To Laugh or to Cry? Ambiguity and Humour in Jason's Graphic Novels

Abstract

The paper offers a reading of Jason’s use of sparsity, seriousness, and reduction as a concealment of a technique that is based on multifaceted ambiguity involving the blending of genres, a playfully intertextual attitude, and surprising emotional depth of character and story. It discusses the connection between humour and visual, textual, and structural ambiguity in Jason’s works, as well as ambivalence in the reader’s response, illustrates Jason’s combination of incongruous genres and simultaneous employment of motifs from children’s literature and various genre movies (such as science fiction, crime thrillers, heist movies, and horrors), and explores Jason’s technique of subverting expectations of comic relief by withholding certain structural parts of a joke (typically a punchline) or inserting an unexpected element (such as psychological depth).