Fleep ($5.00) and Bookhunter ($15.00), two of Shiga's mystery/thrillers, are arguably his most well-known works to date. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dylan Williams' company Sparkplug has published both of them, lending Shiga's work better productions values (and most likely better distribution than his self-published comics). According to Shiga, "Dylan was my first and for a long time my only friend in comics. When I was first starting, I'd bug him all the time about process and technique and he was basically my mentor. So when he started Sparkplug, I guess it was only natural he give a crack at Fleep, which if you ever saw the minicomic version looked like a piece of photocopied poo. Not many people know this but Fleep actually came out as a weekly strip in Asian Week two years before Sparkplug published it [in 2002]. But it was so below the radar, it actually got cancelled two-thirds through its run. So I can say with some certainty that I wouldn't have won that Eisner if he hadn't published it. The way I see it, it's just as much his Eisner as it is mine. When I finished Bookhunter, Sparkplug was my first choice. But Dylan encouraged me to try for some bigger publishers like D&Q or Fantagraphics. After they rejected me, I came crawling back to Dylan."

Fleep is a locked-room mystery in which the amnesiac protagonist is trapped in a buried phone booth. He's able to call out but the operator speaks in another tongue. The question of how to survive can only be answered when he remembers how he got there in the first place. Both Fleep and Bookhunter have roughly six panels per page, a frequent and carefully considered layout for Shiga. "If you're going to do a grid (and I realize this is a big if), I see your choices as 1x1, 2x2, 2x3, 3x2 and 3x3 (past that, the page gets too crowded). 2x3 is the only layout where you end up with panels wider than they are tall (assuming the page is roughly 8.5x11). Of course all this begs the question, why do you need the panels to be wider than tall?: because the eye will scan down a tall panel, but across a wide panel. I want to keep the eye moving along. Another way I like to think of it is that panels are words. They're both the indivisible atomic unit of the story."

While Bookhunter, Shiga's latest graphic novel, shares many of the same themes with his earlier work, it is a marked departure in several ways. For example, Special Agent Bay, the library marshal assigned to locate a missing incunabula bible, is more of a round character rather than the cartooning equivalent of the second-person "you" in many of Shiga's comics. Bay isn't using his reasoning skills to survive in a situation that he doesn't quite know how he got into; he's merely performing a police procedural, and has access to a specialized knowledge that many of Shiga's protagonists lack. A man of action, Bay is also fully capable of using force while orchestrating the investigation, whether that involves car chases, raids on people with overdue books, or chasing a perp from rooftop to rooftop.

Shiga has also put more effort into his world-building than in many of his other works, with the possible exception of Double Happiness: Bookhunter is set in the 1970s and features richly detailed backgrounds of library and urban settings. Shiga chose to set his story in this period because he is a "big fan of forensic thrillers like Red Dragon or early Michael Crichton. But I think police procedurals took a real nose-dive in the '80s when DNA testing became available. Basically, all the criminals in modern police procedurals have to be bald non-ejaculating rapists, otherwise the crime can get solved in two minutes (i.e. Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell). Either that or the detectives on the case are a bunch of backwater hicks who can't afford access to AFIS. Boo!"

Shiga played around with new digital techniques to create the analog world of Bookhunter. "I start out with a script. But when it comes to action, I write in thumbnails," he says of his artistic process. In previous interviews, Shiga stated that he pencils his work, and then goes over it with a brush, but that "recently I've been experimenting with a new method which involves me drawing about 70 poses for each character, drawing the backgrounds and then assembling them in Photoshop and inking over the Photoshop printouts. My goal was to shave off about 30% from the drawing time, but actually this comic has taken me twice as long to draw and is only half the length. Let that be a lesson to you, do not try new things." Bookhunter's sepia tones and graphic design simulate the beat-up, earthy feel of a well-worn library book. "Production-wise, I wanted the book to look like a pulpy paperback from the '70s, the kind where the paper is brown and the ink is a slightly darker brown. I even wanted it to smell bad (and it does). I have to give credit to Dylan Williams who did a brilliant job on the production. He even simulated paper texture that wasn't there through the use of ink."

When asked about the sea change Bookhunter represents in his work, Shiga replied, "In my projects, I try to alternate between interactive comics and more story-based comics. I found my early interactive comics had a lot of story and my early story-based comics had a lot of math (i.e. Meanwhile... and Fleep). Now my story comics have almost no math and my interactive comics have almost no story (i.e. Bookhunter and Hello World). If this trend continues, in 20 years I'll publish an 800-page fantasy comic followed by a proof of the Riemann conjecture in comic form."

In the meantime, Shiga is "working on a romantic comedy that takes place in Oakland and Williamsburg. This will be followed by a comic printed on the surfaces of a tetrahexaflexagon." For those who would like a further introduction to his comics, his website, shigabooks.com, features interactive games and webcomics as well as minis and graphic novels to purchase.

Previous article: Jason Shiga, part one
Next article: Esther Pearl Watson