{"id":28299,"date":"2023-07-14T09:00:32","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T09:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=28299"},"modified":"2023-07-06T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T19:08:00","slug":"the-last-musketeer-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2023\/07\/14\/the-last-musketeer-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Musketeer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\"
\nBy Jason<\/strong>, coloured by Hubert<\/strong> and translated by Kim Thompson <\/strong>(Fantagraphics Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-56097-889-3 (TPB\/Digital edition)<\/p>\n

Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterr\u00f8y: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn<\/em> (Pocket Full of Rain<\/strong>) won that year\u2019s Sproing Award<\/strong> (Norway\u2019s biggest comics prize).<\/p>\n

He won another Sproing<\/strong> in 2001 for the series Mjau Mjau<\/strong><\/em> and in 2002 turned almost exclusively to producing graphic novels. A global star among the cognoscenti, he has won many major awards.<\/p>\n

Jason\u2019s breadth of interest is wide 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\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

As always, this visual\/verbal bon mot unfolds in his beguiling, sparse-dialogued, pantomimic progressions with enchantingly formal page layouts rendered in the familiar, minimalist evolution of Herg\u00e9\u2019s Claire Ligne<\/em> style: solid blacks, thick lines, 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\u2026<\/p>\n

The Last Musketeer<\/strong> is an epic rife with his signature surrealism; 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.<\/p>\n

With hues from much missed triple-threat Hubert, our brief full-colour thriller opens with a drunk in a Paris bar. He claims to be legendary musketeer Athos<\/strong>, still alive after four centuries. And he actually is.<\/p>\n

The contemplative warrior dreams of past glories and inseparable old comrades but things aren\u2019t the same anymore. However, 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\u2026<\/p>\n

Despite failing to get the old gang back together, Athos persists in his quest and, after fighting a couple of green-skinned invaders, induces them to take him to their world. All too soon, he is making friends, battling the flamboyantly evil King of the Red Planet<\/em>, helping a Princess of Mars foment an Earth-saving revolution and re-encountering an enemy from home he had long forgotten\u2026<\/p>\n

And we\u2019re all still here so he must have triumphed in the end\u2026<\/p>\n

Outrageously merging the worlds of Alexander Dumas with Edgar Rice Burroughs, whilst gleefully borrowing Flash Gordon<\/strong>\u2019s 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 \u201cMust-Have\u201d list.
\nAll characters, stories and artwork \u00a9 2007 Jason. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jason, coloured by Hubert and translated by Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-56097-889-3 (TPB\/Digital edition) Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterr\u00f8y: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won that year\u2019s Sproing Award (Norway\u2019s … <\/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_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_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}},"categories":[191,75,63,125,105,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-crime-comics","category-european-classics","category-humour","category-mature-reading","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-7mr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28299","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=28299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28303,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28299\/revisions\/28303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}