Review: The Left Bank Gang

The Left Bank Gang
Written and Drawn by Jason
Published by Fantagraphics Books. $12.95 USD

Jason won me over at the start of his English-translated career with Hey, Wait.. and SSHHHH, but while 2005's Why Are You Doing This? was strong, I think many would agree his books haven't reached those heights since. One reason for that may be his relentless fascination with crime stories. I didn't know what The Left Bank Gang was going to be about when I got it, but I wasn't that surprised when it turned into a heist story.

I was a little surprised, though, and disappointed, because what came before was a delightfully personal and funny homage to expatriate authors of the '20s like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound and Joyce. I love the work of three of them (no offense to Pound, just haven't read him yet), as well as that era, so it was great fun to see these writers transferred to Jason's world of dog-and-bird people. The traits of Hemingway and Fitzgerald are well-known (and Zelda is thrown in for good measure), so that's easy but satisfying entertainment, and though Pound and Joyce aren't very interesting, literate comics readers will find much pleasure in Jason making these authors into cartoonists, their struggles with the blank page solved with pens and brushes rather than typewriters. It's very clever and even personal, as Jason's own artistic struggles come through in the characters.

Unfortunately, as I said, Jason then welds a heist plot onto this amiable idea, and as much as I enjoy the subgenre, he doesn't really earn the right to go in this direction. Or, to put it another way, he takes whatever was fun and interesting about the book and negates it with improper motivation (uh, cartoonists don't make a lot of money, so let's steal some) and set-up. Fitzgerald's codependence on Zelda and his fears of her leaving him for someone with more money (or a bigger cock) are a great motivation for him to rob a bank, and Jason half-assedly sets that up in a few scenes, but why Hemingway originates the plan is unclear, and though he's an enjoyable macho sort, we don't know enough about him. He gets the final page and it's an interesting scene between him and his then-wife, Hadley, but doesn't work nearly as well as it should because we know nothing about his relationship with his wife until that point.

Jason replays the heist through the eyes of the various participants, which is clever in the way it slowly fills in the gaps in the story, but it also serves to kill any momentum the heist plot had. The technique worked great in Pulp Fiction--it was a thrill to see Travolta's character again after we knew he died--but Jason does not have the tools (and cast) of Tarantino at his disposal, and the effect is flat. Jason had an opportunity to do something pretty great and audacious here with cartooning and celebrity and jealousy and passion and doubt and alcohol, but he instead chooses to drop this for a clunky excursion into a genre he obviously admires greatly but is ill-equipped to imitate.