Jason Shiga is an award-winning Asian American cartoonist from Oakland, California. Mr. Shiga's comics are known for their intricate, often "interactive" plots and occasionally random, unexpected violence. A mathematics major from the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Shiga shares his love of logic and problem solving with his readers through puzzles, mysteries and unconventional narrative techniques.
Jason Shiga's life has been shrouded in mystery and speculation. According to his book jacket, he was a reclusive math genius who had died on the verge of his greatest discovery in June 1967. However, upon winning a 2003 Eisner award for talent deserving of wider recognition, a man claiming to be Jason Shiga appeared in front of an audience alive and well only to tell them that he had been living on an island in the South China Seas for the past 40 years. The man who accepted his award was Chris Brandt (also known as F.C. Brandt), who had disguised himself as Jason Shiga, and accepted the award at the behest of Jason's publisher (Dylan Williams of Sparkplug Comic Books) and Jason himself.
At the age of 12, Shiga was the 7th highest ranked child go player in Oakland.[citation needed]
Jason Shiga makes a cameo appearance in the Derek Kirk Kim comic, "Ungrateful Appreciation" as a Rubik's Cube-solving nerd. Shiga is credited as the "Maze Specialist" for Issue 18 (Winter 2005/2006) of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly, which features a solved maze on the front cover and a (slightly different) 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.
Jason Shiga's father, Seiji Shiga, was an animator who worked on the 1964 Rankin-Bass production Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.