I've read this in German (just to keep in touch with the language), and it's been 25 years or so since I've been to Hamburg, so it was interesting to revisit the city from the perspective of a comic designer.
The story is... powerful. At ComicGate, someone compared the plot to Kafka, and there is certainly a Kafkian element to everything. I think what is most masterfully done with the plot is that, although "Mädel-Jan" is not really a lovable person — even though s/he denies it, s/he really just thinks about herself — we, as readers, tend to empathize with her, because she is in a terrible situation, and we can only think — how would we react if it happened to us?
Then, as the story goes on, we start to see how others react to the female Jan, and some doubts start to creep in. There is no doubt that the female Jan believes that she was a male Jan once. But, truth be told, Jan-the-artist is very clever not to give us any obvious clues about that. Let's take a few examples:
The most obvious one: we never see the transformation actually happening.
Then we don't see any other clothes of Jan-as-male. We see the apartment quite often, but there are no absolutely "male" things around. Sure, the flat is a mess, but that's not strictly a "male" trend. The character claims to have porn downloaded on her computer, but we never see what kind of porn is there. There are not even typically male implements on the bathroom, and even a razor would not say much — women use them to shave their legs, after all. So this was brilliantly done — we never know from Jan's environment if she was a he or not.
Except that Jan doesn't have ID cards as a female. But we never see the "male" ID cards — not once. We don't even know how the "male" Jan looks like — we know that the female Jan is not immediately recognisable as "Jan". But we would expect some clues if it were a "simple" gender transformation: Jan would draw attention to things like eyes, hair colour, skin colour, etc., and his friends would at least figure that out. But they don't. So we, the readers, are led to believe that Jan is in a completely different body, although, at the very beginning, this is not obvious.
We would think that Jan's friends would recognise her apartment — but the narrator, once again, eludes us. None of Jan's friends visited the apartment, and Jan had never visited their apartments, either — so we're kept in the dark. And we would expect Jan's friends to figure out some clue that would tell them for sure that they are, indeed, talking to the Jan they knew. But Jan's almost obnoxious personality prevents them to figure that out. Jan doesn't really act as Jan — but, then again, Jan admits, at some point, that "as a guy he would never act that way". But Jan certainly has some knowledge of his past life as a boy, and certainly recognises immediately his own friends. Which is actually quite strange, and contributes to make the plot so interesting.
Over the series, the suspicion that the "female Jan" is a very strange psychopath that extracts all knowledge from their victims and murders them, and then self-hypnotises herself to believe to be the victim just murdered pops up a lot of times — but is seen as not being very credible. Occam's razor! And how would the murderer immediately recognise "male Jan's" friends, know where they hang out, and be able to successfully do a presentation at the uni, knowing exactly what to say? Even in a scenario of prolonged torture, this would not be credible — you can't simply torture someone long enough to acquire the necessary knowledge to understand enough of a subject to pass examination. Specially after walking around uni, knowing exactly where the classes are, and so forth. So at this point we have to admit that, whatever happened, this person really has "male Jan'" memories.
Then we step into surrealism. I agree with rphb, the concept of the unreliable narrator is extremely well done. We tend to believe Jan's story, but it's the nagging things that put us off. Jan starts to believe that the shark really speaks and/or protects her in her dreams. At first, it gets shrugged off, and so we give little importance to it; but as the story unfolds, we understand that there is more surrealism than realism in the whole story. The scene where Jan steps on the table at the police station and sees things that nobody else can see is where we question Jan's sanity.
Now, of course, at this point the reader has to ask a question. Was Jan insane at the beginning, or became insane after the transformation? Let's put it in our own perspective: would we remain sane if we switched gender (and body) overnight? How would we react? Jan tries to be a logic and rational as possible, and is constantly trying to see things from everybody's perspective (which would exclude the diagnosis of psychopathy, or at least of sociopathy), and understands that nobody would ever believe her. So wouldn't it be reasonable to admit that this would drive her to insanity?
