{"id":16857,"date":"2017-05-23T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=16857"},"modified":"2017-05-22T16:04:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T16:04:18","slug":"the-last-musketeer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2017\/05\/23\/the-last-musketeer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Musketeer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\"\"
\nBy\u00c2\u00a0Jason<\/strong>, coloured by\u00c2\u00a0Hubert<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0and translated by\u00c2\u00a0Kim Thompson<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0(Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-56097-889-3<\/p>\n

Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterr\u00c3\u00b8y: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel\u00c2\u00a0Lomma full ay regn<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0(Pocket Full of Rain<\/em>) won that year’s\u00c2\u00a0Sproing Award<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0(Norway’s biggest comics prize).<\/p>\n

He won another\u00c2\u00a0Sproing<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0in 2001 for the series\u00c2\u00a0Mjau Mjau<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0and in 2002 turned almost exclusively to producing graphic novels. Now a global star among the cognoscenti he has won seven major awards from such disparate regions as France, Slovakia and the USA.<\/p>\n

Jason’s breadth of interest is capacious and deep: comics, movies, music, high literature and pulp fiction all feature equally with no sense of hierarchy and his puckish mixing and matching of his inspirational sources always produces a picture-treatise well worth a reader’s time.<\/p>\n

As always, this visual\/verbal bon mot unfolds in Jason’s beguiling, sparse-dialogued, pantomimic progressions with enchantingly formal page layouts rendered in the familiar, minimalist evolution of Herg\u00c3\u00a9’s\u00c2\u00a0Claire Ligne<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0style; solid blacks, thick lines and settings of seductive simplicity augmented here by a beguiling palette of stark pastels and muted primary colours. This delicious caper is one of his best yarns ever and even spawned a prequel\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

The Last Musketeer<\/strong> is an epic gem rife with his signature surreality; populated with his quirkily quotidian cast of darkly comic anthropomorphic regulars, and downplaying his signature themes of relationships and loneliness to produce a wild action-adventure for a charmingly macabre cast of bestial movie archetypes and lost modern chumps to romp through\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

The brief full-colour thriller opens with a drunk in a Paris bar. He claims to be the musketeer Athos<\/strong>, still alive after four centuries\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and he is.<\/p>\n

The contemplative warrior dreams of past glories and inseparable old comrades but things aren’t just the same anymore\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

As he muses on a bench, destructive balls of energy rain down on the city and Athos realises he is needed again and might just have one last adventure in him\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Despite failing to get the old gang back together, he persists in his quest and, after fighting a couple of green-skinned invaders, induces them to take him to their world\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

All too soon he is making friends, battling the flamboyantly evil King of the Red Planet, helping a Princess of Mars foment an Earth-saving revolution and encountering an enemy from home he had long forgotten\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

And we’re all still here so he must have triumphed in the end\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Outrageously merging the worlds of Alexander Dumas with Edgar Rice Burroughs whilst gleefully borrowing Flash Gordon<\/strong>‘s props and work ethic, The Last Musketeer<\/strong> is a superbly engaging pastiche that is pure nostalgia and pure Jason.<\/p>\n

Jason is instantly addictive and a creator every serious fan of the art form should move to the top of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Must-Have\u00e2\u20ac\u009d list.
\nAll characters, stories and artwork \u00c2\u00a9 2007 Jason. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00c2\u00a0Jason, coloured by\u00c2\u00a0Hubert\u00c2\u00a0and translated by\u00c2\u00a0Kim Thompson\u00c2\u00a0(Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-56097-889-3 Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterr\u00c3\u00b8y: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel\u00c2\u00a0Lomma full ay regn\u00c2\u00a0(Pocket Full of Rain) won that year’s\u00c2\u00a0Sproing Award\u00c2\u00a0(Norway’s biggest comics prize). He won another\u00c2\u00a0Sproing\u00c2\u00a0in 2001 for the series\u00c2\u00a0Mjau Mjau\u00c2\u00a0and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Last Musketeer”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[63,125,105,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-european-classics","category-humour","category-mature-reading","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-4nT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}