Has there ever been a more celebrated community of writers than the 1920s Parisian expatriate scene—Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Joyce, Pound, Stein? An awful lot has been written about them, much of it overromanticizing, trivia-worshipping effluvium. What a flush-cheeked pleasure, then, to find somebody—a Norwegian cartoonist!—who's willing to take the piss out of the names while still respecting their work.

Much of mononomenclatured Jason's previous comics are wordless black-and-white vignettes, but there's great dialogue in The Left Bank Gang—Sartre would of course continually need women to rave about his huge prick—and the sophisticated coloring evokes Hergé's Tintin. The writers in this book are presented as cartoonists (James Joyce on Knut Hamsun's new comic book, The Growth of the Soil: "...(W)hy does he fill every square inch of every panel? You've got to leave some white space, for Chrissake!") and together they decide to steal the cash prize of a big boxing tournament. During the closing Tarantino-style tangle of POV and chronology, it's pretty easy to find yourself doing the unthinkable: unabashedly pulling for Hemingway.