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Although he sites Malaysian cartoonist Lat as his key influence, Jason Shiga's comics read very much like, and indeed, borrow quite a few tropes from Agatha Christie novels - both artists manage the high-wire act of entertaining their readers without sacrificing the complexity of their mysteries. Just as Christie often chose to populate her books with primarily flat players so as to better highlight the intricate mechanics of her plots, Shiga's simplified characters are drawn in a squat, rounded, neck-less style (reminiscent of Lego people), to encourage the readers to lock themselves into the protagonist's position (al la Scott McCloud's theory of identification).
There are marked differences between the two artists, of course. Agatha Christie is a dead British Dame, and one of the most widely read authors in the world. While the Oakland, CA-dwelling, Asian-American, not-dead1 Shiga isn't quite as popular, he has received signs of approbation from the comics community: a Xeric grant in 1999 for
Double Happiness, in 2003 both an Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition and an Ignatz for
Fleep, and in 2007 a Stumptown Trophy Award for Outstanding Writing for
Bookhunter. And though Shiga is indebted to Christie, he uses his mathematical background (Shiga has a degree in pure mathematics from UC Berkeley), his day job at the Oakland Public Library, his tri-culturalism (his father is Japanese; his mother is second-generation Chinese) and his love of all things that were cool when he was 12 to instruct his experimental formalism.
Shiga's comics fall into roughly three categories: more straightforward action, choose-your-own-adventure puzzles and mystery/thrillers.
Double Happiness (self-published, $4.95) belongs in the first: it's the story of Tom, a Chinese-American Bostonian who moves to San Francisco's Chinatown, only to experience an unexpectedly violent form of culture shock at the hands of his Hokkien cousin and his friends. Shiga's comics usually don't focus on Asian-Americanism, but even here cultural and language differences function effectively as code: true to form, Tom must decipher them to survive. Shiga explained "the Hokkien or Fukanese dialect was something I had to research. It's an incredibly rich and complex language spoken primarily among Chinese diaspora in South East Asia. Their culture is extremely diverse and within the dialect there are roughly seventeen subcultures and subdialects." When asked the significance of the choice, he replied, "Because the Fukanese are gangsters!"
Comics such as
Knock Knock (self-published, $20) and
Hello World belong in the second category, presenting brainteasers for readers to actively solve. The most recent, 2007's
Knock Knock, is a clear-cut choose-your-own-adventure in which readers must flip back and forth between different page numbers to see the outcome that their decisions have on the main character, who is fleeing a serial killer. Shiga wrote that his love for this conceit stems from the fact that "
Choose Your Own Adventure books (and
Fighting Fantasy game books) just hit me at the right time and are now permanently ingrained in my skull as the coolest possible objects in the universe."
Hello World is a two-tiered strip in which the bottom tier is an items list, and the top tier is a story that weaves in and out of that. It contains a secret code, and Shiga promised to refund readers the $20 cover prince if they could crack it. Shiga wrote that he's "refunded $100 so far! I'm proud to have created a comic so unreadable that of the hundreds of copies I've sold, only five readers have had the stamina to finish."
Part twoKristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
