Jason Shiga
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Jason Shiga is an Asian American cartoonist from Oakland, California. His comics have a geeky side, and often feature exciting uses of math. Many of his comics are interactive and require the reader to make choices to move the story along.
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[edit] Awards
In 1999, Jason Shiga received a grant from the Xeric Foundation for his comic Double Happiness.
Shiga won the 2003 Eisner Award for talent deserving of wider recognition for his comic strip Fleep. The same year, Fleep won an Ignatz Award for outstanding story.
[edit] Biography
Jason Shiga's life has been shrouded in mystery and speculation. According to his book jacket, he was a reclusive math genius who had died on the verge of his greatest discovery in June of 1967. However, upon winning a 2003 Eisner award for talent deserving of wider recognition, a man claiming to be Jason Shiga appeared in front of an audience alive and well only to tell them that he had been living on an island in the South China Seas for the past 40 years. The man who accepted his award was later discovered to be an impostor who had disguised himself as Jason Shiga.
[edit] Trivia
- Jason Shiga's father, Seiji Shiga, was an animator who worked on the 1964 Rankin-Bass production Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
- Jason Shiga makes a cameo appearance in the Derek Kirk Kim comic, "Ungrateful Appreciation" as a rubic's cube solving nerd.
- Shiga is credited as the "Maze Specialist" for Issue 18 (Winter 2005/2006) of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly, which features a solved maze on the front cover and a (slightly different) unsolved maze on the back. The title page of each story in the journal is headed by a maze segment labeled with numbers leading to the first pages of other stories.
- At the age of 12, Shiga was the 7th highest ranked child go player in Oakland.
[edit] Works
- Books
- Phillip's Head, 1997 self-published minicomics
- The Adventures of Doorknob Bob, 1997 self-published minicomics
- Mortimer Mouse, 1997 self-published minicomics
- The Family Circus (parody), 1997 self-published minicomics
- The Last Supper, 1997 self-published minicomics
- Grave of the Crickets, 1998 self-published minicomics
- The Bum's Rush, 1998 self-published minicomics
- The Date, 1999 self-published minicomics
- Double Happiness, 2000 Shigabooks
- Meanwhile..., 2001 self-published minicomics
- Fleep, 2002 Sparkplug Comics
- Hello World, 2003 self-published minicomics
- Bus Stop, 2004 self-published minicomics
- Bookhunter, 2005 self-published minicomics
- Knock! Knock!, 2006 self-published minicomics
[edit] Memorable Quotes
"Mister, that chocolate ice cream is infected with parasites." -Meanwhile
"I should borrow you my clothes more often." -Double Happiness
"I've got an Apache fueled and ready to go. I can have you anywhere in the Bay Area within six minutes." -Bookhunter
"Damn you, Kettle Stitch." -Bookhunter
"The line's dead!" -Fleep
"In news of the world, a train crash in India has killed 1000 people." -Knock Knock
[edit] Goofs
- In Fleep, Jimmy uses a Foucault pendulum to calculate his latitude. However, to swing through even a tenth of a radian would take several hours at 50 North.
- The brand of tattle tape featured in Bookhunter wasn't available until 1976, three years after the story takes place.
