The Norwegian cartoonist known as Jason has a new book due out this September, dubbed Death In Trieste.
You can read the full description below, but in brief, it’s essentially a collection of three short comics stories, tied together by one absurdist thread running throughout. This new book marks Jason’s first new work since 2022’s Upside Dawn, another collection that was nominated for an Ignatz Award.
And today The Beat is honored to have an 11-page excerpt from the new book, courtesy of publisher Fantagraphics. You can find those pages below, following the official description text for Death In Trieste. In this snippet, the characters grapple with early mornings, spilled coffee, and René Magritte related nervous breakdowns.
If it wasn’t evident, the book is poised to feature the same dry humor, minimalist cartooning, and niche cultural references that have made Jason one of our true must-read cartoonists. You can find both the description and the excerpt below. Death in Trieste is slated for release on September 16 … enjoy!
The title story, “Death in Trieste,” sets the scene in 1920s Berlin, a bustling cultural hotspot in the shadow of the coming Nazism. Here, a host of unlikely characters — time-travelling David Bowie, Rasputin, Nosferatu, Marlene Dietrich, and more — are all connected by a group of Dadaists who perform the art of rationality through madness. In “The Magritte Affair,” a wisecracking pair of detectives must crack a case involving art forgeries, masked men, and mysterious disappearances — all linked to the surrealist world of the famous Belgian painter. Finally, in “Sweet Dreams,” Jason reimagines the New Wave artists of the 1980s as X-Men-esque superheroes. While this supergroup easily dispatches such supernatural threats as living mummies, animated suits of armor, and rampaging golems, they soon face their biggest challenge yet, as a giant meteorite hurtles toward the Earth.
