his display, pick up a book with an, "I've never heard of Jason," and find themselves yanked into the mostly wordless narrative, caught in Jason's silent stream of measured ink. "When you remove the dialogue, you take away an important part," the cartoonist says in his flat, throaty voice. "You get a magical quality, where it's up to the reader to complete, to put emotions into the columns."

As signposts, he gives his readers a wealth of hoary cartooning tricks, classics like a halo of spirals to show a character's confusion, or a spray of sweat for panic. Anger is a jumble in a speech balloon. Now and then, he interjects dialogue in white type over panels of solid black, like the speech cards in a silent movie.

They're elements of a graphic style that could make readers weak-kneed from the way it straddles distant eras. Its chiaroscuro is classic Hollywood, a bald black and white slathered in shadow. "There's something more iconic about black and white that's quite often lost in colour," he says. "Take the ending of Casablanca -- the airport with the smoke -- it wouldn't have been the same in colour." His rendering and storytelling, though, are thoroughly modern; bare and unsentimental. It's a brew he first blended in the pages of Mjau Mjau, a comic magazine he began publishing in Norway seven years ago. (He posts weekly strips at its website, www.mjaumjau.net.) The waste-free artwork, the stark shadows, even the skinny animals with empty eyes can be traced to it. It's here that he serialized the silent story that broke him to North Americans when it was published in 2001 as the graphic novel, Hey Wait.

The magazine is also where he found his peculiar romantic voice, bittersweet and darkly amusing, like a balladeer serenading a wall. "I'm a fan of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin," he says, sad clowns both. "Here," and he opens one of his books to a panel of a cop colliding with a mailman as both race around adjacent corners, envelopes fluttering in the melee. "I stole that one from Chaplin."

One telling example is his 2003 graphic novel Tell Me Something. It's pure tragicomedy; a slender volume, just 48 pages, but its plot weaves between time frames and storylines, setting a simple love story in a steam room of emotions. In standard fashion, it does so in panels that are precisely composed, with timing as sharp as a Brooks Brothers suit. "I just start drawing directly," he says. "I don't do sketches beforehand. I'm a big fan of Tintin and its very clear storytelling. I do spend time changing small details, but the telling comes very naturally."

A young maiden, her rich husband and the poet she loves (plus guns, drugs and Morocco) all make appearances in the book. They're ingredients ripe for piano-trilling melodrama, but Jason doesn't stoop to his readers' preconceptions, or short-change them with trite twists. The comic avoids grandiosity for stoicism, though it isn't above a pratfall when a yuk is wanting. It took him six months to produce and can be read in a matter of minutes. But that would mean ignoring its countless meditative rest stops. "Hopefully," he says, "there's something there to think about."

Tags: Buster Keaton , cartooning , Charlie Chaplin , interviews , Jason , movies , Norway , silence , Toronto