Pocket Full of Rain and Other Stories Expanded Edition

by Jason

Leading off with the eponymous novella-length thriller, “A Pocketful of rain” is drawn with realistic human beings instead of Jason’s trademark blank-faced animal characters—a true revelation for longtime fans. This collection showcases three distinct the artist’s earliest "realistic" drawing style (used to unsettling effect in some particularly creepy stories), an intermediate "bighead" cartoony style that still features humans (used for both humor and drama), and the "funny animal" style he's now best known for.Readers who love Jason's anthropomorphic style won't be disappointed, though. Also included is several tales drawn in that fashion, featuring (among other things) Death, a guy waiting for a bus, and croquet-playing nuns; over 40 "daily strip" format gags; a trio of hilarious parodies of other pop media work including Corto Meowtese and an elaborate riff on Basil Wolverton's Spacehawk done Jason style; and much more.This new and expanded edition also collects all the images from the limited Swedish edition of Pop!, a collection of Jason’s wildly ingenious and graphically pixelated single page pop culture homages. Modern Art meets pop cult, channeled through Jason’s keen sense of humor and atmosphere. In this gallery, readers see the cartoonist’s takes on Hopper, Magritte, and Kahlo; Moebius, Pratt, and Hergé; musicians like Tom Waits and David Bowie; and many more combinations, tributes, and send-ups. Of special interest are his delightfully ghoulish re-workings of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, blending in works from David Lynch, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and, of course, the paintings of Sluggo Picasso. Plus, a key to deciphering all of Jason’s roguish and inspired takes.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published December 3, 2024

About the author

John Arne Sæterøy, better known by the pen name Jason, is an internationally acclaimed Norwegian cartoonist. Jason's comics are known for their distinctive, stone-faced anthropomorphic characters as well as their pace reminiscent of classic films.
Jason was born in 1965 and debuted in the early 80's, when still a teenager, in the Norwegian comics magazine 'KonK'. His first graphic novel Pocket Full of Rain (1995) won the Sproing Award, one of the main national awards for cartoonist.
In 2001 Jason started a fruitful collaboration with the American publisher Fantagraphics, which helped him gain international notoriety. Besides Norway and the U.S., his comics have appeared in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil.
Jason's stories feature a peculiar mix of dry humour, surrealism and tropes from a variety of pulp genres, such as noir novels and monster movies. His most celebrated works include: Hey, Wait... (2001), a tale of childhood and trauma; You Can't Get There from Here (2004), a re-telling of the myth of Frankenstein; The Left Bank Gang (2007), featuring fictional versions of Hemingway and other writers living in Paris in the 1920s; I Killed Adolf Hitler (2008), a story that mixes romance and time travel; The Last Musketeer (2009), a love letter to old sci-fi imaginary featuring king's musketeer Athos; Low Moon (2010), one of his many collections of short stories; Werewolves of Montpellier (2010); Isle of 100,000 Graves (2011), a pirate story co-written with French cartoonist Fabien Vehlmann; Lost Cat (2013), a thriller with a surreal spin.
Jason won a Harvey Award for best new talent in 2002 and Eisner Awards in the category 'Best U.S. Edition of International Material' for three consecutive years (2007-2009).
He has lived in Denmark, Belgium, the U.S., eventually setting for Montpellier, France in 2007.

Reviews

[Rick Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

A new edition of various comics from Norwegian comics artist Jason, collecting broadly some of his earlier and more formative works. The main feature is Pocket Full of Rain, his first graphic novel. Though typically known for his distinct anthropomorphic character designs, this story is told entirely with realistic human figures and expressions. Much of the deadpan and absurdist sensibilities are still present here, though it's fairly apparent that Jason hasn't quite settled into the narrative voice he'll use in much of his later works. The story has a noir-ish surrealistic flavor it, perhaps a little akin to something like Dan Clowes' Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron. Primarily focused on a police sketch artist who strikes up a relationship with a woman with a jealous ex who also happens to be a hitman. On the run for having ripped off the ex-boyfriend, the story twists in absurd directions steeped in the "strange film noir" style of a Lynch or Cronenberg film. It's solid fare that is memorable within the context of Jason's larger body of work simply due to how different it is from the stuff that follows.

The comics and strips that follow is much more what one expects from Jason. Most are in the style of Jason's deadpan humor, with the "Kill the Cat!" comic serving as one of the most genuinely brilliant strips by him. A lot of homage artwork makes up the bulk of the remainder of this collection, with Jason honoring the likes of Little Lulu, Krazy Kat, Tintin, Corto Maltese, Love and Rockets and more. This section is what makes this an "expanded version" on the previous softcover edition, and it serves as an entertaining flip through of Jason's honed aesthetic over the years.

[Devin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This early Jason work just wasn’t for me.

He hasn’t mastered his storytelling here yet, but you can see the potential. He’s also starting with a much more generic comic crime type story with mostly human characters. It just didn’t hit me or make me care at all.

I’d say this is more for the hardcore Jason fans who want to read his early work.

Anyone else? I’d skip to one of his many other fantastic books.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn’t realized that Jason is Norwegian.
While I didn’t understand every page or love every choice I did love most of it. It made me think, made me laugh, made references I liked, had interesting premises.
It helped that in the introduction I felt warned that things might skew a little absurd.

[Tom Garback]

Couldn’t vibe with the worldview, which is, like, mentally ill pretentious straight dude from the 90s.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly good. Books like this that give an overview of an artist's earlier work can be a lot of fun if you like the artist, I definitely would not recommend this for people who don't like Jason much!

The 50 page *Pocket Full Of Rain* story in here is actually quite good. Not excellent, but it's a good romance / crime story with a lot of surreal elements

There's also about 10 pages near the end with some other short surreal stories that I think really work. I liked the gallery, especially the parts at the end showing his old comics covers

There is also a terrible comic strip he tried to make. Fits right in with the awful comic strip in his book Meow, Baby. His sense of humor makes no sense to me

[Miquela Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enjoyed bits of this very much and the rest didn’t land with me (usually the stuff he made before he started to draw his iconic animal characters and was drawing more “realistic”)

Loved the strips with the cactus and prisoner guy in particular and all the illustrations of his iconic characters based on people and characters from pop culture

[Ben Dudden]

The expanded content consists of an additional 64 pages of illustrations from the Norwegian-exclusive Pop! collection, and is otherwise identical to the original edition.