The end, of course, was shocking, but actually quite well constructed. The climax comes when Jan thinks she has murdered Phillip, driven by the ghosts — and there are two possibilities here. The first is that she runs away from that act; the second is that she might have realised that she might have murdered Jan too, and is really a psychopath, and now tries to run away from that as well. So even the end is ambiguous (of course, we're never 100% sure that the end is the end, except for what the author tells us
).
As the plot goes, I think it's one of the best stories I have read in the past few years, because it's so hard to grasp. As soon as we start feeling sorry for "female Jan", she reacts in a way that we can only say, "nooo you stupid! you shouldn't have said that! you shouldn't have done that! you need to earn their trust! you're doing all wrong" — and then Jan realises exactly the same thing, and we feel even sorrier for her. But we also feel sorry for the many people who wish to help her somehow, who wish to believe in her, but she is constantly defeating their attempts to come closer to the truth.
On the final sequence... what happened? Phillip is the protector that replaces the shark; why did Jan suddenly feel she needed to have sex with him? Phillip, somehow, also sees that this is not quite right, and doesn't react (although he certainly cums) — or was it all a dream? After all, Phillip seems to wake up, alone, in the morning. So what happened during the night? Is the lack of response during the sex act merely an indication that it's all a dream?
What is also masterly done is this constant shuffling around of what is real and what is not — we start to lose track. At the beginning, the surreal elements are drawn in a different style, and depict scenes that we know that Jan would never do — e.g. walking around naked. But during the modelling session, she almost gets naked, and, while uncomfortable, she gives the idea that she's getting used to it. She can't explain why she stuffs her pants inside the bag before visiting Phillip. So the reader is conditioned to believe that Jan, somehow, is more at ease with her female body, and the sex scene becomes convincing — a female's last resort for demanding trust by the last remaining friend. We get this "crazy bitch" sequence, which, however, never becomes true — although, at the end, they do have sex, even though it doesn't turn out how Jan wants.
But at the very end, Phillip wakes up — in his bed, not on the couch. So did they have sex or not?
For the reader, the most complex part to follow is the motivation of the whole story. Jan's constantly asking questions about why and how, and we, the readers, have no other way but to ask the same questions. The surreal parts just drive us off. Who are the ghosts? Even if they are just Jan's projections — and at the end, they trick her in believing she has some control over them — what do they stand for? Is there a motive for the ghosts to force her to kill her plushie shark — and then Phillip (or at least make her believe she killed him) — or is she just completely insane?
There is a crescendo in the surreal parts as well. At first (like the character), we believe it's just fear from darkness, and being over-sensitive to sounds (which would actually be consistent with the transformation scenario: women hear and see differently from men). But then it becomes more complicated. What is the role of the light bulb which explodes so quickly? What do the three screws mean? These are physical things, not imagined; they really happen for the other characters as well. And so does her strange eye-bleeding, which has no medical explanation. So is it fantasy (a world of magic, where people can switch genders overnight; where plushies have powers; where ghosts exist) or surrealism (we don't know what is real and what is not, and often both get switched without the reader — or Jan — noticing)?
Wow, what a masterpiece! I'm quite astonished at how good this is. I understand this took four or five years of work, but I think there is quite a lot that is unsaid, and the plot could definitely go on and on and on and on.
I could imagine an Act 7 where "female Jan" wakes up again in her apartment, just like on Day One. And we, the readers, would be baffled once more (and Jan too). What had happened the night before — what was real, what wasn't real? Jan would then proceed to look at the screws again, and try to understand what they mean. And from there the plot could go endlessly on. I think that the frustration expressed by the fans is mostly because the story stopped — although the end was a surprise, but perfectly logical following from the plot — and it could certainly continue. But all artists have to take a break and say, "this is enough, I have to work on something else instead!"
(Well, except for Möebius, who kept returning to the Incal storyline over and over again)
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