Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie appears as either an image or a character in all three black-and-white graphic stories that make up Death in Trieste by mononymous Norwegian Eisner Award winner Jason (The Left Bank Gang; I Killed Adolf Hitler). That Bowie, like most of the book's characters, is a human-animal hybrid is one of the less strange aspects of this pleasingly odd endeavor.
In "The Magritte Affair," a crime story largely set in Brussels, a couple of burglars steal a portrait of Ziggy Stardust from a house and leave in its place what looks like surrealist painter René Magritte's The Son of Man. In the more languid "Death in Trieste," set in 1925 Berlin, a time-traveling Bowie's encounter with Marlene Dietrich is just one storyline revolving around characters who embrace Dadaism (someone explains the concept to an uninitiated Bowie). And in "Sweet Dreams," an asteroid is headed toward London. (Bowie is, fittingly, in outer space in this story.) Possibly in the asteroid's path are members of 1980s musical acts Eurythmics and Ultravox, as well as other famous faces from the era's British music scene.
Throughout Death in Trieste, Jason uses spare and lean black lines on stark white; the book may contain some challenging ideas, but he gives readers plenty of neutral space to get their bearings. Everything here is marvelously surreal and silly, with much superhero-comics-style fighting ("BAM") and the occasional metafictional touch, as when one character in "The Magritte Affair" describes another as "the hat seller from page 14, panel 2!" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer