Word: shiga
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...turns out that Jason Shiga is not actually dead, but just living in Oakland, California. This will come as welcome news to comix fans who may have been alarmed at the coda of his 2000 book, "Double Happiness," which explained that he had committed suicide in a mental institution. Shiga has since explained this Puckish bit of misinformation as a marketing ploy which backfired. I'm glad he's still around because his creations, though woefully hard to find, are some of the most fun comicbooks I've read in a long while...
That first book, "Double Happiness" (Shiga Books; 72 pp.; $4.95), self-published through a grant by the invaluable Xeric Foundation begins when Tom, a shy Chinese-American who barely knows how to hold chopsticks, travels from Boston to San Francisco. There he meets a distant cousin immigrant who introduces him to the city's Chinatown. Tom learns to squat on the balls of his feet, wins money at a smoky mah-jongg club, and starts to fall for Li Jian, the cute girl whose karaoke version of "Hey, Jude" is "Hey, Jute." She teaches him to read the fruit merchant...
...Written with a mix of phonetic Hokkien dialect and English, Shiga creates a fascinating and little-seen world. In both content and artwork Shiga emulates the style of Lat, a cartoonist with a Charles Shultz-level reputation in South East Asia. Having only started cartooning in 1995, Shiga has an extremely simple, cute and doodley drawing style. But watch out. With the kind of reversal that you later appreciate as a Shiga trademark, two thirds of the way through "Double Happiness" Tom takes an absurdly cruel beating at the hands of some thugs who seem to think he knows something...
Radical reversals become literal with the other kind of book that Shiga produces: Choose Your Own Adventure. The first of these, 2001's "The Last Supper," had the user unfold a sheet in different directions depending on what choices he wanted to make, starting with whether to eat a brussel sprout or not. The most remarkable of these books, "Meanwhile...," is a photocopied, hand-constructed wonder. Rather than the usual left to right and top to bottom layout, the panels are connected by a maze of tubes. At some point these tubes lead off the edge of the page...
...attractive. One guy gave me a Gucci ring but I didn't keep it. Using it was gross! I sold it and spent the money on snowboarding. I bought lots of cute accessories and went on snowboarding trips. I'm actually going on a trip this weekend to Shiga Kogen, with my older brother's friends...