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[Link] Double Happiness [Date] 11/27/03 [Comments] 
To review any comic by Jason Shiga is to try to find a way to recommend everything by this artist. I have yet to find any other review of Shiga's work that doesn't use the word "genius", so there, I've gotten it over with immediately. My theory as to why he inspires this impression on anybody who meets him is that his sense of humor is so odd and geeky while being completely interwoven into everything he does. Unfortunately, like with most geniuses I have encountered, his output can be intermittant, and it is only because of his newest regularly available work that I can write a review. The base of the Jason Shiga world is his own website, Shigabooks.com. This site contains mostly reviews, written by the artist himself, of his earlier hand-printed comics. The comics described are mostly out of print and not available on the web site, but the reviews are screamingly hilarious. And, as you read, you will begin to get a taste of how math and humor combine in Jason's world. There actually are some samples of comics on the site, all good especially the compelling Bus Stop, which is representative of Jason's highly recognizable drawing style, pacing and humor, and is also unfinished. The Shigabooks site used to contain a journal, now a LiveJournal, which is perhaps the funniest I could ever possibly recommend. In absolutely deadpan tones he describes attempting to overcome shyness in his everyday life by analyzing it mathematically. Just read it. When I discovered shigabooks, his then Magnum Opus was in the process of moving to Modern Tales, one of the grandfathers of pay webcomic sites that is still going strong and which you should join. I never saw "Fleep" at the time because it was in transition and I couldn't figure out its update schedule; the really good news however is that it is now available in full for free back on shigabooks.com! Fleep's review on the website, which was all I could find for about a year however, is such a work of art on its own that I feel compelled to quote it in entirety here: Fleep is everything I wish that a comic strip could be. It's ambitous, mysterious and utterly masturbatory. About a quarter of the strips feature the main character working through various math problems. They are some of the most dramatic math problems you'll ever see in a comic strip. I believe that Fleep is my best strip to date. It is also a complete commercial disaster. The editors at "Asian Week" felt that the theme of the strip didn't really jive with the rest of their newspaper and decided to cut the run at number 28. I imagine all along, they really wanted an Asian Boondocks or Cathy. But gosh darnit, I did the best strip I could and if I did what they wanted it wouldn't have been the best. I really thought there were enough people out there like me who would just fall in love with the strip. But I think it just confused people. After all that, it seems all the more ironic that Jason's shiny new comic, Double Happiness, again at Modern Tales (the most current comic is always free for you cheapsters out there), would have made Asian Week's editors happy. It's the story of a chinese american who moves to SF and hangs out with some friends there in it's vibrant chinatown, but is ashamed when they discover that he doesn't actually know much chinese language or culture. They of course are not offended, but set out to help him learn to fit in. It's a beautiful story, and it inspired me to do a web search on "Hokkein" and learn something I didn't know before about chinese history and people.
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