Jason Shiga By The Numbers

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on July 8, 2008 Sign up now!

By Laura Hudson -- Publishers Weekly, 7/7/2008 3:43:00 PM

Jason Shiga loves puzzles, and he makes no secret of it in his comics, which often involve logic games, narrative mazes and choose-your-own-adventure themes. The Oakland, Calif., native, who holds a degree in mathematics from the UC Berkeley, has earned numerous awards for his unconventional cartooning, including a 1999 Xeric grant for Double Happiness, a 2004 Ignatz award for the comic strip Fleep and a 2007 Ignatz nomination for Bookhunter, a library crime procedural based on the real-life theft of a rare book. Shiga even received an Eisner Award for “Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition,” and though that recognition may still be coming, the originality and intelligence of his work—much of it self-published—continues to impress. Shiga talked with PWCW about math, fanfiction and the book he’ll be working on for the next decade of his life.

PW Comics Week: The biography on the book jacket of Double Happiness claimed that you were a mathematician who died in 1967 on the verge of a major breakthrough. What’s the real story of Jason Shiga?

Jason Shiga: I studied mathematics, but in reality I am still alive. After graduating, I went to work for the Oakland Public Library where I currently maintain the library Web site and catalogue.

PWCW: Your newspaper strip Fleep, among other works, is a mixture of math and mystery. How much does mathematics influence your creative process?

JS: I get pegged as the math cartoonist, but to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything in Fleep that someone who’s passed all their math courses in high school couldn’t figure out. Certainly nothing past freshman calculus anyway. Maybe a little group theory and combinatorial analysis. But mostly my comics are just extremely rigorous and analytical. Also, there’s a little graph theory in my last two comics.

PWCW: You’ve also done several self-published Choose Your Own Adventure- style books. What interests you about that kind of narrative?

JS: I’ve always loved Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was a child. I think part of the allure of the genre is that as a child, you don’t get to make any choices in your life. As an adult, however, one aspect I really love is the idea of collaborating on a story with the writer. I like to use my imagination when I’m reading and I’ve noticed that seems to be the direction a lot of narrative is heading. Even with relatively linear books, readers will create their own fanfiction, where they imagine what would happen if Harry Potter and Hagrid are gay lovers.

PWCW: Two of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Hello World and Knock Knock, aren’t available at your website. How can people buy them?

JS: I only sell them at conventions. They’re basically too heavy ,and I get killed in the shipping. Hello World is the world’s first programmable comic. The story centers around a mother who gets to pack items into her children’s lunchboxes. The children pull out the items that can cause other items to go in or remaining items to get switched around in various ways. So essentially, the comic works are a very basic three-line stack program. Knock Knock is another choose your own adventure comic except instead of two or three choices, the reader gets to choose from over a dozen choices at each node. The only thing is, after the reader makes three choices, a crazed gunman bursts through the door and shoots you. There are over 250 ways to die and only one way to survive. The reader must in his three moves pick up enough clues about his identity, the identity of the killer and why he wants to kill him to formulate some sort of survival strategy.

PWCW: You’ve also done a number of comic strips for newspapers and magazines, including Fleep. Do you have any interest in doing more? How about other formats?

JS: I’ve come to the conclusion that three postage stamp–sized panels printed every week over the course of 50 years is not the most conducive format for narrative. Which is why it appeals to me! It’s almost like an Oulipo style formalist restriction. I’d like to get back into it, but I had discouraging experiences my previous times; both my strips were canceled before the story concluded. As for other formats, I’m planning to create a comic on the surfaces of a tetrahexaflexagon.

PWCW: Have you given any thought to doing a Web comic?

JS: I’m too old to do a Web comic. I might give it a shot if monitor technology improves, but as it is, I have a difficult time reading comics on the Web. Paper has twice the contrast, 10 times the resolution, costs a thousand times less and weighs 10,000 times less. The main advantage of computer monitors as I see it is that they can be printed on more than once so over the long run make up for the cost.

PWCW: Also, how does one publish a tetrahexaflexagon?

JS: By printing on two strips of paper, folding one into a Mobius strip and then folding them together into a tetrahexaflexagon.

PWCW: What are you working on now?

JS: Right now, I’m pretty busy working on an interactive children’s book, a romantic comedy and a 1300-page scifi epic that will consume the next 10 years of my life. The romantic comedy is about a boy who takes the Greyhound to New York to tell his best friend that he likes her. The scifi epic is about a boy who wakes up next to his dead body. Everyone thinks he’s someone else and that he’s guilty of murder. My plan is to release [it] quarterly over 20-25 issues. I don’t know when any of these are going to print… I’m hoping to go through a publisher. But I’ve self-published before, so I feel I can always self-publish again if need be.