houbanaut (houbanaut) wrote in scans_daily, @ 2009-08-02 18:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | char: athos, char: ming the merciless, publisher: fantagraphics, title: last musketeer |
The Last Musketeer
This story won the Eisner award for "Best U.S. Edition of International Material" at this year's Comic-Con, so you should check it out!
Seven pages from a 46-page book under the cut.
Were I to pick two words to describe most of Jason's stories, "understated" and "melancholy" would come to mind. That also describes The Last Musketeer, but only in part. It's probably the straight-up funniest and most exciting book he has done in years.
These laser blasts (or as a scientist explains, "balls of laser energy") turn out to be the first wave of a martian invasion. Athos sees it as his duty to protect France against the invaders, but no one takes him seriously. Patrolling that night, however, he soon runs into them:
From here on, Athos gets wrapped up in a good old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure on Mars, complete with killer robots, a martian princess and her secret lover, an old adversary, and this guy:
In Jason's world, iconic pop-culture characters usually live lives of emptiness and quiet desperation, or just petty frustration. His series of one-pagers about Darth Vader dealing with everyday life is both funny and relatable (and predates the YouTube fad by a number of years).
Finally, another page that I just think captures a lot of what this book is about. Athos, the princess and her lover (a meekly rebellious lieutenant) have fled the Emperor's forces, but crash-landed in the desert:
Being a hero doesn't make life any easier to deal with.
Given the almost complete lack of interest the last time I posted a bit of Jason's work, I wasn't going to bother scanning more of his stuff (they're hard to scan too, without cracking the spine too badly). But it looks like I'm not the only one who likes it after all...
So good work, Eisner voters, and
Congratulations, Jason!