Back in 2009 I was still working at Borders…..which is a book store….and a book is an item that varies in sizes depending on the page count…pages by the way are what you would flip and they’re made from trees….Trees are…You know what? If you’re reading this in the future and you don’t understand what I’m talking about then ask your parents.

Let’s start over.

Back in 2009, I was working at Borders and during a search on a slow day I came up with a comic with an amazing title: “I Killed Adolf Hitler”. It had this odd looking cover with a dog, standing up right, holding a gun coming out of a weird machine. That image stayed with me for most of the day and eventually I decided I had to own this book just to see what the hell it was about. That’s how I got introduced to the remarkable comic book creator ‘Jason’. (Real name John Arne Saeteroy)

I’ve been hooked on this guy for about three years now and Fantagraphic Books has decided to do a mini-tribute/info dump on this brilliant mind. If you don’t know who he is, his only real mainstream work came from Marvel’s ‘Strange Tales’. There he did a story where Spider-Man forced Doctor Octopus into a bar fight and if you were a fan of that short story then you’ll get to know the guy a lot more with this one-shot. It contains two interviews, one from Jason and another from his colorist Hubert. They’re great interviews that gives you the mindset of both men and how they work together. Especially for Hubert because, naive as I am, I didn’t know Jason didn’t do his own coloring.

The book also has some rare short strips by Jason during his time in America. They range from the easy to get into pop culture references to some surreal stories, the latter making me love his work. The one’s I particularly liked it the first that involves the Phantom Menace and a disgruntled Darth Vader and the ‘origin’ of Death’s scythe. What makes me like his work is that Jason has a dry sense of humor and he takes his time setting up jokes and story beats even with only forty-eight pages to tell it. They are also very imaginative from the aforementioned ‘I Killed Adolf Hitler’ time travel story to having a Three Musketeer story taking place on Mars. I guarantee that whether he writes them or has collaborators that you won’t find these type of in your regular comic pile.

If your comic shop got this one-shot I urge anyone to pick it up. It’s a nice primer to get you into Jason’s work and it also has a checklist of all of his work that’s still in print. I’ve gotten a lot of his titles over the years and he has yet to disappoint me and I bet he won’t disappoint you either.