Jason Shiga


Jason Shiga is an American cartoonist who incorporates puzzles, mysteries and unconventional narrative techniques into his work.

Early life

Jason Shiga is from Oakland, California. His father, Seiji Shiga, was an animator who worked on the 1964 Rankin-Bass production Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Jason Shiga was a pure mathematics major at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1998.

Career

Shiga is credited as the "Maze Specialist" for Issue #18 of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly, which features a solved maze on the front cover and a 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.
Shiga has also drawn and written several comics and illustrated features for Nickelodeon Magazine, some of which feature his original creations, and some starring Nickelodeon characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants and the Fairly OddParents.
Shiga makes a cameo appearance in the Derek Kirk Kim comic Ungrateful Appreciation as a Rubik's Cube-solving nerd.

Techniques and materials

According to the rear credits page of Empire State: A Love Story, Shiga, who was inspired by an actual Greyhound Bus trip from Oakland to New York to create that story, pencilled it with a yellow No. 2 pencil on copy paper. He then inked it with a lightbox and a 222 size Winsor & Newton brush, and lettered it with a Micron 08 felt-tip pen. The colors were applied digitally by John Pham.

Awards

Won